“For Berry, the deep problem standing behind all the
other problems of industrial civilization is “specialization,” which he
regards as the “disease of the modern character.” Our society assigns
us a tiny number of roles: we’re producers (of one thing) at work,
consumers of a great many other things the rest of the time, and then
once a year or so we vote as citizens. Virtually all of our needs and
desires we delegate to specialists of one kind or another — our meals
to agribusiness, health to the doctor, education to the teacher,
entertainment to the media, care for the environment to the
environmentalist, political action to the politician.
As Adam
Smith and many others have pointed out, this division of labor has
given us many of the blessings of civilization. Specialization is what
allows me to sit at a computer thinking about climate change. Yet this
same division of labor obscures the lines of connection — and
responsibility — linking our everyday acts to their real-world
consequences, making it easy for me to overlook the coal-fired power
plant that is lighting my screen, or the mountaintop in Kentucky that
had to be destroyed to provide the coal to that plant, or the streams
running crimson with heavy metals as a result.
Of course, what
made this sort of specialization possible in the first place was cheap
energy. Cheap fossil fuel allows us to pay distant others to process
our food for us, to entertain us and to (try to) solve our problems,
with the result that there is very little we know how to accomplish for
ourselves. Think for a moment of all the things you suddenly need to do
for yourself when the power goes out — up to and including entertaining
yourself. Think, too, about how a power failure causes your neighbors —
your community — to suddenly loom so much larger in your life. Cheap
energy allowed us to leapfrog community by making it possible to sell
our specialty over great distances as well as summon into our lives the
specialties of countless distant others.
Here’s the point:
Cheap energy, which gives us climate change, fosters precisely the
mentality that makes dealing with climate change in our own lives seem
impossibly difficult. Specialists ourselves, we can no longer imagine
anyone but an expert, or anything but a new technology or law, solving
our problems. Al Gore asks us to change the light bulbs because he
probably can’t imagine us doing anything much more challenging, like,
say, growing some portion of our own food. We can’t imagine it, either,
which is probably why we prefer to cross our fingers and talk about the
promise of ethanol and nuclear power — new liquids and electrons to
power the same old cars and houses and lives. ”
++++++++++++++++++++
“But there are sweeter reasons to plant that garden, to bother. At least in this one corner of your yard and life, you will have begun to heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen. Chances are, your garden will re-engage you with your neighbors, for you will have produce to give away and the need to borrow their tools. You will have reduced the power of the cheap-energy mind by personally overcoming its most debilitating weakness: its helplessness and the fact that it can’t do much of anything that doesn’t involve division or subtraction. The garden’s season-long transit from seed to ripe fruit — will you get a load of that zucchini?! — suggests that the operations of addition and multiplication still obtain, that the abundance of nature is not exhausted. The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world. ”
I think I'll go visit my vegetables first thing tomorrow morning and I will finish the Omnivore's Dilemma witin this month.
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