My Chair

My dear old chair with ecru shawl
Companion to my lonesome
Thoughts these many years,
So staid and ready to receive
An ancient sage
A modern myth
A holy word of yonder age
Without complaint,
I hope to bring
Your worn and weary cloth
A simple happy offering
Before I sleep

Henry Madden Library Reopens

I have been looking forward to today for over a year. Our recently renovated CSU Fresno library opened its doors this morning for the first time. It’s a nice building, with tall windows and massive concrete pillars. It’s a modern building but it isn’t overdone. It’s certainly a library to catch your eye.

When I moved to Fresno last year, I promptly drove to campus to check out the library. I was quite disappointed when I discovered that it was closed for renovation. The good news was that the construction was impressive and a great deal of money had been invested to build it (including gambling money which I find to be a bit unusual). The bad news was that it wouldn’t be finished until the end of the year (several months away).

Well, as expected, the end of the year came and went and the library still wasn’t open. January was an overly optimistic target and so was Valentine’s Day. But I soon learned that a firm date had been set when I checked out the library website and noticed a clock marking the days, hours, minutes and seconds to Opening.

On campus today, the most common remark I heard was that the library was “huge”. Having experienced larger campuses and larger libraries, I was a bit amused by this apparent provincialism but I did have to admit that the building was spacious. There is a lot of open unused area inside, but I think this is a good thing – there’s plenty of room to grow.

I am a bit tentative about priorities however. There seems to be a lot of space dedicated to administration compared to the space allotted to books and journals. If the unused space gets used for what libraries are supposed to provide – books that is – then it will be well spent and the campus administrators will deserve our praise. If the same relative allocations continue, however, I’m not sure the gamble will have paid off.

Part of the reason for the small space allocation for books is that there is a very impressive series of shelf-compactors. Almost all of the books are on the lower level in what is claimed to be the largest self-compacting system in the United States. It is quite impressive. It seems that the science of compactors has been around long enough that many of their earlier problems have been overcome. It used to be that they took a long time to move and you often had to wait your turn to open the shelves if somebody was in a nearby isle. The compactors here are much shorter than I’ve seen in other libraries making room for more isles. No doubt this will still be frustrating during peak periods – such as midterms – when students have to wait around for isles to clear. But over-all, it seems to be a good use of space.

I have to admit, however, that I’m not a big fan of shelf compactors. I’m too old-fashioned I guess. I prefer walking up and down the isles looking at whatever volume catches my eye – the dustier, the better. Shelf-compactors make this difficult and much less rewarding. They are just fine for the individual with reference number in-hand who knows just where to find what is needed. They frustrate the library soul in search of serendipity.

Another frustration is the lack of hiding places. Libraries have charm to the extent that they have secret hiding places where you can cozy up to a book and pass the silent hours. Fresno’s new library is much too practical for this. If you need to sit down and read, you pretty much have to find a chair in the large open area full of tables, and read next to a dozen laptops and sundry groups of students. There are reading rooms nearby that can be closed for privacy. These will, no doubt, be useful when chairs are added. Today I preferred sitting on the floor alone in one of them to the chairs in the “lunchroom”.

I say “lunchroom” only half in jest. There is, after all, a convenient coffee shop on the second floor next to a large reading area. I know that many campuses these days have such vending services in their libraries. They seem to be copying Barnes & Noble Booksellers who has been successful at combining books and beverages. It’s sad that these are the busiest places in the library. Maybe they exist as a form of literary bribery. Maybe they just help boost patron numbers in order to justify such big buildings. I guess I shouldn’t complain.

I should also mention the frustrating arrangement of the current journals. They are placed alphabetically. I realize that young students, unfamiliar with how libraries are arranged will find their favorite magazines more easily this way. But it is a real headache for somebody wanting to review the recent literature on a given subject. You have to run back and forth to find the issues you need and then you’re not sure if you’ve seen everything there is. It seems to me that it would be much better to educate our students in call numbers and arrange things as they should be arranged.

This may sound a bit negative. I don’t mean for it to be. Our new library is definitely something to be proud of, and I look forward to many hours of enjoyment here. There are areas that I haven’t seen yet (particularly the South Wing) that I look forward to exploring. I also need to look more closely at the map collection – apparently it is one of the best in the state.

And I admit to being quite pleased, while walking across campus, to overhear a couple of different students tell their friends that they had to go “check out” the new library. I hope I hear the same thing for a long time to come.

Community Preparedness

Whatever happened to the idea of community preparedness? You would think that with all the natural disasters and economic troubles we have been experiencing lately that it would be a subject of much interest and discussion. How can it be that during such difficult times we ignore the whole subject?

It’s true that most communities have plans for disasters. In the earthquake zones of California, for instance, building codes reflect this danger and most homes lack basements. In the South, coastal areas build for possible hurricanes. Along our major rivers, people who decide to build on floodplains, usually take precautions to build levees.

Schoolchildren all across the country are drilled on what to do when they hear the public siren sounding a warning of danger. Scouts are taught the importance of safety and preparedness and so are almost all businesses. It might seem, then, that we are more prepared than I have claimed. And I haven’t even mentioned our community funded fire and rescue squads. We’re more focused on safety now than we’ve ever been.

Of course, all of these programs and precautions are worthy efforts. In fact they often save lives and property. But they are not to be confused with true community preparedness. Truly prepared communities certainly have these same programs, but they also have something more - they are self-reliant and even sustainable.

Unfortunately self-reliant communities are a rarity these days. This is a shame considering how common they were just a few generations ago. In less than a hundred years, we have forgotten many basic skills that were intuitive to our grandparents.

How does one go about planting and caring for a garden? I know this might sound ridiculously obvious to many. But it’s a serious question. You’d be surprised at how many people don’t know even the basics of how to grow their own food. Who knows how to build a root cellar anymore? Or who knows how to irrigate and fertilize a crop? Who knows how to fertilize a crop if you can’t go to the store and buy fertilizer? Who knows anything about rotating crops or how to keep insects from destroying your plants?

Well the answer to most of these questions is that almost nobody does. And, in fact, almost nobody even cares. What makes this so troubling is that these basic skills are necessary for sustainable communities, despite how trivial they might seem in our current economy.

Perhaps we convince ourselves that we are self-reliant people. It’s just that our self-reliance is a nation-wide phenomenon. Why does it matter if we get our vegetables from the local farmer’s market or from another state (or continent, for that matter)? After all, the broader our trade connections become, the better off we all become.

Or so it might seem. Nonetheless, the error in this thinking is pretty obvious with just a little perspective. Things never remain as they are. We might like telling ourselves that it is our ingenuity that drives change and that we can control the future; but in reality, most significant changes come because of disruptive influences - even disasters. We adapt to the new circumstances because we have to, not always because we want to.

Our modern society exists in a precarious position. In many ways we’ve built ourselves a culture that exists as an upside down pyramid. Things that we need - such as food and shelter - are in the hands of a very few people. Most of us make a living out of providing goods or services that are not really necessary. I don’t mean that they aren’t worthy professions, they just aren’t required to sustain life. A sustainable community is comprised of a broad base that provides the basic requirements for survival. Further up the pyramid are those professions (such as education, government, and cultural luxuries) that are progressively less necessary. Our society is clearly top-heavy.

One example immediately comes to mind. The number of lawyers seems to me to be excessive. I haven’t counted but I expect that we have as many lawyers in the US as we have farmers. In a way this is a compliment to the abilities of Americans. A lot of us are smart enough to become lawyers. Who, in their right mind, would stay on a farm when they could use their abilities and make a lot more money in the city?

But this is a little misleading. First of all, one can be a farmer and a lawyer (or one of many other professions) at the same time. Secondly, it fails to consider the importance of wisdom. It takes more than cerebration to be wise. One must also have perspective. With our society turned upside down and vulnerable - vulnerable to being toppled from any of a myriad different directions - we need wise citizens. We need citizens with the wisdom to come together and create sustainable communities. Agrarian communities have always been sources of wisdom.

We have lived a long time under the mistaken belief that disasters won’t happen to us. Or maybe we’ve admitted that they might happen but that we’ll somehow come through OK in the end. That’s the beauty, after all, of a global economy. If disaster strikes in one place, someplace else can come to the rescue. There’s only one thing wrong with this sort of thinking. Not all disasters are local. Wisdom teaches something quite different. Sustainability is.

California Newts

Sometime in the middle of February last year - while driving around Pine Flat Reservoir above Fresno, California I took a detour along Big Creek Road looking for a good place to find aquatic insects.

It had rained a good deal during the last couple of days and the stream was high. I found a number of small pools by the bank that had been left after the high water receded. I went looking for diving beetles. Instead, I found a number of California newts. They were out in force and paid me absolutely no attention at all.

In one pool there were four. I watched these for some time. They were a deep orange brown above with pale legs and eyelids. Underneath they were a bright orange. Their tails were flattened laterally for swimming and their eyes were white with a black band across the middle. They ranged in size from six to eight inches and practically skipped in slow motion along the bottom of the shallow pools.

The water was cool – almost cold. It was, after all, the end of winter and snow was still lining the banks not too far upstream. But this didn’t seem to bother the newts at all. I first thought they were out looking for food since the rain had stopped but I was soon proven wrong. They were out looking for mates and late winter after a rainstorm was an opportune time.

A bird will occasionally eat a California newt, but only once, before it dies from poisoning. Mallards, western grebes, great horned owls and the unwitting domestic fowl are all on record for having expired with a toxic newt in their gullets

The newts’ skin secretes the same non-protein toxin (known as tetrodotoxin) as the puffer fish of voodoo fame. For the hapless bird that measures its weight in ounces, the dose acquired from a single newt can be mortal in minutes. The garter snake, on the other hand, has developed immunity to the poison. It can eat a number of newts and only experience a bit of a buzz. Fortunately for the amphibians, forty degrees in February is not their favorite time to be out.

I had not been watching them more than a minute when one average-sized individual tentatively grabbed a larger one around the mid section and then paused to see how things would go. Apparently things didn’t go so well because both decided to part company rather abruptly. This was done by swinging their long tails back and forth to propel themselves in separate directions. It was obvious that when they wanted to move fast, they swam instead of walked.

In an adjacent pool (holding maybe five gallons of water) I discovered seven other newts. They didn’t seem to mind being in such close quarters except for one individual. He was curled up in a ball holding a female newt. A smaller newt was all tied up with them and it was hard to tell where one ended and another began.

As I watched more closely, I could tell that this was quite an event in the lives of these animals. Slowly the stronger male managed to move his long tail between his intended mate and the intruder and push him away. But this was only partially successful. His opponent had its front legs tightly wrapped around the tail of the female newt with its hands clasped together on the other side. It took a lot of shaking to get it off.


When the strong male was finally alone with his mate, he quickly pulled her up to the surface and gulped down a mouthful of air. Such a struggle, no doubt, used up a lot of energy; at least it did for him. The female got no air at all. Nor did she need any. She was exerting no energy at all.

For over an hour as I watched, it seemed the male was constantly busy keeping the others away. They would wander around the pool and then poke their nose against the pair. This usually was left uncontested by the mating male. But then the intruder would become more nosey and push itself with more assertiveness. Sometimes it would even walk right on top of the other two. At this point the male would slap the other with its tail and try to swim away, with his mate en tow, almost always rising to the surface for a gulp of air.

Once in a while a surge of water would splash over the rocky bank from the stream and agitate the pool. When this happened the salamander would just yield themselves to the current and slowly drift to the bottom of the pool. Occasionally an individual would float past in the main current of the stream, seeming to enjoy the ride. At other times when only a small current of water was entering the pool, the others would swim against the current just for pleasure – or so it seemed. They didn’t seem at all bothered by the cold or by the large primate observer that was only a few feet away. Even when the occasional wanderer would leave the water right in front of me, they didn’t seem to care that I was there.

It was surprising though that they didn’t seem at all interested in eating. Even the ones that weren’t mating paid no attention to the occasional mayfly naiad as it undulated through the water right in front of them. It seemed that this was supposed to be a time for other things and not for grub.

Solomon wrote, “There is a season, and a time for every purpose under the heaven… a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing" (Ecclesiastes 3:1,5). For these newts on a cool winter day in California it was a time for embracing.

Rendering

The box of knickknacks he
Could never throw away,
The piles unread of newsprint
By the way
The pear tree rendered
Leaves for him to see,
By order of the fall
Were they set free,
It happened on a day
He took to sweeping out
The cubby holes inside
At first he emptied all
The dust in bins, but then
Upon the garden to decide

Small Farms Win

We have two primary needs in agriculture right now. We need higher yields and we need more small farms. We need higher yields because the human population is growing and land is limited. We need more farmers for a lot of reasons. In fact our need for more small farms exceeds our need for higher yields.

Arguing for higher yields seems like more of the same. In the last century, science and technology have provided us with truly unbelievable yields thanks to synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and genetically modified organisms. It’s tempting to assume that our future demands will be fairly easy to meet in the same way.

But this is misleading. Fertilizers are only capable of doing so much. We reached a point some time ago where adding more nutrients to our soils wouldn’t increase yields. In many cases, in excess, it even reduces them. Pesticides (both synthetic and natural ones) are still being discovered but the cost of developing them is becoming greater and greater at the same time that regulatory agencies are demanding fewer and fewer broad-spectrum products. This means that companies are being forced to make more effective and safer products on smaller and smaller margins. This trend obviously can’t last forever.

Genetically modified crops have significantly increased yields in the last couple of decades but farmers have not benefited from this as much as basic manufacturers have. To make matters worse, our dependence on fewer and fewer crop varieties is making us more and more vulnerable to disease and pest outbreaks on a global level. The local storerooms of seed varieties that farmers could chose from and manage themselves are becoming fewer and fewer. We are approaching a time when our agricultural apathy will come back to haunt us.

This is, of course, the reason that we need more small farms. John Taylor of Caroline noticed more than two centuries ago that small farms produced more than big farms do - at least proportionately. Taylor was a Virginia farmer from the same tradition as Thomas Jefferson and grasped a basic truth that we moderns have a hard time appreciating: that there is an important difference between productivity and yield.

It’s obvious that an industrial farmer with his tractors can plow and plant more acreage than a man on a small farm. On a man-hour basis it would then seem obvious that mechanization is more practical and profitable. And indeed, this is true if we measure yield only relative to man-hours. If we start from a land ethic, however, and calculate yield relative to farm size, things change. Industrial farming no longer wins hands-down.

The reasons are straight-forward. An owner of a small farm often has a family - call them part-time field hands if you like. Together they know what’s happening on the farm. If disease or insects start to threaten part of the field, local action can be taken to keep problems from getting out of hand. Losing a few plants or part of a crop is often much less expensive than making multiple spray applications over multiple acres. Large farms rarely monitor their crops as well as small farms do.

Harvests can be customized on small farms too. Normal plants will usually be productive over a period of days, weeks, or even months. Small farms are able to take advantage of this. It isn’t cost effective for an industrial farmer to start up the combine or hire seasonal help to harvest large tracts of produce multiple times. On small farms, this is not a problem and multiple harvests are the rule – providing less waste and generally fresher produce. In many cases multiple harvests promote greater yields as well.

Another problem of calculating productivity on a man-hour basis is that it fails to consider external costs. When these costs are taken into account, they almost always favor small farms (see the USDA’s 1998 report, Time to Act, for more information on this).

Small farms harbor greater diversity in a number of ways. For instance, citizens of small farm communities come from a wider variety of cultures than other farm communities. Cropping systems are more diverse too and this diversity lends stability to changing circumstances. Small farms have greater biological diversity - both of natural enemies of pests and to wildlife. There is also a greater variety of landscapes and cultural traditions on small farms.

Small farms also have a better track record with the environment. They conserve soil and water quite a bit better than large farms. And this happens in a free enterprise system. In fact small farms are a very important part of the economy in many places.

Small farms are also places for families to raise children and acquire values. They are places to learn about the Law of the Harvest (q.v.) and to become practical and self-reliant. These are all things that are certainly worthy of note, even if they don’t factor into spreadsheets about yield.

Of course it doesn’t make sense to lose sight of the need to feed a growing population - both at home and abroad. We clearly do need greater yields in many parts of the world. But we also have the choice about how this can be done. We can leave the task to industrial farmers alone and continue our estrangement from the land, from our faith, and from each other; or, we can regain our culture, heal ourselves and our communities, and grow a little wiser in the process.

The Law of the Harvest

The Law of the Harvest is simple. We reap what we sow. If we plant tomatoes, we harvest tomatoes. If we habitually spend less than we make, we’ll gain wealth. The Golden Rule is an extension of this law. Hillel (as recorded in the Babylonian Talmud) expressed it in negative terms: what is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor. Jesus (as recorded in the New Testament) expressed it in positive terms: do unto others what you would have others do to you. These are basic principles that have been known for thousands of years. But, of course, they are only part of the Law of the Harvest.

The other part, that is hardly ever mentioned, is just as important. It’s also less appealing to most people. It asserts that there will be no harvest without work and that there are no immediate gratifications. A long time ago, when most of us raised our own food, these were not truths to ignore. We might not have liked them, but we had to plan our lives around them anyway. They are laws, after all.

If you lived in a rainy place you didn’t have to worry about irrigating. Nature took care of that for you. But if you ignored your crops, weeds would soon choke them to death. If you lived in a dry region and forgot to irrigate, your crops wilted and died.

It takes work to reap a harvest and it takes a lot of it. You have to work long hours sometimes and then get up and work long hours again. Sometimes you do all this and then lose your crop on top of it all. Sometimes you lose your crop more than one year in a row and have to move.

The Law of the Harvest is obviously not a law of mercy. It’s also obvious why we have tried to mitigate it as much as possible. In fact to have not tried would be to demonstrate our own lack of mercy. But it is one thing to mitigate suffering by abiding by the Law of the Harvest itself - and quite another thing to ignore it outright.

Today, with our trust in technology, we hardly even have opportunity to think of such troublesome things. And why should we? Food is easy enough to get whenever we want it. One might even be tempted to argue that we have outgrown the Law of the Harvest - at least in its strict agricultural sense. Maybe it is only a historic artifact anymore. We might be tempted to think this way even if we were not thinking about farming. Why delay buying an expensive toy when we can get it now on credit? The principle is the same.

But nothing could be further from the truth. People that fail to work productively and that can’t delay gratification may get by one way or another but they will never reap a harvest. Harvest time is a time of plenty, of abundance. It is a time of satiety, of running over. It is a time of rejoicing. And there is joy because work has been invested and born fruit.

The Law of the Harvest is joyous when it is lived. It can be disastrous when it is ignored. Taken to extremes, it leads to war. If we find ourselves without enough to sustain the basic needs of life, we have the choice to either borrow what we need from others or to take what we need - by stealth or by force. We might fake things for a while, but ultimately, justice will have her due.

When a society is based on a culture of responsibility - a culture abiding by the Law of the Harvest - needs will be met humanely and morally. A society lacking in responsible culture cannot be trusted to do so.

If needs are real, irresponsibility leads to theft. If the level of irresponsibility is great enough, mere wants will lead to the same end. If enough people find themselves destitute, then wholesale plundering occurs. If this is unorganized, it is anarchy. If it is organized, it is war.

Now all of this might seem a bit much to extrapolate from a lack of interest in gardening. And so it is, but not entirely. Certainly, the Law of the Harvest is part of every enduring culture. Without it, things must unavoidably fall apart. It is also true that the Law of the Harvest can be learned and lived outside of a farm. Care for one’s home, yard or even apartment may suffice. In fact it can be lived in the thoughtful way that we care for others.

But it needs to be remembered that these alternatives have never been enough, by themselves, to sustain a culture. For culture to endure, it must be based in religion and the cultivation and care of the land. Unfortunately, our society is trying to be civilized without either of these. We’re trying to be civilized without culture. This can never be sustained. In the end we will pay the price for this. And our children will too.