Grounded Vision: New Agrarianism and the Academy

Grounded Vision

New Agrarianism and the Academy

WILLIAM H. MAJOR

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

Copyright © 2011

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Typeface: Minion

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Major, William H.

    Grounded vision : new agrarianism and the academy / William H. Major.

        p. cm.

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-8173-1734-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8173-8544-6 (electronic)

1. Agriculture—Social aspects. 2. Agriculture and state. I. Title. II. Title: New agrarianism and the academy.

  GN407.4.M35 2011

  306.3'49—dc22

                               2010036185

Cover: Agrarian, © Tim Foley (timfoleyillustration.com)

An earlier version of chapter 2 previously appeared as The Agrarian Vision and Ecocriticism, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 14.2 (2007): 51–70.

An earlier version of the Afterword appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education 6 Apr. 2007: B5.

For Ginny, Susannah, and Ava

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains there's a land that's fair and bright

Where the handouts grow on bushes and you sleep out every night

Where the boxcars are all empty and the sun shines every day

On the birds and the bees and the cigarette trees

Where the lemonade springs where the bluebird sings

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Agriculture, New Agrarianism, and the Academy

1. New Agrarianism: Retrospect and Prospects

2. A Theory of Use: Ecocriticism and the New Agrarian Vision

3. New Agrarianism and Postmodernism: A Rural Perspective

4. What Are People For? New Agrarianism, Work, and Pleasure

5. A Theory of Resistance: Community in Agrarian Politics

6. Reconciliation: New Agrarianism and Ecofeminism

Conclusion: Toward a Cosmopolitanism Agrarianism?

Afterword: How I Became an Agrarian

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Preface

Grounded Vision places contemporary agrarian ideas into dialogue with other critical approaches within the academy: environmentalism, postmodernism, feminism, work and leisure studies, politics, and globalism. In the field of cultural studies, new agrarian insights about the intersection of land and people—the point of departure for its social and environmental criticism—have been substantially ignored in the academy, especially, perhaps, in colleges of agriculture, where one might assume they would find a home. More important to this project, today's agrarianism rarely finds itself on the syllabi in the graduate seminar in English, history, or sociology, where, too, its vision has the potential to deepen our understanding of many central cultural and environmental issues of our time. Indeed, as the environment now occupies an increasing share of the world's attention, largely due to the threat of global warming—as if that were the only peril on the horizon—it is discouraging to note that an agrarian analysis of cause, effect, and solution is almost never part of the conversation. Within the culture at large, such disregard may be understandable; within the academy, it is utter carelessness.

A good argument can be made that contemporary agrarian writers are far more concerned with practical soil and land issues than, say, their most immediate predecessors, the Nashville Agrarians of the 1920s and 1930s, whose best-known work, I'll Take My Stand (1930), arguably put cultural criticism before agricultural practice. Most new agrarian writers are not terribly impressed by critical and theoretical enterprises such as the one proposed by Grounded Vision. This is another way of saying that some agrarian readers (and readers familiar with new agrarianism) might be baffled by my strategy of pairing new agrarian cultural criticism with an academic discourse that is typically referred to as theory. Today's agrarians—Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, and Gene Logsdon, to name but a few—make it their business to enact agrarianism; land (its use, its health, its connection to local culture through careful and kindly work) comes first, and critique arrives mostly as its epigone.¹ This does not mean that we ignore the wide-ranging implications that follow from an agrarian understanding of economics, politics, consumerism, and so on, for to do so would be to miss an important voice in the world of social and cultural criticism. Indeed, it is the thesis of this book that agrarian theory can vitally enrich what often seem—to me at least—merely academic concerns, even as Rome burns.

New agrarian writers question many of the assumptions and presumptions underlying modern life, such as that science and technology will provide the answers to our most pressing ecological and social questions, that our ability to manipulate if not control nature is progress, that economic growth in its current guise can sustain itself and us. Many such assumptions underpin the daily choices we make about work, leisure, and consumerism. Scientist and agrarian writer Wes Jackson, founder of The Land Institute in Salinas, Kansas, makes the case that the belief that the contemporary world we have wrought is just natural is terribly flawed, an example of extraordinary hubris. Jackson notes that a major part of that consciousness comes from being raised in a society dominated by science and its technological arrangements, most of which would not be here without the high energy that comes from fossil fuel and nuclear power (Becoming 104). This last reference to science, technology, and energy production and consumption—ostensibly in a book about how best to live within the carrying capacity of the land—demonstrates the broad social and cultural reach of the new agrarian critique. If, as agrarians argue, agriculture is fundamental to culture, then the relative neglect of new agrarianism among today's cultural theorists (who have never been afraid of taking on a spectrum of subjects) is suggestive of a major gap in the entire cultural studies project.

Stephanie Sarver's observation that agriculture figures in our physical well-being, in our economy, in our national identity, in the transformation of the earth, and the loss of biological diversity (2–3) is a fundamentally agrarian idea. This is another way of saying that agriculture is both economic and social, [and] requires a relationship with nonhuman nature that is simultaneously material and spiritual (Sarver 9). I suggest that if we pursue agrarian theory as relevant to the farmer and farming only—if that is even possible—its urgency may not be nearly so apparent for those urbanites and suburbanites predisposed to environmental and community issues, but who may not entirely recognize how an approach that concentrates on land use and rural culture pertains to the environment, the economy, and even national security. Given my focus on agrarian social and cultural criticism, the argument here diverges from Berry's idea that agrarianism is primarily a practice, a set of attitudes, a loyalty, and a passion; it is an idea only secondarily and at a remove (Horse 67) or from rancher and writer Linda Hasselstrom's notion that for country people, beliefs about both family and land grow out of everyday practices, rather than theory (Addicted 68). In other words, Berry, Hasselstrom, and other agrarians do place the practical before the theoretical, while Grounded Vision primarily examines new agrarian social and cultural criticism in dialogue with a number of academic discourses.

This book is therefore about the agrarianism I know best, the analytical agrarian vision whose scope is wide, whose demands are often difficult if not unyielding, and whose argument with the modern world arrives out of a deep respect for, and understanding of, the connections between the health of the land and that of its peoples, communities, and economies. I explore the various reasons for the absence of agrarianism among the various isms that drive cultural and literary studies (poststructuralism, postmodernism, feminism, and postcolonialism, for example) at a number of points in the book. Let it be said here that aside from a few academic specialists who pursue ideas and issues of importance to, for lack of a better term, country people, most cultural criticism is driven by metropolitan lives and cosmopolitan claims.² There is nothing inherently wrong with such an approach except, of course, what it leaves out. To that end, one objective of Grounded Vision is to recapture the spirit of difference by introducing neglected ideas and theories into the discussion and thereby demonstrating the possibilities of a method and a worldview whose claims ought to be given more sustained attention, if for no other reason than that they offer attractive alternatives to a status quo verging on the politically and ethically moribund. For that reason and others, this book approaches questions of theory and criticism with an eye toward productive tensions and possible reconciliations.

The new agrarian critical impulse lends itself to a wide dissatisfaction with many of the assumptions behind the direction of modern life, such as, for instance, the possibility of living with the ideology of materialism while fostering a healthy ecosystem or functional community at the same time. As agrarian writer Eric Freyfogle notes in his introduction to The New Agrarianism, much agrarian criticism centers on materialism and . . . the dominance of the market in so many aspects of life (xvii). As best they can, says Freyfogle, agrarians spurn the grasping materialism of modern culture; they define themselves by who they are and where they live rather than by what they earn and own (xxxii). In part, Freyfogle means that new agrarian thought pushes against many of the bedrock beliefs that animate contemporary social behaviors. This is what literary critic Lawrence Buell suggests when he notes that Berry's agrarianism has a different political valence for Berry than for Thomas Jefferson. For Jefferson it would have expressed something like the status quo. For Berry it is deliberately anticonsensual, an insurgency of the disempowered (Imagination 44). This is not to propose that an agrarian worldview offers a panacea to all of the deleterious aspects of modernity and globalism, but rather that it provides the friction—a necessary friction—to an industrial/technological model that often makes the joy and mystery of life secondary to the bottom line. It is becoming more and more clear that such resistance is necessary to make the putative reverence for human and environmental health a lived reality rather than the rhetorical platitude it often appears to be. At the very least, agrarian ideas help us imagine a world in which we need not be perpetually bullied by economic and social forces that appear paradoxically beyond our control but which we are led to believe are also for the best. In this way contemporary agrarianism asks that we begin to see the intersection between the land and our lives as something for which we can and should take responsibility. Much the same can be said for agrarian theory's reach into the academy. If academic literary and cultural critique often sees its relevance through the prism of politics (it is sometimes a rather thin politics, like weak tea), agrarianism never lets us forget that there is a world beyond the text. By demonstrating a healthier way for humans to be in the world, new agrarianism offers a dispatch whose message is that there may be a different, better approach: not a lost paradise of the people or a prelapsarian state that never was, but an active and assertive countercultural voice.

Acknowledgments

I would like to recognize and thank Pamela Banting, Kimberly K. Smith, Timothy Sweet, and Steven Wrinn for their encouragement and support; Wendell Berry for his inspiration; John Eakin for his example; Pat Gonder, Andrew McMurry, Michael Robinson, Bryan Sinche, and Dan Williamson for their friendship and wit, without which this project would never have been completed; Murray Kuperminc for his wisdom; Marcia Seabury for her leadership; Michele Troy for her insights; Kevin Eyster for planting the seeds; and Albert and Martha Helen Smith for their love.

Special mention goes to the Jay Holden Camp Fellowship of Hillyer College, University of Hartford; Vincent B. Coffin Grants, University of Hartford; David Goldenberg, Dean, Hillyer College; the late John Roderick, Chair, Department of English, Hillyer College; Scott Slovic and the editors at Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment; and Karen Winkler, Denise Magner, and Tim Foley at the Chronicle of Higher Education. To the staff at The University of Alabama Press goes my deepest appreciation.

Introduction

Agriculture, New Agrarianism, and the Academy

It is a strange but auspicious fact that agriculture seems to occupy an increasingly large share of the American cultural consciousness. Consider a few recent publications: Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food (2008) and The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006); Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (2007); Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation (2001); Nicolette Hahn Niman's Righteous Porkchop (2009); and Lisa Hamilton's Deeply Rooted (2009), to name but a few. Consider also the ongoing plaudits for restaurateur and pioneering food guru Alice Waters; the building cultural tide of the slow-food movement; the proliferation of community-supported agriculture and farmers' markets and the comparative rise of urban farming; the recent films King Corn (2007), Super Size Me (2004), and Food, Inc. (2009); the curious popularity of the Food Network; and the even more curious example of the New York Times Magazine, which has recently and happily awakened to the subjects of agriculture and agro-imperialism.

With all of this one could be forgiven for thinking that something has been afoot in the world of food over the last ten years. Many of us have apparently had a gustatory awakening that some have called a food renaissance, others a political revolution. Writers, activists, bloggers, and even movie producers are more and more making their subject food—its production, distribution, and safety, not to mention its larger cultural signification—which is also to say that they are now engaging in a form of agricultural work. If eating is an agricultural act (Berry, What 145), then these cultural stirrings support another of the major insights of new agrarianism: that in most of the primary choices we make in our everyday lives, we are implicated in the fate of agriculture. It is an insight that should give us pause.

This recent cultural and agricultural epiphany is partially inspired by anxiety: What are we putting in our bodies? Where is it coming from? What are the social and environmental costs of current agricultural practices? What does our attitude toward food say about who we are as a people, about our identity as a nation? While we may now be paying closer attention to one of the most fundamental acts of being human, something else important is at stake: the generalized feeling, perhaps particularly acute in the industrialized West, that many of us have lost a modicum of control over an elemental part of our lives. The basic economy of growing, cultivating, cooking, ingesting, digesting, and composting more and more emerges as the cultural act it has always been. The reintegration of such an economy into the warp and woof of our lives suggests that we are ready to assume some control over those essential elements that we have ceded to others, many of whom may be unknown to us and have little allegiance to the values around which this renaissance is focused.

An argument can be made that since 1990 our interest in the provenance of our foods arrives not only as a result of genuine principle—ethical, environmental—but also as a result of real threats to our health. To take one example, it has become almost a ritual for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to investigate and report outbreaks of the potentially fatal bacterium Escherichia coli 0157. As of this writing (November 2009), the CDC is reporting an outbreak in the Northeast (where I live) in which two people have died from hemolytic uremic syndrome—kidney failure, often the most serious effect of 0157 poisoning. If we were sensitized in 1993 to the dangers of E. coli 0157 when four children died (and hundreds were sickened) from an outbreak at Jack in the Box restaurants in the western United States, it never seemed entirely clear what we should do about it, short of abstaining from beef products, an option that did not seem to gain widespread traction. And avoiding beef is hardly a solution. After all, the CDC informs us that recent occurrences have included spinach, tomatoes, peanut butter, cookie dough, and frozen pizza. Perhaps, then, we have every right to feel trepidation when we eat.

Are we living in such a state of national apprehension that the once comforting narratives of food and family now only make us feel worse? In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan suggests that we live in a state of cultural anxiety in which many of us are vexed by the simple question, What should we have for dinner? (1). That food is a roadmap to larger cultural issues is aptly demonstrated, Pollan thinks, by the recent repugnance over carbohydrates and the omnipresent wave of fad diets and governmental studies whose goal is to educate us about how to get healthy, all of which add up to the sign of a national eating disorder that could only be the result of a culture missing deeply rooted traditions surrounding food and eating (2). Food dread is apparently far less pronounced in countries whose relationship with dinner is more intimate and culturally embedded, such as Italy and France, Pollan intimates (3). Seen from this vantage, the United States is a nation feasting on fear and worry, unhappily mistaking convenience for pleasure while relegating the general embeddedness of agriculture to the realm of myth—when it is thought of at all.

If the post-World War II Green Revolution in agriculture increased worldwide crop yields and helped mitigate (but certainly not prevent) famine in the developing world, we are only now becoming aware of its enormous costs calculated at cultural and environmental levels. The slow-food movement, the nod toward locally grown produce, and the rise of farmers' markets signify not only an attempt to make good on an ethic of environmental responsibility not a part of the Green Revolution, but they may also be a way to allay the oft-remarked chaos of modern life by bringing some order to the table. As food gains (or regains) its central place as a touchstone of our attitudes about the environment, community, and family, it has the potential to become something more than the angst-producing bugbear that visits our homes several times a day. This, at least, is the hope.

But it is tempting to romanticize. There is considerable merit in the opinion that those who criticize the Green Revolution and its subsequent offshoots are elitist; that organic farming, slow food, and farmers' markets are fine for those who sit atop their cultural capital while surveying the surrounding vineyards; and that, ultimately, people who do not farm for a living ought to pipe down. This latter is in part the position of farmer Blake Hurst, who notes in The American that the calls for organic farming, for fewer (if not outright banning of) genetically modified organisms, and for the all-important renewed connection to the earth supposedly available to the small farmer are in fact unreasonable, impractical, and not terribly in demand by the average consumer. Hurst evinces particular contempt for Pollan's call for less industrial farming—especially for Pollan's desire that farmers move away from commercial fertilizers that rely on fossil fuels—when he notes the impossibility of using manure and cover crops to provide the requisite nitrogen needed to grow enough food to feed the world. Hurst has little patience, therefore, for agri-intellectuals who wish to save the earth but are less inclined to get some dirt under their nails to see how difficult that project might be. His pragmatism seems right in the American grain, coming as it does from decades of experience tilling the same farm, and if we agri-intellectuals are going to be taken seriously by the majority of farmers we may need some clear answers to his objections.

In looking at the issue with a wider lens, perhaps we should not exaggerate the importance of the current food revolution, if revolution it is, since recent sales figures for fast-food brands such as YUM (Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut), the largest restaurant company in the world, have outperformed Wall Street's expectations throughout 2009 and stayed strong over the course of the current economic recession. Both YUM and McDonald's—to take only two examples—are growing exponentially overseas, creating and expanding upon enormous markets in China and India. Indeed, the slow-food revolution is nascent and meager compared with the global expansion of industrialized food production and consumption since the end of World War II. As it stands, Alice Waters cannot compete with McDonald's, whose food is cheap, available, and high in protein. Nor, on the production side, is it always easy for the small farmer to contend with the proprietary demands of conglomerates such as Monsanto, Cargill, or Archer Daniels Midland, whose technologies and marketing practices are to this day a direct reflection of former secretary of agriculture Ezra Taft Benson's infamous declaration to farmers to get big or get out, and that of Earl Butz, another secretary of agriculture, who opined that farmers should plant fencerow to fencerow. The global economy (a bloodless epithet for a dirty business) is large, impersonal, and, for those concerned with human and environmental health, often destructive. Benson's and Butz's legacies—and the present technologies that help drive the ideology that bigger is better—prosper even in the midst of today's cultural awakening. Slow food and locally produced agricultural products may be gaining a tenuous hold in the home and within the industrial economy, but they remain unreliable guides to the future of farming, food, and eating.

One fact of modern life in the United States is that we are more and more dependent on what I call a strange food economy—distant, indifferent, and highly vulnerable—yet one whose ostensible benefits penetrate virtually every facet of modern life and therefore appear, for lack of a better term, natural. It is a commonplace statistic among environmentalists that the average American meal travels well over fifteen hundred miles from the farm before it reaches the plate. What this says about convenience is not, as might be inferred, that we are willing to pay dearly for it from an environmental point of view, since such costs are generally hidden. How much do we really want to know? It is interesting to note that it was not until the relatively recent preoccupation with global warming that many of us began to take an interest in where our food comes from. (Bill McKibben's The End of Nature, one of the first book-length examinations of global warming, was published in 1989.) We rightly suspect that there is an inherent connection between what and how we eat and a looming global environmental crisis. Paradoxically, therefore, it has taken the potential consequences of what often seems a scientific abstraction to sensitize us to the more proximate and concrete agricultural and environmental crises that precede and, in part, cause global warming. Such crises are felt acutely within declining and disappearing rural communities, with their exaggerated economic, health, and educational issues that tend not to make the national news.

Occasionally in my community I come across a bumper sticker that says No farms, no food. This message is typically delivered on the back of a Volvo or Subaru rather than a pickup truck, a not terribly surprising fact. Somewhat more remarkable is that in my state, Connecticut, where the local farmer is a staple of New England lore, farms and open spaces are disappearing at an astonishing rate. New England is a place where much of the population purports to believe in the symbolic power of the yeoman Yankee, and farmland is at a premium—for suburban housing tracts and shopping malls. According to the Connecticut Farmland Trust, for instance, we lose agricultural land at a rate of approximately eight thousand acres a year, one of the highest rates in the nation. Many of us are concerned, but our behavior gives the lie to our values, a point made explicitly by Wendell Berry more than thirty years ago with the publication of The Unsettling of America (1977) when he noted that the Sierra Club had invested in oil and gas companies; he called this a crisis of character, one decidedly not confined to the Sierra Club. What we think and what we do are often at odds, and our behavior does not always follow our convictions.

And yet, since 2000, small agriculture appears to be winning some minor skirmishes. According to the U.S Department of Agriculture, between 2002 and 2007 the number of farms in the United States saw a net increase of 75,810 farms, or 4 percent. The department terms this a leveling of the post-World War II trend of net losses (Small Farms). Moreover, 91 percent of all farms are considered small (defined as less than $250,000 in agricultural products), and between 2002 and 2007 there were 18,467 more small farms in operation, an increase of approximately 1 percent of all small farms (Small Farms). One has to wonder, however, whether this is a trend or a blip, and to what degree the increase in small farms also signals greater cultural and economic capital for the same. After all, most new farms are operated by people who also work off farm and whose investment in agriculture as an occupation must necessarily be supplemented by other economic activities. Even though we have seen an increase in the number of small farms, agriculture has become far more centralized over the same period. The U.S. Department of Agriculture Census reveals that in 2002 144,000 farms produced 75 percent of the value of U.S. agricultural production, while in 2007 the number of farms that produced that same share of production declined to 125,000 (Farm Numbers). Even with the recent expansion of small farming, the economic power of the large farm has increased over this same five-year period, signaling in part the further monopolization of our food production by fewer and fewer people/corporations. This is not simply a vexing economic and environmental question; it is at least as importantly a national security issue, one that apparently has escaped the radar of the highly educated policy analysts in Washington, D.C.

In looking back over the course of the twentieth century, moreover, we note that the trends toward the centralization of production and the expansion of industrialized farming have decimated the cohesion of rural communities. In 1910 there were well over 3 million farmworkers in the United States. By 2000 that number had dropped to approximately 780,000 (Charts and Maps). While the argument can be made that many of these people went on to other, more profitable economic and cultural lives (one need only consider the great migration of African Americans in the early decades of the century who were often escaping desperate circumstances in the Jim Crow South), the ongoing story of the hollowing out of large swaths of the country has not yet seen its denouement. One has to wonder, moreover, whether such a story will ever capture the attention of an American public not terribly interested in the fate of rural communities. To that end, Dee Davis of the Center for Rural Strategies in Whitesburg, Kentucky, has called for a rural Marshall Plan that might begin to address the fact that of the 250 poorest counties in the United States, 244 are rural (Think). Yet the face of poverty in the United States remains stubbornly urban.

If the trend toward getting big has been an economic disaster for so many farmers, their families, and their rural communities—and it has—it has been an economic boon for the agro-industrial complex; if it has been good for the consumer's pocketbook—and it has—it has been ruinous to the land; if it has benefited certain crops and methods of tillage—and it has—it has done so at the expense of biodiversity, topsoil, and water quality. And if rural schoolchildren look around and see only a few people profiting by their labors—and they often do—they leave, and the communities that were often vibrant and economically viable are now on life support, both culturally and economically. Everything is a tradeoff, and within the current environment the losers are often rural people and the land in which we all have a stake. There is nothing sexy about farms, farmers, and the daily muck, and the decimation of rural communities throughout the latter half of the twentieth century hardly calls to mind an agrarian or pastoral idyll.

Many of us see no contradiction between wishing to save farmland and enjoying cheap, abundant food; perhaps we value open spaces but see McMansions and malls as signs of economic progress. The contradictions that form part of the American economic and psychological tapestry are too numerous to unravel here, but they point to one of the central questions that new agrarian thinkers grapple with: How do we align our values with our behavior? That agrarians such as Berry, Gene Logsdon, and Wes Jackson continue to insist on the centrality of rural life and farming-based culture, after these many years and despite most economic trends that would seem to belie their efforts, suggests either naïveté or a silly disregard for life as most of us live it. Or maybe they have a point and some of us are just now catching up. I prefer to think the latter.

This modest cultural reawakening regarding food and farms is evidence that many of us are the children of writers such as Berry, Logsdon, and Jackson, who highlight the central connections among the health of farming communities, a healthy environment, and, indeed, a vibrant family and cultural life in general. The life of the soil and the life of those who depend upon it are, and have been, the subject of new agrarian thought for several decades.¹ But it is here that we run into another issue, for by conflating soil, family, community, and culture—by drawing clear parallels between them—new agrarians clearly run a certain political risk, one to which they are not insensitive. Much agrarian thought has historically been associated with extreme right-wing movements—from the comparatively benign Fugitive