The Fine Line Between Blind Tradition... and Blind Innovation

"What was life like in the colonies? Probably the best word to describe it would be 'colonial'."
--Dave Barry

We tried to come up with a more polite way to say it, but there just isn’t one:  practically everyone (ourselves included) is a hypocrite when it comes to thinking about the past.  To be fair, it is rather difficult for anyone to escape an uncomfortable disjoint in perspectives about the past – a nostalgia for the mud embodied in talk of “The Good Old Days” juxtaposed with a belief that history is an arc of progress wherein things must necessarily be getting better and better.

Everyone is prone to one extreme or the other.  We at Myrtle’s place tend to get lumped into the former point of view rather than the latter, based on the fact that we are trying to restore some fairly traditional parts of daily family life to our own little corner of the world.  Growing as much of our own food as we can, raising chickens, even drying our clothes on a line outside instead of in an electric clothes dryer, these are things that some folk would point to in justifying their belief that we are “traditionalists”.

On the other hand, we have absolutely no desire to return to the living conditions of our forebears.  The last three to four decades or so have seen air pollution, noise pollution, water pollution, light pollution, etc. ad nauseum, coupled with atrocious dietary, sleep, work, and play habits in the industrialized world which have started to eat away at the improvements we made in personal health and hygiene in the 20th century, but make no mistake – those improvements were real, and they were impressive.

And “The Good Old Days” just weren’t all they are made out to be.  Around 1900 C.E., New York City was one of the filthiest places on Earth, with smoke and soot and grime everywhere, mounds of animal feces in the streets, no clean water, no clean food, half-hearted and occasionally absent sanitation workers, toxic fumes in every home, lead paint on every wall.  Even the wealthy were living amidst vermin, contagion, and grime.  And food?  It came carted in from the countryside, covered in flies, and of questionable origin and healthfulness.  Late night comedians notwithstanding, modern New York is spotless by comparison.

But that’s just the big city, right? 

Wrong.

Not only did every major municipal center suffer the ills aforementioned, but country life was pretty unpleasant, too.  Indoor plumbing was only just becoming possible, let alone popular, which meant that outhouses had to be built for every farmhouse dotting the countryside.  All too often, these buildings were constructed with convenience (particularly mid-winter convenience) in mind, rather than sanitation.  Frequently, well water was drawn far too close to barns or latrines – just imagine the number of wells placed in between the outhouse and the barn!  Little wonder, really, that so many folk died so young back then.

The more common (and less unpleasant) nostalgic picture of the idealized past does, however, point towards some important truths about how we ought to be trying to live our lives now, even if it does not provide an accurate blueprint on how to live up to those truths.

For one thing, nostalgia almost always focuses on small themes – home, community, friends and family – rather than grand themes such as arcs of history.  Outside of a few grandiloquent politicians, nobody really wants to spend all their time focused on Manifest Destiny, or the White Man’s Burden, or Noblesse Oblige, or any of the other big themes which in the past fueled American culture and caused so many boring debates at so many stuffy cocktail parties.

No, what most folk think of when they think of the past at all is rocking chairs, garden fresh watermelon, innocent romance, picnics in the park, family and friends, somebody strumming a guitar or a banjo in the background, and most of all, nothing disturbing to think about. 

It is far too easy for nostalgic persons to fall into the trap of never trying to solve problems simply because they refuse to recognize that those problems exist – it is equally true, though, that the healthiest, happiest people are those who find some kind of equanimity in their lives.  Remove turmoil, and we go a long way towards making things better, first for ourselves, and then for those around us.

In context of olde tymes and new epochs, what this means is that we ought not deny our problems exist, nor should we allow solving those problems to lead us to traumatically undo the fabric of those things we have decided we care about.  Translation?  When fixing systemic problems, don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.

An excellent example, and one which makes our point (and yes, we do have one) best, is the destruction of an entire small-town, agriculture-oriented way of life, which came as a result of a solution to a problem ironically based entirely on questions of agricultural efficiency.  How to feed a hungry planet has been – justifiably – one of the principle concerns of leaders everywhere, for all of recorded and most of unrecorded history.  And in the 20th century, the so-called “Green Revolution” appeared to  solve this problem in unprecedented fashion.

The advent of chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides increased the scope of farming in our heartland by orders of magnitude.  Bushels-per-acre for everything from alfalfa to zucchini increased ten-and-twenty-fold.  And in the process, we created dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico, where effluvium sucked all the oxygen out of the water, and fish and coral died off and are unlikely to ever return.  And we drove small family farmers out of business, and automated practically everything, increasing small town unemployment and unemployability.  And we created a massive healthcare headache with millions of immigrant farm laborers suffering from a lifetime of chemical exposure.  And by feeding the bones of discarded animals to their next of kin, we created new nightmares like bovine spongeiform encephalopathy (BCE), better known as “Mad Cow Disease”.

Much of the developing world viewed the good which came from the Green Revolution – and it is hard to argue that large surplus supplies of grain were not largely “good” – with understandable envy.  Hollywood melodramas aside, most of the world’s leaders are in their positions not because of a lust for power, but instead because of a genuine concern for the welfare of their people, however well or unwell their applications of those concerns may manifest themselves.  And leaders in places like Bangladesh, Bhutan, Chad, Eritrea, or Sudan, just to name a handful, would obviously want to bend over backwards in order to achieve the degree of food wealth which the United States has enjoyed for almost a century now.  Food security and water scarcity (a topic worthy of its own future posting, we promise) are more important to large portions of the world’s population than practically any other considerations.

We are hopeful, however, that they employ a more thoughtful and sustainable approach than the one our own country embarked upon in the wake of the Great Depression.  Squeezing the land for every ounce of nutrient content has filled our grocery shelves, but it has also made us fat, lazy, diseased, arrogant, and unconnected.  We talk on phones we would not have the first clue how to build on our own, drive in heavily computerized automobiles we can no longer fix ourselves, and eat food which comes from God only knows where, grown God only knows how.

It does not have to be this way.  Every year at Brazos Valley Pulletpalooza, we find that pretty much all of our visitors have their own chicken stories.  This is because until just two generations ago, practically everyone in this country had chickens.  The vast majority of folk also used to grow their own fruits and vegetables, too.

And not just country folk, and not just homeowners.   Most tenements in most big cities had rooftop vegetable gardens, though they were limited by the availability of water, and time (particularly before the Progressive Era, when thanks to labor unions, the average workday shrunk from as much as 12 to 16 hours down to a more manageable 8-10). 

The move completely away from self-sufficiency did not really begin until the post-World War II era, when the ideal home stopped being a place where food was produced, and started becoming a box in which goods could be stored.  When we moved to newly built suburbs, away from both the city center, and away from the countryside, we got rid of our chickens.  We spent our time driving to and from work, instead of kneeling in the garden, tending to our crops.

A lot more was lost in this transition, too.  Not only did we stop being responsible for our own food, we stopped spending as much time together as families and communities.  And while we had heretofore depended on shipped in food to supplement what we grew ourselves, we were suddenly depending on large agribusiness to provide all our nutrient needs.  Suddenly, farming had to be big business.  Which meant that even more people would move away from the countryside. 

Small town America is the essence of an idealized picture that cannot exist, given this vicious circle.  And ironically, those who champion the small town most are frequently part of the very industries and political movements which have doomed that lifestyle.

A move away from luxury and back towards subsistence is, in our view, the best solution to many of the problems we created in the last half of the 20th century.  The best part is, it isn’t even that hard to achieve.  We love our land here at Myrtle’s place, because we have a full half-acre to play with; not only do we have the chicken coop, but we also have roughly 2,500 square feet of garden – including the herb garden – and also not one, but two rainwater collection ponds, and a bunch of fruit trees and vines.  All that having been said, you don’t need any land in order to start transitioning to a simpler subsistence-based economy. 

In Nairobi, for instance, there are entire apartment buildings where you will see a huge potato sack hanging from every balcony, full of dirt, and with vegetables growing from slits in the sides.  Guerilla gardeners have laid claim to alleyways and any public patch of dirt, to grow corn, amaranth, and practically anything else they can think of to sell in inner city farmer’s markets.  One can prepare a year’s worth of meals there without buying anything that came from a traditional “farm”.

And really, when you think about it, all gardening is “container” gardening.  Whether your container is a 9” clay pot sitting on a windowsill, or a 5’x5’ raised bed in your backyard, or a 1,000,000 hectare wheat field in the countryside, there is a measurable quantity of soil to be maintained, which will yield a measurable amount of produce. 

Most of the problems related to poor soil tilth – including not only the failure of a given plot of ground to produce after it has been overfarmed, but also the problems for the neighboring environment related to runoff from the container – are actually much easier to handle when the scope and scale is smaller.  Raised beds in the backyard, much like the clay pots on a balcony, represent spaces in which the addition of nutritious compost is relatively easy, and the possibility of runoff into neighboring watersheds is also relatively simple to control.

What we are talking about, then, is scaling back the nature of “farming” to be less about feeding hordes of people on a few large, extensive plots of land, and instead feeding smaller groups of people on many more, but much smaller, containers of soil.  Change the scale, and the practices can be made healthier without damaging the communities involved.

Subsistence farming has traditionally gotten a bad rap – so much so that children’s history textbooks frequently speak of the “improvement” of moving away from subsistence based economies.  And in some palpable senses, there is truth to this prejudice.  Slash and burn techniques, for example, are contributing to deforestation in the Amazon; nomadic herding led to desertification in much of central Asia; the list of other ills encumbered by subsistence lifestyles throughout the world is lengthy.

However, what we are talking about is a new model for subsistence.  We are not talking about some 40-acres-and-a-mule government sponsored restructuring of society, whether American or otherwise.  We are talking about collectively taking individual responsibility for our own nutrient needs.  The Nairobi model, in particular, is inspiring, because Nairobi, Kenya, has so many other problems.  It is really one of the last places around the globe where you would expect folk to be blithely self-sufficient, and yet, many of them are. 

Faced with immense population density, and most of the troubles which face most of the other large cities in the developing world, a solution to this most basic of problems – how can I get enough to eat – has been propounded not by any international agency, but by a few hardy inner city pioneers.  In the face of global warming, air pollution, water scarcity, etc., however, they do not have enough wherewithal to solve even their own problems, let alone those of other people susceptible to want and hunger.  Everyone, everywhere, can do something, but no one, anywhere, can do everything.

Government must get involved at some point if in no other way than to clear obstacles to personal responsibility – laws such as those in some U.S. communities against growing vegetables in one’s front yard, for example.  Or restrictive ordinances on backyard chickens.  Subsidies for agribusiness, too, tend to depress the availability of resources for small-scale producers.  And protection of insidious organizations like Monsanto, whose patents on their invasive varieties of genetically modified crops, also tend to squeeze out smaller producers in favor of factory farms.

On the whole, though, it really is up to individuals, whether living in College Station, Texas, or Mt. Union, Pennsylvania, or Tokyo, Japan, to take back control of the production of what we consume.  In the Colonial era, North America was dotted with small towns and villages where virtually all needs were provided either by oneself or one’s neighbors.  Ships and wagons brought luxuries from other places; what went on one’s plate came from “out back” or “across the way”.  Much the same has historically been true everywhere in the world; and the solution to the ills created by getting away from that model is also the same pretty much everywhere.

Growing more of our own food, whether in garden plots, or in raised beds, or in containers on porches and window sills, increases food security, decreases pollution, improves personal economies, and improves nutrition.  We can get back to the ideal food production model without also bringing back cholera, witch burnings, and bad fashion.  Well, okay, maybe not without bringing back bad fashion.  But two out of three ain’t bad.

Happy farming!