The land was everything

You bet­ter have plenty of magic mark­ers and col­or­ful tabs as you read Vic­tor Davis Hanson’s The Land Was Every­thing (The Free Press, N.Y., 2000) because every page is plum full of quota­bles of accu­rate obser­va­tion of what farm­ing was and is today.

Take for exam­ple, “Hard work on the land pro­duced a sta­ble cit­i­zenry and a beau­ti­ful coun­try­side,” — page 28, or “Cheap food, cheap hous­ing, cheap trans­port can also give us cheap peo­ple,” — page 32.

The reader must ask who are these “cheap” peo­ple? They are the ones who now lec­ture to the farmer, “You did a fine enough job here with what you had, with your pic­turesque lit­tle towns and farms: but now step aside and let us show you what can be done when you have real money and more than enough peo­ple to fin­ish what you started,” — page 28.

On the other hand, Han­son defines the farm­ers as the only ones who are not cheap, the ones who arrived and are arriv­ing “under the aegis of lib­erty to enact with­out coer­cion their own par­tic­u­lar phi­los­o­phy of the grow­ing of food,” — page 28.

That phi­los­o­phy of grow­ing food touches all life accord­ing to Han­son. He has taken his own expe­ri­ence as a 7th gen­er­a­tion raisin rancher in the San Joaquin Val­ley of Cal­i­for­nia and fol­lowed it to the end. Or so it seems. This is not a pretty book about tran­quil back 40’s or serene low­ing cat­tle; it rather addresses the demise of the fam­ily farm and the attempt to prop it up with faulty roman­tic images, per­verse tech­nolo­gies and engi­neered solu­tions from uni­ver­si­ties. It is a bru­tally real­is­tic view of what con­crete can do to civ­i­liza­tion and what unbri­dled greed can extract from cul­ture. Han­son writes that cul­ture, after all, is the prod­uct of the soil, and with­out this cul­ti­va­tion of the soil life becomes a liv­ing hell. “Hell will not be the black­top­ping of Amer­i­can, but the sort of black­top­ping of Amer­ica, the sit­u­a­tion in which he can­not dis­tin­guish farm­land from the sub­urbs,” — page 158.

And what Han­son knows is that in our abun­dance, we have in this coun­try cre­ated a mon­ster believ­ing we can con­trol the beast that threat­ens to over­ride us at any minute whether it is an unwanted mall or manure spoilage or pol­luted aquifer or the mis­guided sense that what the farmer pro­duces comes from plas­tic and not cel­lu­lose which is always nearer to the wild than it is to man. And when the human fac­tor is removed, the wild takes over and tech­nol­ogy can­not retard or even mod­er­ate the dam­age, for soci­ety has become stunned, lulled to a stu­pe­fy­ing sleep believ­ing it has arrived at the best pos­si­ble human con­di­tion — indo­lence, sloth, and end­less sup­ply of stuff!

Read with cau­tion this pow­er­ful paean to what was the foun­da­tion of democ­racy — the metrons, as the Greek called them, who bal­anced the nat­ural and cul­tural. With 1 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion prop­ping up the 99 per­cent, the tip­ping point has been reached and the bal­anced breached. One can glean from this book in its rawest form what is at stake, an enlight­ened cit­i­zenry even, and fight harder still for what is richer, not cheaper.

Sylvia Zim­mer­man is the owner of Ful­ton Creek Jer­sey Cheese in Rich­wood. She holds two grad­u­ate degrees and, when not work­ing on her farm or pur­su­ing her inter­est in sus­tain­able agri­cul­ture, writes her own blog.

Posted by Sylvia Zimmerman on Apr 14 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.