How Sue “C’s” it.

My worldview has undergone a cataclysmic change every year since I left college. Sojourners got me thinking about the necessity of community and healthy ways to nurture that community. It started a flame of interest in agriculture that has been kindled to a fire. I shared in my last e-mail about how my faith has shifted. There are a lot of other areas of change I could get into but it would be premature at this point.

I have become endlessly pluralistic in my thinking. I am somewhat grateful for the chance to see the world this way but I know it is not sustainable. The roots of pluralism have grown into my foundations and cracked it thoroughly. I now feel it is my task to decide which foundations are worth rebuilding and fill in the cracks with faith. That being said, I want this letter to focus on what I do believe. I want to share with you how and seeing the world, and what the implications of that sight are.

For as long as I can remember I have been asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. I had a few ideas but few things I was passionate about. More than anything, I’ve always been motivated by a desire to fill in where I’m needed. I believe one of God’s gifts to me is my jack-of-all-trades nature. I’m good at learning new things quickly to be useful in most situations. Career-oriented thinking never appealed to me because I only wanted to be where I was most needed. I could have programed computers but there were plenty of people doing that. I could have been a musician but the world has way too many of those. (I don’t actually believe it’s too many just too many that want to be known but that is another discussion) It was this frame of thinking that lead me to agriculture.

It was a chilly October evening after work my junior year of college. We were driving back from after-care and Kia Ryssdal way speculating with some economist whether a sudden downturn in the economy could be defined as a recession. I remember gas at the time being over $4.00 a gallon and just a couple months later being close to $2.00. Half way through my college education a bubble burst. I believed then as I do now that it is a bubble that need not be re-inflated. I actually think I would be better for us all if it weren’t. The growth way founded on the basis of greed, consumerism, and risky speculation. Almost four years later it pains me to report that no lesson has been learned. That the ants have gone right back to rebuilding their ant mound. A big, grotesque, self-serving ant mound. My mind tells me to be cynical; that the sinful nature of man is winning -by a large margin; that we’ve ruined our planet beyond repair; that no amount of repentance could bring us back and that no one wants to repent anyway.

All of these problems contribute to a boom and bust economy that favors those with money and discriminates against those with out but that’s not the biggest problem. The biggest problem with our socio-economic world view is that growth is always good. We worship at the feet of a GDP that needs to be perpetually rising. The problem is: we live on a finite planet but all believe that our growth must be infinite. This is almost the very definition of cancer: unchecked growth in a finite system. An organism can get along just fine with a cancer that is small and stops growing. What kills people is when the cancer expands but their body remains the same size. Our population and consumption rises infinitely higher but our planet is not getting any bigger. We talk about sustainability in terms of how we can cut back, how we can have a smaller footprint in the world. The truth is, no matter how green we are as individuals, we still consume a lot of resources -especially if you’re in a developed country. Children born in developed countries will consume as much energy as thousands of children born into poverty. http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2010/02/energy_consumption. We need an new ethic to deal with the unique challenges we face today. Unfortunately, that fact is on so few people’s radars it will mostly go unnoticed until to is too late. But I yearn for hope. I choose to believe in my unbelief that if God’s people would humble themselves and pray, and seek His face, and turn from their wicked ways; that God would see them from heaven, forgive their sins, and heal their land.

I don’t think there has ever been a time in human history, where to live into the cultural norms of the day, has meant you were so complicit in so much injustice and devastation. It sometimes seems there is scarcely go about my day without oppressing someone somewhere in the world.  It seems to me, that in the face of this fact, the only way for me to live honestly is to seek every opportunity to remove myself from this system. To, where ever possible, re-imagine ways to engage the world around me. I often say that we live in an economy of want and need to rediscover an economy of need. I don’t see any way to make this a global reality short of a cataclysmic event. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I have every faith such an even or events will happen in my lifetime. I’m just hoping to beat the curve. The best I can do is strive to live out an economy of need in my own life and to encourage others to do the same.

Jesus didn’t talk about a lot of these things directly. The problems of his day were different in many ways. He could walk into any market and buy a chicken without wondering if it came from a factory farm. He could buy a garment from someone who actually made garments themselves. All the modes of transportation of his day were carbon-neutral. While the issues were different I really do believe that these are things he would be talking about if he was preaching in our town. Globalization is a real problem but it was still 2000 years away. While many of the things that weigh on my heart and head are large, systemic, global issues, the solutions I hope to pursue are small, humble, and local.

I want to be a farmer. One the seeks to be as in-tune with creation as possible. There are roughly seven billion people alive today. If l live to be 60 I will see the planet put on another two billion. http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/unpp/p2k0data.asp. Most of them are going to want to eat at least once a day. This is where my desire to be what is needed most comes in. I don’t want to create some sort of survivalist island, I’m not to concerned with my own survival. As a matter of fact, it would be healthier for the planet if I didn’t exist. Rather, I hope to grow food as a means of being a light in the darkness. As a means of being a river in a dry and thirsty land -literally, if climate change keeps up at this rate. Urbanization is a great way to deal with population growth in the short term, but in the long term it is totally unsustainable. The only way to have 10% of the population providing food for 90% is to have energy intensive, land ruining, industrial farming. The very system that feeds urban centers in this way is unsustainable. Yet the trend continues around the globe. The best way I can see to combat this is to de-urbanize aka, ruralization. To learn to live off the land. To have a greater interdependence with the land and a local community rather than fossil fuels and an unseen global community. The Amish have some wonkey theology but they’re light years ahead of us in so many other ways. Not really ahead of us, or behind, or off to the side. More like their way of life transcends our ideas of progression altogether. It’s funny how our progress myths have come full circle to where we are now behind those we call backwards.

This is where I’m at. It’s far from where I used to be and perhaps far from where I’ll be next year. But I find too much truth in these things to see myself straying from them too far. They hang too heavily on me to be ignored. There are many ways in which I hope I’m wrong about these things. If I am, I beg you to correct me. Either way, let me know what you’re thinking because I’d love to know.

2011

06/30

POSTED BY

Rob Watton

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