The photographs and captions Lange produced for the FSA offer a fascinating glimpse inside the sociology of the Jim-Crow South. According to the historian Linda Gordon, the FSA’s photography program was the leading “left edge” of the New-Deal-era Department of Agriculture. Alongside the work of her FSA peers, Lange’s photographs appear unsentimental and candid; modernist in sensibility and scale. In ways both subtle and strange, they raise questions about agricultural economy and race relations in the South--but also, intriguingly, the ways that the country and the city implicate each other in the places people call home.

Lange is much better known for her photographs of the Japanese interment camps and documentation of Dust-Bowl poverty, including the one that circulates under the unfortunate (and unauthorized) title of Migrant Mother. But the photos she took all over the Southeast are no less interesting. I’m thinking about writing a longer essay about them, but for now, enjoy a few shots of hers from the visit to Shoofly. I’ve included the captions Lange included for each image, including her long, patient description of the process. An outsider, Lange reproduces a level of detail that is remarkable.

Source: Library of Congress

Finally, here are Lange’s words about what she observed:

Subject: Putting in Tobacco:

This process is also known as ‘saving’ tobacco; the word ‘priming’ is also sometimes applied to the entire process, although strictly this term describes the actual removal of the leaves from the plant. The process is also known as ‘curing tobacco,’ although here again this term applies strictly only to one particular part of the process.

1. “PRIMING.” Beginning at the bottom of the plant, the leaves are stripped; usually two or three bottom leaves are removed at one priming. Only the ripe leaves are primed, and ripeness is determined by the color of the leaf. When ripe, the leaves are pale yellow in color, although they are often difficult to distinguish from the green leaves. Hence the job of priming is something of an art, which is left to the men of the family or to those ‘women folks’ who are skilled at it. In the field picture, the men are priming for the second time, the ‘first primings,’ or sand leaves, having been removed. Noe the method of removing the leaves, the manner which they are held, and the care which is exercised to prevent bruising or breaking. [a list of 11 negatives follows]

2. “SLIDING TOBACCO TO THE BARN.” The primings are transported to the barns, here they will be tied or strung, in the ‘slide’ (also called sled). Note construction of the slide-frame of wooden strips, on a pair of wooden runners. The body of the slide is made of Guano sacks, and the entire structure is narrow enough to run between the rows of tobacco without breaking the leaves. In this instance to slides are in use; while one load of tobacco is being strung, the other slide is sent to the field for another load. [5 negatives]

3. “STRINGING THE TOBACCO.” At the barn, the tobacco is strung on sticks by the women and children, and those men who are not required i the field. The sticks are of pine, four feet long. The string is fastened at one end, and the leaves of tobacco in bunches of three or four, are strung on the stick alternately on each side. Note the notched ‘horses’ for holding the sticks while stringing. When a stick is filled with tobacco, it is removed from the horse and piled in front of the barn, where it remains until put up in the barn. Sometimes shelters are provided to keep the sun from the tobacco, after it is strung, since very hot sun will burn the tobacco. In this case two people are stringing, one of them an expert negro boy, and two or three people are ‘handing the primings’ to the stringer. [12 negatives]

4. “PUTTING IN THE TOBACCO.” At noon, after the last slide of the morning has come from the field, the tobacco which has been strung is hung from the barn. The barns are of four or five “rooms” (a room is the space between the tier poles; the barn in the picture is a four room barn, and will hold about 600 sticks of tobacco). Two men go up on the tier poles, and the tobacco is handed up to them. One room is filled at a time. In the barn picture, several people’s tobacco is being put in together; there are, in addition to the second primings mentioned, some first primings from another field. These are much inferior in quality of the second primings., and are covered with sand--hence the term ‘sand leaves.’ [7 negatives.]

5. “FIRING THE BARNS.” When the barn is filled, the tobacco is allowed to hang for several hours, sometimes over night, until the leaves are thoroughly wilted. Fires are then built in the furnaces, and the process of curing begins. The heat is kept at ninety degrees until the tobacco is ‘yellowed’ then is gradually raised until all of the leaf except the stem is cured, when the final stage, ‘killing out,’ is reached. The heat is usually raised rapidly until it reaches 190 or 200 degrees. Curing takes about three days and three nights. although under certain circumstances it may take longer. After the tobacco is cured, it is allowed to hang in the curing barn until it ‘comes in order’--absorbed enough moisture so that it can be handled without breaking--when it is taken down and packed in the pack house. Here it remains until it is stripped out. It is usually taken up and repacked once, so that it will not become excessively moist and mould. [5 negatives]

In the novel, Cusk calls the spy “G,” but it doesn’t take much sleuthing to realize that Cusk is describing the life and art of the French filmmaker Eric Rohmer. “Eric Rohmer” was the pseudonym of a filmmaker who worked with such obsessive secrecy that not even his parents or sibling, when they died, knew that he ever made films. (About ten years ago, Rohmer’s Six contes moraux received the Criterion treatment. He’s a wonderful filmmaker; I recommend starting with Ma nuit chez Maud [1969].) “Invisibility was his conduit to self-expression,” Cusk writes of G/Rohmer. In G’s films, in Rohmer’s films, the camera doesn’t penetrate the social or physical space of the people it records, and it rarely scans them for visual pleasure. Most of the time, it is content to sit and watch and record characters played by actors who were not glamorous movie stars. In many cases, the actors were people that G/Rohmer hired off of the street. The camera watches, and it waits--for what? “he watched them lovingly, for the good and the bad in them. He brought them no drama. He forced nothing on them, extended as they were by the task of living” (168). “His style, so uninterfering,” the narrator continues,

drew attention to itself without meaning to. He rarely, for instance, showed his characters in close-up, believing that this was not how human beings saw one another. His films had no particular aesthetic. They often took place in public spaces, and his characters seemed barely to notice that they were being watched. They wore ordinary clothes and rarely looked at the camera. They were absorbed in their own lives. 156

A different auteur might reach out with a camera and try to re-make the world in his or her own image. Here is an aesthetics of conquest and domination: the camera acts as an vehicle for the imposition of a personal vision of the world or how it should be, marrying this vision “with extraordinary public impact and power.” Not so with the spy, and not so with G/Rohmer. “[G] wasn’t interested in change. He was interested in the fragments that change leaves behind behind in its storming passage towards the future” (174).

Cusk divides Parade into four sections, and each section includes a meditation on a different artist. The artists are based on real people, but in each story Cusk refers to them rather cryptically by the initial G. However, by the time she comes around to discussing the last of the four G.’s, the one based on Rohmer, the tone shifts. The fourth G. stands out as an icon or an ideal. G. intuits that the connection between art and the self is a problem in need of demolition. As Cusk or whoever the narrator is puts the matter, it is only by severing the bond between art and the public identity of the artist that G. is able to see anything true or real in the world. If one’s work is successful, then the work will inevitably be connected to the performance of a particular kind of personality or “vision.” But it is precisely this form of relation that G. finds incompatible with his understanding of reality. G is drawn to film in particular because “its unbodied mode of perception--even if it was to some extent an illusion--furnished him with a hiding place. When he was behind the camera, he believed he could not be seen” (173-4).

***

One of the dogmas of modernity is that the making of art is fundamentally disconnected from morality. Art may reveal truths about the human condition. It may show us authentic ways of living that we were previously blind to or were otherwise inaccessible to us. But the making of the art often has little to do with the character of the artist. There are lots of ways this idea gets expressed. Most often, I hear people repeat something along the lines of the following: the truly great artists all had troubled lives. It is as if their being difficult to live with were a sign of a special calling. Perhaps this has more to do with the cult of genius in our country, but I’d be surprised if it were a peculiarly American phenomenon. Of course, the same idea can be expressed from a internal perspective, too (that is, not pseudo-sociologically). The idea goes like this: the daimon of an artist requires them to hold connections to other humans more loosely than other people are required to. You never know how far your art may ask you to go, or what it may require you to do to others (abandonment, betrayal, etc.). To think otherwise is to place artificial constraints on an autonomous practice or a discipline that, in principle, should have no other rules than the ones it chooses to accept for itself.

There is a genealogy to these patterns of thinking that is much more complicated than I have space to discuss here. It involves the attempt to replace religion with art at the dawn of the twentieth century; with art and artistic practice becoming a religion unto themselves, complete with their own idiosyncratic rituals and rules and attendant pietisms and forms of devotion. Under such a regime, it is often the personal idiosyncrasy, a process, or “style” that is taken for the unique contribution of the artist, as if a particular vision or essence of self could be encoded and reproduced through the unique combination of signifiers, whether they be literary, painterly, cinematic, and so on.

I see Parade and Cusk’s earlier work in the Outline trilogy as an attempt to unsettle this dogma, and to do so from within what has to be the most self-obsessed aesthetic form in human history, the modern novel. It’s an odd selection for anyone setting about sifting through the ethics of literary authorship. It’s an especially awkward task for Cusk, the famous novelist and memoirist, who has made a small fortune and a large reputation by writing so publicly about her own life. In 2001, Faber published Cusk’s very famous memoir about becoming a mother. Nine years later, she wrote another one about marriage and divorce. Her fiction, too, is larded with autobiographical detail. The narrator of the Outline trilogy, Faye, is a writer who travels across Europe speaking at book festivals and fiction workshops. Critics often point to her novels and short stories of the last decade and a half when discussing the turn to “autofiction,” a portmanteau that designates the current taste for blending first-personal fact and fiction in novels and short stories.

One of Parade’s unnamed narrators seems to acknowledge the awkwardness as they discuss G.’s decision to leave behind fiction writing and take up film. The novel, Cusk writes, “of all the arts[,] was the most resistant to dissociation from the self. A novel was a voice, and a voice had to belong to someone. In the shared economy of language, everything had to be explained; every statement, even the most simple, was a function of personality” (167). For G./Rohmer, though, it is precisely the connection between language and voice that stands in the way of bearing witness to reality. Film, he concludes, is the natural medium for severing this connection. As a form, it is made possible by a team of actors pretending like there isn’t a camera recording them, while all the time the camera captures every ripple of emotion that passes across their faces. The camera’s invisibility is an illusion, an artifice; it’s there, it’s just that the art of film makes it such that the actors have to pretend that it’s not. What makes G.’s art unique is the decision to continue the severing of language and voice through to life itself. No one knows the true identity of G., and it is the key to the power of his art. “He has no doubt that his anonymity is what allows him to see what he sees. Because of it he has no investment in the game of life. He is a spy; his ego, is exiled, at bay. Like the spy, the difficulty is that he can’t make things happen--he just has to be sure he’s there when they do” (188).

***

Are there certain modes of seeing that require the abandonment of the self of the seeing agent? In the Sovereignty of Good, the philosopher (and novelist) Iris Murdoch argued that there are. For Murdoch, the act of attention to something outside of yourself (a soaring hawk and an annoying daughter-in-law were two famous examples) requires a discipline of “unselfing,” of willfully forgetting the subject who sees but who may otherwise desire, fear, crave, resent or regard with indifference who (or what) they happen to be looking at. Drawing on the work of Simone Weil, Murdoch argues that attention is the fundamental condition of being a moral agent. To act virtuously requires us to see the world and our place in it clearly, unselfishly. Often, the just and right act, when it proceeds from a mode of pure seeing, arrives without any kind of private discourse or interior reflection on the part of the agent. The action itself speaks.

More recently than Murdoch, the philosopher Jonardon Ganeri has drawn on the “unselfing” of attention to explain our situatedness in the world as agents. “Attention precedes self in the explanation of what it is to be human,” Ganeri writes, and it is doubtful (he argues) whether there is anything defensible in the concept of the self at all. He is working within the tradition of Indian philosophy to mount a critique of post-Enlightenment ethics. In particular, he has in mind the idea of the self as “the concept of a detached author, the simple origin of willed directives, a concept that forces us to understand the mind in terms of a dichotomy between free voluntary actions and purely passive happenings.”

I’m not aware of Cusk ever explicitly alluding to Murdoch, much less Ganeri, but the concept of the self as a detached author is one that Cusk seems especially keen to demolish in her fiction. She does so through a motif that pops up throughout Parade and her other experimental novels. The motif is of a person standing outside a house or an apartment and looking in through the window and watching people who do not know they they are being watched. It’s a creepy idea, but Cusk returns to it again and again in Parade and in other works. Curiously, in Parade, it is a habit or an act that is never explicitly associated with G., but it seems to mimic the kind of looking he achieves in his films. In the fourth section of Parade, another unnamed narrator, speaking inexplicably in the first person plural, describes looking out from their apartment and watching the lives of neighbors unfold around them:

At night, when the lights are on, the scenes playing high up in the windows are framed by the emptiness, like paintings. They are paintings of people in rooms, together or alone, seen through windows or across spaces by an eye that seems larger and more omniscient than a human eye. It could be the eye of a god, or equally that of an animal or a child. The human figures have a theatrical quality: in the recurrence of their own lives they seem to exist outside time. That quality in the view from our window arises not because the people are consciously enacting themselves, but because perception itself--the pure perception that involves no interaction, no subjectivity--reveals the pathos of identity. (160)

The windows of a building are like paintings which frame the occupants in a stylized tableau of domestic routine. When the windows light up, we are able to see people absorbed in their lives, unaware of being watched. The eye who sees them is like the eye of a god or an animal, an eye who sees everything and nothing. Crucially, for Cusk, this sort of vision doesn’t come automatically from a person passing by. You don’t get “pure perception” by peering in voyeuristically, seeing your own assumptions or designs i the faces and actions of others. Nor do you get it when the people realize they are being watched and “consciously enacting themselves.” What matters is “no interaction, no subjectivity.”

In a passage in Outline, the first novel in a trilogy Cusk began in 2014, Cusk explores a similar scene, but here the characters who peer in the window cannot help but see reflected back to them their own wants and fears:

I thought often of a chapter in Wuthering Heights where Heathcliff and Cathy stare from the dark garden through the windows of the Lintons’ drawing room and watch the brightly lit family scene inside. What is fatal in that vision is its subjectivity: looking through the window the two of them see different things, Heathcliff what he fears and hates and Cathy what she desires and feels deprived of. But neither of them can see things as they really are. And likewise I was beginning to see my own fears and desires manifested outside myself, was beginning to see in other people’s lives a commentary on my own. (75)

In the Wuthering Heights passage the narrator is recalling, Young Heathcliff and Cathy Earnshaw spy on their wealthy neighbors, the Linton children, by looking in from the outside, but each sees something different from the other. Heathcliff is repulsed by the sight of rich children fighting over a little dog; Cathy is apparently drawn in by the opulence of the rural gentry. Heathcliff and Cathy begin mocking the children from the outside, and the Linton’s, hearing the noise, let their guard dog loose. The dog latches onto Cathy’s leg, and while the family brings her in to have her leg treated, Heathcliff, the adopted foundling, is refused entry to the house. When Cathy returns, her behavior towards Heathcliff is mannered and distant.

For the narrator of Outline, personal disintegration is figured as an uncanny return of the self in the guise of others. It is the paranoid projection of one’s own disappointments in other people, of seeing other people as an implicit commentary on your own life. Subjectivity, as Cusk puts it in Parade, gets in the way of seeing people in the way that they really are. Contrast this with the “pure perception” of the first passage, where attention doesn’t project uncanny versions of self onto the lives of others, but finds itself absorbed by the theatricality of a performance that is no performance at all. Only by not disclosing your presence, by not engaging, and most of all, by not being seen, does the “pathos of identity” disclose itself.

There are two other window scenes in Parade that I want to discuss briefly. Both come at the very end of the novel, and both are inside paintings that the plural narrator sees on a visit to a museum. The paintings, the narrator says, were once thought to be the product of a very famous painter. Later, it was discovered that they were made by a different painter of the same school, but this time, the painter’s identity was “virtually anonymous.”

In the first painting, there is “a middle-aged woman” in a chair reading a book in a room “full of a bare light.” The windows behind her are dark, but in one of them there is a child’s face looking in at her. The child “wanted something, was waiting out there in the dark for something,” but the woman doesn’t, perhaps can’t, see him. She is too “immersed in being herself, [...] indifferent to how she was seen.” In the second, there is a different woman in the same room, but this time, the woman is leaning towards the dark window and the viewer can’t see her face. On the other side of the window is the face of the same child. “The woman was waving at the child through the glass, her hand and face almost pressed to it, the chair nearly toppling with her enthusiasm” (197).

What are we to make of these two paintings? Maybe Cusk’s descriptions are based on real artworks. Probably not. I’m inclined to think that they’re made up, but I don’t think it really matters. Cusk is giving the reader a diptych of attention: of one person so absorbed in themselves that they are no longer in a position of being able to see the needs of others, and in the other, of being so captivated in the giving and receiving of attention that they do not, that they could never see, that they are being observed. The narrator tells us that the paintings are a parable of “the rarity of love”--of a child’s gaze that is answered in a woman’s reaching out, in touch, if only through a pane of glass. But it also seems to be a parable about the limits of art. The first woman holds a book, and as long she holds it, she’ll never see the child. So it is with the giving and receiving of attention.

The wedding and related festivities took up most of our time in Medellin. Except for early morning walks around the neighborhood of Poblado, where we stayed, I didn’t get to see much of the city. I only saw a tiny, hip fragment of a sprawling metropolis of contradiction. Here’s something I learned: Colombia is the world capital of plastic surgery. Walk around the fancy neighborhoods of Medellin, and it really shows. I can’t recall ever seeing crushing poverty so close and cozy to extreme wealth. The place demanded more time and attention than I could give it.

I hate to say that none of us were particularly crazy about the food, which seemed to be a matrix of potato, corn, and meat in different configurations, then deep fried. By day four, I yearned for a different vegetable.

Here is a photo I took from the rooftop of our hotel. The sprawling comunas, the city’s slums, creep up the sides of mountains and sparkle in the darkness.

Poblado by night. Photo by the author.

Cartagena is a city of similar extremes. But the old fort town, surrounded by towering walls and rusty cannons that protruded out to sea, felt worlds away from Medellin. Plumes of tropical life erupted in every direction; so many accretions of history visible from the street. Also, the city seemed to ooze. About a month before we got there the old town flooded. The waters had subsided weeks before, but whenever we left the hotel, water would pool along the city blocks for miles. It never rained while we were there, so it was unclear where the water was coming from. But it always seems to have a gentle flow to it.

Cartagena is the city where Gabriel Garcia Marquez lived for long periods of his life. (Love in the Time of Cholera takes place in Cartagena; so does Love and Other Demons.) Once, when I poked my head inside a men’s clothing shop, I saw a framed picture of a haberdasher measuring the outstretched arms of a very old Marquez. Marquez looks confused, like he had just woke up to someone poking him in the shoulder. It was really funny, and part of me wishes I had taken a picture, but it felt weird to snap a photo and then duck away.

A quieter street in the Getsemani (Gethsemani) neighboorhood of Cartagena (Carthage). Photo by the author.

While we were in Cartagena, a massive international land reform conference took over the big centennial park in the middle of the city. The organization, La Via Campesina, was the focus of the event. If you don’t know about their work, I’d encourage you to read about them. La Via Campesina is an international peasant movement focused on building food sovereignty through agroecology and solidarity. It is, in my view, one of the most inspiring global movements in existence. The conference didn’t really get going until our last 36 hours—we had to leave before the really interesting programs began—but it was enlivening to be surrounded by people from all over the world who believe very deeply in the political possibilities of agriculture and land reform. I am someone who lives in a wealthy country where the concept of land reform is, quite frankly, dead in the water. I felt more hopeful, if only in a vague, unspecified way, about the state of the world than I have in some time.

The world around us lurches towards spring. I have too many writing projects bubbling on the stove. In two weeks, I’ll be buried in farm work. But I press on. In the next few days, I’ll have an essay posted here about a part of a novel that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: Parade [2024], by Rachel Cusk. More soon.

I’ll join the Denis Johnson party by posting a link to an essay he wrote for Salon in 1997. It’s a sharp little piece about the decision to home school his two younger children. Johnson lived, let us say, a wild life. The essay comes from the late, domesticated period of his career. I encourage you to read the whole thing, but this is my favorite passage:

What about friends their own age? The kids have to work at their friendships now, using the phone and mail and arranging visits. They don’t see their comrades every day. Some days they don’t like that, most days they don’t seem bothered. But the question of friendships touches on a larger and vaguer question. Just as people used to ask me how much my Great Dane weighed and how much he ate, people invariably ask about home schooling — “How will the kids be socialized?” When in turn I ask what it means to be socialized the answers vary wildly, but everybody seems to agree that there’s no better way to get it done to you than to be tossed into a kind of semi-prison environment with a whole lot of other persons born the same year you were.

I question that now. After three years learning at home, Daniel and Lana seem sociable in a way I wouldn’t have hoped for. They don’t convey the impression I usually get from kids, and must have given to my own elders, that they’re pretending, wishing — as I certainly did — that grown-ups didn’t exist. They live in the same world we, their parents, live in. They look us in the eye. We’re counted among their friends.

When I asked the kids this morning what they like about home schooling, they said “incredible freedom” and “lots of leisure.” Lana mentioned being able to spend time with me and Cindy. What about the drawbacks? — “Can’t see our friends every day.” “People act like we’re odd.” “They make me feel alienated.” “People always say, ‘So! When are you going back to school?’” This last is something I often notice too — the expectation that every experiment must end.

I don’t want it to. It’s changed all of us, and speaking just for myself, I’d be hard put even to find the language to talk across the gap to the person I was before.

Maybe Johnson’s caricature of modern schooling is too harsh. Growing up, school certainly felt like prison to me. Nowadays, when I look sideways at these institutions, I can’t help but think that they begin to resemble the caricature. Set that aside, though. What really speaks to me is the wish for children to have the space and freedom and pleasure to be children. Some of you probably know that I homeschool our four kids. I do this not because we don’t believe in public education (we do) or feel passionately about school choice (we don’t) but because modern educational institutions, public and private, have drifted so very far from a purpose that might take our kids’ flourishing seriously. It’s not the teachers’ fault, for God’s sake, nor does the blame lie with administrators’. It is decades of underfunding coming home to roost; the greed and rapacity and callousness of our government leaders; the spineless fools who run the tech companies.

Of course, not every family can make the choice that we did, and not every school is like this. I know parents and students who desperately need the services they get at school. Many need more than they currently get. Still, there are others, perhaps like me, who feel ill at the thought of sending my kids somewhere they will grow to hate. Maybe, for us, homeschool is the right choice.

We came to the decision to pull our kids out of school slowly, haltingly, wracked by fear and uncertainty at every step. How could we, faulty parents, be enough? Who would their friends be? Johnson says the secret to homeschooling is willing to fail at what the schools have already failed at. (Another secret: church, a built-in community, helps. It is an imperfect, sloppy, often infuriating community, but church is a place like the farm, a place where my kids belong.) Like Johnson, we’re three years in, and I can’t help but conclude that it was the right decision. My kids are our friends because of it, and I’d like to think I’m a better person. Homeschool has forced me to grow in patience and kindness.

Okay, enough on school. One more question: any of my readers seen the Netflix adaptation of Train Dreams yet? Was it good? Let me know in the comments.

Breck had separated himself from the herd and found a quiet corner down by the pond. He wasn’t down on the ground, at least not for abnormally long stretches of time, but he was standing with his legs kicked back in a stilted, “come-at-me” pose. It wasn’t until I got much closer that I saw the problem. If you look at a cow from behind it, the profile should be roughly the same shape as an egg would be if you stood it upright with the tip facing up. If the profile of your cow looks like an apple, then you have a problem. Breck’s entire left side, from the ribcage down, was horribly distended. It looked like he’d swallowed a barrel that got stuck 2/3 of the way down his digestive tract.

A sick cow is not to be trifled with, especially if the illness is bloat. One minute they seem like they might pull through. The next, they’re dead in the field. Cows are fine until they aren’t. I’ve learned the hard way that you have to be extremely aggressive at diagnosing symptoms and acting quickly.

After getting on the phone with a couple of vets and veteran farmers, I decided to give him a round of shots to boost his metabolism. I also gave him a bloat drench, orally, in the field, without a restraining device like a head gate. Maybe it wasn’t the wisest decision, but it was Breck, our beloved bull, probably the most docile animal we’ve ever had on the farm. Also, we don’t have a head gate or a chute to speak of. A good head gate is expensive. A solid head gate with a squeeze chute costs costs at least five or six thousand of dollars, so I have always found ways of making do without them.

This time, though, Breck resisted for a bit, pulling away and drifting from me until, after four or five tries, he walked over to a corner of the field and put his nose right up against the corner post so I couldn’t get around to his mouth. Eventually, I got him to take it by mixing it in a bucket with water and emptying his water trough.

Breck, at three years old, in 2021.

At first, everything worked. Ten hours later, the bloat had subsided and he was eating and drinking again. From behind, he looked like an egg again, not an apple. A day later, he had wandered back to the rest of the herd and was eating and drinking contentedly, behaving as he always does. But then something strange happened. The day after that, the bloat was back, and Breck was basically immobile on the ground. I tried to get him up and on the trailer to take him to the large animal veterinary hospital, but he wouldn’t budge. At this point, after a night on the ground, saddled with bloat, he was too weak to get up. He was down, as they say, and there was nothing I could to about it. The local vet was off for the week, and with the first round of bloat, the state vet wouldn’t come because I didn’t have a safe way to physically restrain him even though we pleaded with them. Though he is as meek as cows come, they wouldn’t risk it. I can’t blame them. By the time he got sick the second time, they had agreed to come out in four days after the Christmas holiday. I knew there was no way he’d last that long. I tried my best to keep him alive, but he didn’t make it. Breck died on December 30th, two days before the New Year. He was one of the greatest animals we’ve ever had on the farm. I will miss him so much.

It’s difficult to explain the loss of an animal like this. For years he was the cornerstone of our farm’s breeding program, our pride and joy, a very-old-line Black Angus Scottish bull that descended from the Wye Plantation at the University of Maryland, which has kept a closed herd of Black Angus cattle that came straight from Scotland back in the 50’s. He was small, stocky, the ideal type of animal for a grass-based cattle farm; none of the large-framed nonsense that has dominated the cattle market for the last fifty years.

There is the financial loss, then, and the loss of future genetics to the farm. But Breck was also a friend. I bought him through sheer dumb luck from a farmer friend who knows a lot more about cattle than I do. He’d had enough of the business and was selling out. I had the good sense to buy the bull he wanted to sell me. From day one, Breck was my lead animal. Anytime I needed to work the cattle or move them to a difficult place, he’d come running for a treat, and the rest would follow. Now that he’s gone, my relationship to the animals around me suddenly feels tenuous.

Normally, when a cow is resting on the ground, it will cock its head up and to the side so that the neck curls away from the ground. Its head is lifted up into the air above the body. When it sleeps, it will often wrap its head around rest it on its flank. Sometimes it will lay its head on the ground, but it will always do it with its neck curled. It does this to cut off the rumen. If a cow’s neck were laid out straight like you do when we sleep, the rumen would overwhelm the esophagus with hot liquid ferment. If a cow stays like this for too long, it won’t get up again. You’ve probably seen cows in the normal pose before without knowing what you were looking at. All cows do it, every single one, when they lay down to take a rest.

A strange thing happens when a cow is dying. It relaxes its neck, lies on one side, and lays its head flat on the ground. The body lies in profile with the earth, as if longing to be absorbed by it. A female cow will sometimes do this when giving birth. It’s a terrible thing to witness. If you live around cows and you see one do it, you know instantly that it is in pain. If it happens and you’re not they’re to catch it, the cow will almost certainly die. But then, if they are doing it, then they are pretty far gone to begin with. I’m told that they can lay like this for days, unwilling or at last unable to get up or lift their heads, until they finally die from drowning or dehydration.

There is nothing quite so devastating as walking out into the field and finding a cow prone like this. In my experience, when you get to this point, there’s not much to be done. Mercifully, it is not a frequent occurrence; twice it has happened to us over the last five years. But whenever it happens, it’s enough to make you want to hang it all and quit. When it’s an animal that I love, some small part of me is sundered and drifts off.

Is it possible to regrow parts of ourselves, like some creatures do? Or does a new chunk break off every time something or someone we love dies? Sometimes I worry that if I wait long enough, there won’t be anything left of my love for this place and the creatures who call it home.

There is an older farmer a few roads down from us that I have gotten to know well. He has helped us a lot over the years. I have tried to help him as best I can, though he doesn’t really need my help. Once, when a beloved calf of ours went lame and couldn’t stand up after days of helping her, he came over and shot it because I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I have seen him weep over the deaths of his own animals, large and small: horses, dogs, cats. When I hear his sobs through the telephone, I sometimes can’t believe that, after a lifetime of being surrounded by farm death, he still mourns.

I woke up early and knocked out the chores in the dark. Now, it’s cold and raining. The kids are at school. A car passes down the road with a sibilant whine, and I hear a whomp in front of the house. I dart out in the pricking rain, socks on my feet, no time for boots. Was it a dog, or a cat? Neither: just a squirrel, its body now a small, crumpled heap of fur and broken bone.

In the days leading up to Breck’s death, I slept terribly. Around 2:30 or 3am, I would wake up with an image of Breck’s body transfigured by pain, and I run to help pick his head up, but I couldn’t do anything. I’d sit on the ground and grimace and stare, then I’d wake up feeling like my heart had been torn out. Two nights ago I dreamt I had to shoot him. His body quivered and strained when I did it, each limb stretching, then slowly relaxed as blood and then shit welled around his backside. Earlier that day I had been out to see him and he had been nearly motionless this time--a little labored breathing, a quiver of foreleg. His mouth frothed slightly. I knew he would die soon. In another dream, I am walking back to the house and I pass through the gate to get home, and I realize I am surrounded by the corpses of my cattle herd.

After the day he died, I slept better than I had for weeks. Eleven uninterrupted hours. Does grief always work like this? A welling of pain that grows tumescent, then a long, slow release.

My son John this morning, before he left for school, gazed over at the old garden and said he saw a hawk “swimming” in the wind. He is nine now, and he is constantly searching for the edges of words, trying to figure out how they fit together. I came over and the two of us watched the hawk level over a wave of wind. We see an army of dead leaves come tumbling head over heels, as if in pursuit of us, and the same gust bursts across our faces. The leaves pass all around us and rush beyond, then settle back to the ground again.

We named Breck after Alan Stewart Breck, the hero of Kidnapped, the 1886 novel by Robert Louis Stevenson. It’s not my kids’ favorite Stephenson book, but Breck is our favorite Stephenson character, who is followed closely by Ol’ Barbecue himself, Long John Silver, of Treasure Island. Kidnapped, which is set in Scotland during the Highland Clearances, tells the story of a foundling boy named David Balfour, who after seeking refuge from a rich, crusty uncle is betrayed and sold into indentured servitude. David is bound and shuffled aboard a boat bound for “old Caroliny,” but before the ship manage to pull away from the Isles it strikes a small vessel in the fog, killing all but one of the people on board. It turns out that the man that didn’t die is a political fugitive: Alan Breck, a Jacobite assassin and sworn enemy of the British crown. Alan and David form a team; in no time, they overtake the boat through Breck’s swashbuckling prowess. Soon they are being pursued throughout Scottish Highlands, evading redcoats and assassinating officials of the Empire along the way.

An illustration from the 1906 edition of Kidnapped, which our family uses.

The book ends with David recovering his stolen fortune from his uncle in Edinburgh, and Alan, through the solicitation of a spy, hears that he may find refuge in France. I’ll end this post by quoting the end of Kidnapped, when the two unlikely friends say goodbye to each other, followed by the “editor’s” (that is, Stevenson’s) postscript.

In the meanwhile Alan and I went slowly forward upon our way, having little heart either to walk or speak. The same thought was uppermost in both, that we were near the time of our parting; and rememberance of all the bygone days sat upon us sorely. We talked indeed of what should be done; and it was resolved that Alan should keep to the county, biding now here, now there, but coming once in a day to a particular place where I might be able to communicate with him, either in my own person or by messenger. In the meanwhile, I was to seek out a lawyer, who was an Appin Stewart, and a man therefore wholly to be trusted; and it should be his part to find a ship and arrange for Alan’s safe embarcation. No sooner was this business done, than the words seemed to leave us [...] We came the by-way over the hill of Corstorphine; and when we got near to the place called Rest-and-beThankful, and looked down on Corstorphine bogs and over to the city and the castle on the hill, we both stopped, for we both knew, without a word said, that we had come to where our ways parted. Here he repeated to me again what had been agreed upon between us: the address of the lawyer, the daily hour at which Alan might be found, and the signals that were to be made by any that came seeking him. Then I gave what money I had [...], so that he should not starve in the meanwhile; and then we stood a space, and looked over at Edinburgh in silence.

“Well, good-bye,” said Alan, and held out his left hand.

“Good-bye,” said I, and gave the hand a little grasp, and went off down hill.

Neither one of us looked the other in the face, nor so long as he was in my view did I take one back glance at the friend I was leaving. But as I went on my way to the city, I felt so lost and lonesome, that I could have found it in my heart to sit down by the dyke, and cry and weep like a baby.

It was coming near noon, when I passed in by the West Kirk and the Grassmarket into the streets of the capital. The huge height of the buildings, running up to ten and fifteen storeys, the narrow arched entries that continually vomited passengers, the wares of the merchants in their windows, the hubbub and endless stir, the foul smells and the fine clothes, and a hundred other particulars too small to mention, struck me into a kind of stupor of surprise, so that I let the crowd carry me to and fro; and yet all the time what I was thinking of was Alan at Rest-and-be-Thankful; and all the time (although you would think I would not choose but be delighted with these braws and novelties) there was a cold gnawing in my inside like a remorse for something wrong.

The hand of Providence brought me in my drifting to the very doors of the British Linen Company’s bank.

[Just there, with his hand upon his fortune, the present editor inclines for the time to say farewell to David. How Alan escaped, and what was done about the murder, with a variety of other delectable particulars, may be some day set forth. That is a thing, however, that hinges on the public fancy. The editor has a great kindness for both Alan and David, and would gladly spend much of his life in their society; but in this he may find himself to stand alone. In the fear of which, and lest any one should complain of scurvy usage, he hastens to protest that all went well with both, in the limited and human sense of the word “well;” that whatever befell them, it was not dishonour, and whatever failed them, they were not found wanting to themselves.]

Alan Breck, waiting for David Balfour to leap.

Even the land goes taut in the cold. Animals are searching a little bit harder for food. Songbirds flock to the places in the yard where I haven’t managed to mow down seed heads of perennials; barn cats harass them. Colors bleed, soften, desaturate. You look up and you see the shapes of trees for what they really are: rangy, antic, probing creatures, limbs forever searching for pockets of sunlight.

Farm work has shrunk to a minimum. There are of course the daily herd checks, the flinging out of hay, water, and shelter in poor weather. I still need to do some clean up in the garden and the field. For the last three years, though, I’ve let the day’s abbreviation invite me to do less on the farm, not more. Spring will come soon enough.

Life and writing have been busy. I’m juggling four different writing deadlines at the moment. Please bear with me: a longer Substack post is coming shortly.

As always, thanks for your support of my work here. It means more than you probably know. More soon.

Jack

What of dissidents, of gay and trans people, or immigrants? American integralists with any significant public profile sometimes go silent when you ask such questions, but it’s not hard to see that these are precisely the types of people they want to get rid of. Modern liberalism and the cascade of protections that have been extended to individuals: these are the enemy that a strong executive must bring to heel or eliminate. Muller argues quite plausibly that this virulent form of post-liberal thought can be traced to the writings of Carl Schmitt, the Nazi jurist who once claimed that the Catholic Church was the only institutional force capable of fighting the socially corrosive effects of modern individualism.

It’s worth bearing in mind that common good constitutionalism, and the movement of integralism on which it is based, is a grotesque distortion of Catholic social teaching. Gaudium et spes, a papal encyclical from 1965, sums up the Roman Catholic Church’s longstanding position on these matters. The Church, Paul VI wrote, “by reason of her role and competence, is not identified in any way with the political community nor bound to any political system. She is at once a sign and a safeguard of the transcendent character of the human person.” Moreover, it “does not place her trust in the privileges offered by civil authority. She will even give up the exercise of certain rights which have been legitimately acquired, if it becomes clear that their use will cast doubt on the sincerity of her witness or that new ways of life demand new methods.”

Other things I’m following: COP30 climate talks ended very poorly. Predictably, the US was a complete no-show. Meanwhile, China’s CO2 emissions have peaked or at least plateaued for the last eighteen months. They wildly outpace the rest of the world in new green energy investment. Some researchers think it could provide the conditions for a global about-face. The US is lagging behind–hiariously behind. US LNG (liquid natural gas) currently accounts for 25% of all natural gas exports globally. Meanwhile, the world burns more natural gas than ever has before.

A happy note: Brian Goldstone, author of There Is No Place For Us, continues to reel in the accolades. His book received the “New York Times Notable” designation a few weeks ago, and this week, it was names by the same rag as one of the ten best books of the year. Two weeks ago, a segment featuring the individuals he wrote about aired on CBS. Check out this clip of Brian driving Ted Koppel (of all people) around in a minivan. I am glad I got to review his book, and I’m grateful to call him a friend!

I read two new novels last week: Death and the Gardener, by former Booker Prize-winner Bulgarian novelist, Georgi Gospodinov, and The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, by Kiran Desai. I was reminded of what a brooding, expansive writer Desai can be. I first encountered The Inheritance of Loss as an undergrad and loved it. The new one, her first in nearly twenty years, is also excellent. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize but lost to David Szalay’s Flesh, which I haven’t read yet.

You’d be forgiven if, like me, you supposed that the Humboldt Current’s isolated path represents a kind of attenuation of oceanic power. On the map, it looks as if the mighty, counter-clockwise circuit of saltwater near the South Pole would slow down when it makes contact with the South American continent. The current’s northward drift seems forced, as if the ocean itself were pushing up against the grain of the continent. Compared to other currents, the Humboldt Current is indeed very slow. It moves a tremendous amount of water, up to 700 million cubic feet per second, but it does so at a fairly leisurely pace: eight or nine miles-per-hour, tops. However, the secret of the Humboldt Current isn’t its size or speed so much as what is happening to it on top: the wind.

In her 2023 book, The Blue Machine: How the Ocean Works, the physicist Helen Czerski asks us to imagine a stack of clean, white copy paper on top of a desk. If you place your hand on top of the stack and push the paper to one side, the top sheet moves about as far as you decide to move your hand. Some of the papers below will move, too. The friction between the lower pages allows the top sheet to pull them along with it. But the force isn’t strong enough for all of them to travel the same distance as the top sheet. Instead, the pieces fan out below, each one travelling a little bit less than the other, until the paper that is furthest from your hand barely moves at all.

Czerski explains that this is more or less what happens whenever wind blows on the surface of the ocean. The warmer surface layers of water get pushed about in different directions, generating most of the planet’s major ocean currents. When this surface water moves, it takes some of the lower, colder layers with it. But like the stack of paper, the further down the water column you go, the less these lower layers tend to move. At the bottom of the ocean, the water barely moves at all.

The same phenomenon happens in the Humboldt Current, but on a different order of magnitude. Trade winds blowing off of the Andes perform a constant stripping away of the warmer layers of water that extend horizontally several hundred miles offshore. A staggering amount of ocean, two hundred meters all the way down, is displaced by the wind. The earth’s rotation causes the water to swerve to the north instead of west with the wind (the so-called Coriolis Effect). And the wind doesn’t just stop: it keeps pushing this column of warm water hundreds of miles up and then out to the Pacific. In its place, frigid, nutrient-dense water from the depth surges to the surface in a mechanism ocean scientists call “upwelling.” “Cold, nutrient-rich water has escaped from underneath the warm lid,” Czerski writes, “and as it comes up to meet the sunshine, all the ingredients for life are there in huge quantities.” Bathed in sunlight and a rich broth of nutrients, the phytoplankton “gorge themselves silly on sunlight, stashing away solar energy on a monumental scale.”

“Monumental” undersells it. The explosion of phytoplankton in the Humboldt Current supports the most productive fishery in the world. In a body of water that makes up roughly .05 per cent of the ocean’s surface, the Humboldt Current consistently generates 15 to 20 percent of the global fish catch every year. The majority of this catch is made up of the Peruvian anchoveta, a small, foul-smelling anchovy that is edible, but not palatable, to humans. Once caught, the anchoveta are processed, dried, pulverized, and shipped all over the world in the form of fishmeal. It’s not uncommon for harvests to reach 5 or 6 million metric tons annually. The two fishing seasons in 2024 combined to haul in nearly 8 million tons.

What is done with this abundant harvest of marine life? A tiny percentage of Peruvian anchoveta is pressed into fish oil, which is pumped into pills and sold as a dietary supplement for humans. The rest–ninety-eight per cent of every anchoveta harvest–is destined for animal feed, primarily farmed fish and hogs. So dependent has modern agriculture become on the Peruvian anchoveta that, in 1972, when the anchoveta fishery collapsed, the price of bacon in the UK doubled instantly. In the US, the price jumped by one third.

After reading Czerski’s book, I checked my feed labels. It’s true: the twelve hogs I tend two hundred miles from the coast have a little bit of the ocean, perhaps even the Humboldt Current, inside of them. It’s likely that my chickens do, too. (According to trade groups, Peru accounts for 20 per cent of global fishmeal and fish oil supplies). I’m embarrassed to say that I hadn’t noticed the ingredient before. When piglets are weaned, they are fed a special ration that contains fishmeal. Once they get to fifty pounds, their protein needs shift, and they switch to a feed without fishmeal. I’m told by my ‘feed guy’ that hogs fed on fishmeal their whole lives have an unpleasant fishy smell. Call it the revenge of the anchoveta.

Animal feed is big business. It’s been big business for as long as agriculture has been conducted on an industrial scale. Very large numbers of domestic animals require very large amounts of food. One source of cheap protein is fishmeal; another is soy. Like fishmeal, the majority of soybeans (77%, roughly, according to the UN) produced around the world go to animals like pigs and chickens, not humans. In the US, over a third of corn goes to feed non-human animals. There are, right now, three quarters of a billion hogs alive on earth. Half of them live in China. That’s quite the evolutionary coup for a species that, not very long ago, humans once tended in very small numbers, in their backyards and or woodlots, to graze tree mast and utilize kitchen waste.

From one perspective, then, the Humboldt Current’s role in the global agricultural economy makes a certain kind of sense, which is to say that it makes as much sense as the human appetite for swine flesh does. Agricultural systems reflect human appetites. By looking in the mirror, we can see very quickly that what we want is cheap meat and sugar–and that most of us don’t want to do the work of raising our own food. Certain crops or animals or marine ecosystems lend themselves to industrial-scale exploitation because they can, with careful study or technological tweak, withstand it. They are cheap precisely because they can be grown and harvested or managed at scale.

Czerski’s book isn’t much interested in these systems and the role the ocean plays (or has played) within them. That’s fair, I suppose; her job in the book is to explain the physics of oceans in ways that people like me, people who are bad at math, can understand. What’s odd, though, is how the history of these systems seeps into the language she uses to describe the oceanic mechanisms that make biotic life possible on the planet. Her metaphors for the ocean revolve almost obsessively around the steam engine, the distinctive invention–and engine–of industrial capitalism. It’s not that the metaphor of ocean-as-engine doesn’t work, but that it works too well. The ocean is a machine of life; the ocean is a machine of industrial capitalism. Chapter one opens in a technology park on Kona, in Hawaii, where technology start-ups are trying to figure out how to use temperature differential in the ocean to generate cheap energy. By the end of the book, it’s sometimes hard to know where one machine begins and the other ends:

Earth’s blue is closely connected to the other global components: atmosphere, the ice, life and the land, and all five work together as a single system. But the ocean is the big beast in Earth’s planetary machinery. The engine that is Earth’s ocean takes sunlight and converts it into giant underwater currents and waterfalls, hauling around the ingredients for life: nutrients, oxygen and trace metals like potassium and iron, shaping our coasts and transporting heat. This isn’t just another engine, it’s the grandest one of all: an engine the size of a planet. It’s got all the elegance of the most ingenious human-built engines but the mechanics here are more subtle and intricate. Instead of a nice tidy piston, we’re faced with a flow of water that merges into the water on either side of it; it’s definitely up to something, but it’s hard to say where this pushes on that. But it is absolutely still an engine, converting light and heat into movement in myriad different ways.

Subtle and intricate, but where the tidy pistons and or shiny brass widgets would be, we get water, wind, underwater current, and hidden waterfalls. Each subtlety of current or variance in temperature adds up to “an engine the size of a planet.” (Is this phrase about the ocean or scifi dystopia?) However, in the conclusion, we find out that this metaphor, which seemed so elegant and straightforward, isn’t. The ocean is not a self-contained hydraulic machine for biological life. In fact, precisely because we’ve been acting as if the ocean were a machine that supplies us with endlessly renewable resources that the ocean may soon turn around and start dominating us.

Czerski explains that for the last hundred years, the ocean has been softening the blow of climate change by absorbing excess heat from the atmosphere. But its ability to do so is coming under strain: “the addition of extra heat at the surface is reinforcing the layered structure and therefore acting as a brake on the vertical turning over of the blue machine.” Putting a break on the oceanic machine means drastic changes in weather patterns and the intensification of storms.1 It also means that life in the ocean regenerates more slowly than before. Because of overfishing, the sea, is now devoid of ninety per cent of the largest class of creatures that once called the ocean home (whales). Sixty per cent of creatures with a biomass over ten grams has also disappeared.2 It’s difficult to imagine how these numbers could rebound within any of our lifetimes without drastic, immediate intervention.

Appropriately, the language in this section of the book abandons machines and engines and embraces interdependence and ecology. The implication is that, if we simply make more tweaks to the machines we do in fact control, the machines of global capitalism, then the oceanic engine can recalibrate itself and go on sustaining life in all its human and non-human plenitude. “We have to be very careful about what we do in the ocean, because it’s easy to be blind, either deliberately or accidentally, to the full picture.”3 But who exactly is included in the “we” who operate the levers of capitalism? Is it reasonable to assume that we can attain the full picture of the ocean from within an economic system that is designed to abscond matter from one place and consume it on the other side of the world?

Europeans first came to the Humboldt Current because of the massive deposits of guano, or bird shit, on a chain of islands called the Chinchas that sit in the middle of the Current. Czerski mentions this, but what she doesn’t say is that this discovery utterly transformed the way Europeans did agriculture.

For thousands of years, ocean-going birds have feasted on the seemingly miraculous numbers of fish swimming in the Humboldt. Pelicans, boobies, and cormorants all make their nests on the Chinchas. There’s no rain to wash the excrement away, so it dries and accumulates. The current’s extremely cold waters, coupled with the rain shadow effect of the Andes, keeps this region among the driest on earth. The Atacama Desert in Chile, just inland of the Current, is the most arid non-polar desert in the world.

When Von Humboldt first travelled to the Chincha Islands, he recorded layers of the acrid-smelling stuff three meters deep. Because of the courses he took in chemistry, he knew it had to contain lots of ammonia. But he rejected the explanation that indigenous people gave him (that the guano mounds came from the birds) and surmised that the pungent substance was left behind after some prehistoric cataclysm. In any case, Humboldt shipped back samples to his colleagues all over Europe. The English chemist, Humphrey Davy, a close friend and companion to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, published one of the first chemical analysis of guano in 1813. He instantly realized the value of the substance. Guano, he wrote, was chock full of uric acid, phosphoric acid, lime, and potassium salt. It could be a boon to capitalist farmers, who were experiencing declining crop yields and infertility. To Davy, Peruvian guano demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that God Himself had set down “the modification of the soil, and the application of manures [...] within the power of man, as if for the purpose of awakening his industry, and of calling forth his powers.”4 The guano of the Humboldt Current and the exhausted soils of Europe were two pieces of a puzzle God intended humans to solve. And solve it they did.

Davy’s Elements was translated into a number of languages, including Spanish and Hungarian. His and other popular reports about the potency of Peruvian guano kicked off a bonanza of military expansion to the South Pacific. Numbers help clarify the scale of what unfolded in the decades that followed. During the 18th century, when the Dutch East India Company controlled the South Asian nitrate trade, around 100 tons of guano were imported annually into Europe. By 1800, the British East India Company had supplanted their rivals, hauling in approximately 1,000 tons per year. However, as the historian Gregory T. Cushman notes, “Peruvian nitrate imports immediately dwarfed these numbers, rising from an average of 2,500 tons per year in the 1830s, to 17,000 tons in the 1840s, to 42,000 tons in the 1850s.”5 By the 1890’s, Peru was exploring around a million tons of nitrates from the Chinchas Islands and the Atacama all around the world. Peruvian guano was quite literally feeding the industrialization of the Northern hemisphere.

Cushman proposes calling the period of global history from 1802 to 1884 “the age of shit.”6 He means the phrase literally and figuratively. Haunted by Thomas Malthus’s grim pronouncement that population growth regularly exceeds agricultural production, many of the leading minds of Europe were interested in agricultural productivity and the possibility of turning political economy into a formal object of study. They became obsessed with the properties of animal dung–particularly guano. “Rather than improving the world’s food supply,” Cushman writes, “Peruvian guano mainly served northern consumers of meat and sugar.” And instead of “inaugurating an epoch of peace and prosperity,” rapacity for guano and nitrates inspired some particularly vicious conflicts: the Chincha Islands War (1865-1866), which granted Peru’s independence from Spanish rule, and the War of the Pacific (1879-1884).

To the chagrin of abolitionists in the United States, the search for guano encouraged the seizure of new lands and the expansion of slavery. In 1856, the US passed the Guano Act, which allowed US citizens to lay claim to any uninhabited island that had guano on it. The authors of this legislation reasoned that these islands were effectively a public commons, and therefore could be taken at will by anyone who “demonstrated” need. (Of the sixty-six islands US citizens seized, nine remain in US possession.) However important slaves were to the American capitalists who harvested the nitrates they found in the South Pacific, the new global industry of nitrate production found different ways of adapting to life without the peculiar institution. When Peru achieved independence in 1826 and Great Britain abolished slavery (1833), British capitalists pivoted and perfected the infamous “coolie” system of labor by importing hundreds of thousands of bonded Chinese workers into Peru and Chile. These people labored under some of the most extreme conditions imaginable. One contemporary English eyewitness described that these workers,

[...] besides being worked almost to death, [...] have neither sufficient food nor passably wholesome water. Their rations consist of two pounds of rice and about half a pound of meat. This is generally served out to them between ten and eleven in the morning, by which time they have got through six hours’ work. Each man is compelled to clear from four to five tons of guano a day. During the last quarter of 1875, it is reported that there were 355 Chinamen employed at Pabellon de Pica alone, of whom no less than 98 were in the hospital. The general sickness is swelled legs, caused, it is supposed, by drinking condensed water not sufficiently cooled, and by a lack of vegetable diet. The features of this disease are not unlike those of scurvy or purpura.7

Around the same time, the US consul to Peru noted in a letter that the suicide rate of the Chinese workers who dug guano was so high that the British had to put armed guards “around the shores of the Guano Islands, where they are employed, to prevent them from committing suicide by drowning, to which end the Coolie rushes in his moments of despair.” Guano workers in the early twentieth century reported that they still found bones and the tattered garments of Chinese workers scattered around the islands.

Perhaps the greatest irony of the age of shit is that the importation of guano ended up ruining the soils that it was intended to improve. (It also ruined nations: DNA sequencing suggests that the Peruvian guano trade may have been responsible for the arrival of the P. infestans strain that led to the Great Famine.) Initial returns in Europe and America were good, really good. On both sides of the Atlantic, large landowners touted stupendous crop yields in journals and newspapers addressed to the gentleman farmer. By the 1840s, slaves and sharecroppers in the US were pooling resources to import guano together. Over time, however, farmers found that guano tended to cause soil productivity to decline. This is because plants aren’t able to absorb nitrates unless there is a minimum of other necessary compounds available to them in the soil. (It has also been shown that excess soil nitrogen inhibits the bloom of biological life in the soil. The same is true of modern synthetic fertilizers.) The so-called “law of the minimum,” first articulated by the German chemist Justus von Liebig [1803-1873], brought the guano craze to a sudden halt. In Letters on Modern Agriculture, Liebig spared no British or American farmer for misusing guano. While the Americans were guilty of the worst land abuse–an “open system of [soil] robbery,” he called it–the British practiced a “more refined system of spoliation”: “Good fortune kindly sent guano to rescue them in their utmost need,...but in their fatal hands, this blessing actually turned into an instrument for impoverishing the land in the course of time more completely.”8 Many others joined Liebig’s complaint. But none of the polemic did anything to curtail modern agriculture’s addiction to off-farm inputs.

The anchoveta industry accounts for a much larger proportion of the Peruvian economy than guano does. Guano is still harvested off the coast of Peru and Chile, but the industry is regulated very tightly. Conservationists crisscross the Chinchas every year, ensuring that the harvest of manure doesn’t disturb the populations of sea birds. Since the collapse of the guano industry, global agriculture has pivoted. Nowadays, the majority of fertilizers used in conventional agriculture are produced by artificial means. A byproduct of the munitions industry in World War I, nitrogen fertilizer is made by subjecting atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen from natural gas to extremely high temperatures and pressures. Rock phosphate is mined below the surface of the earth and then mixed with sulfuric acid to make phosphate fertilizer. One of the largest phosphate mines–in fact, the largest integrated mine and chemical plant in the world, the Aurora Phosphate Mine–lies a hundred miles east of my farm. The mine is located on top of an ancient sea bed that houses the remains of countless prehistoric sea creatures. The phosphorus is in those remains.

Accounting for these changes, it’s still worth asking whether the age of shit has really ended. We’re no longer scanning the globe for large caches of animal manure, but our dependence on the extraction and global distribution of very specific substances from very particular places is every bit as acute as it was during the guano age. If extraction and distribution are what the guano age was all about, then it is hard to believe that we’ve left it. The Humboldt Current is hardly an exception in this history, and it’s not just all about the extraction of fossil fuels (as important as this story is). To take a few of the most salient contemporary examples: the town of Spruce Pine, North Carolina, one of the few places in the world where the pure quartz necessary for computer chips and solar panels can be found. The cobalt mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where thousands of modern-day slaves scrape the ground for chunks of blue mineral that go into electric car batteries and rechargeable household devices. Where I live, the soils have been strip mined for so long that the ground is mostly prized for what can go on top of it: data centers, natural gas storage and distribution, conurbation.

Meanwhile, global agriculture is more reliant on off-farm inputs than ever. This is insane: studies suggest that crops absorb about 50 per cent of the nitrogen and phosphate fertilizers that are applied to them. Some residue from the other half leaches into groundwater. The rest finds its way into the ocean, where it creates vast “dead zones” for marine life. One dead zone, in the gulf of Oman, is the size of the US state of Florida. And these zones are growing. A recent study found that the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico has reached 4,298 square miles, two times larger than the 2035 reduction target.

There are still reasons to believe that small, sustainable farms are the future of agriculture. According to different metrics, small farms still account for a large percentage of global food production.9 Also, small farms are still almost certainly more productive per acre than industrial farms. People like David Schlossberg and Chris Smaje have argued that there is an insurgent politics lying dormant within key sustainability movements (energy, fashion, food). However, despite localized enthusiasm in the US, there’s little evidence of governments taking small farms very seriously, or considering what the future of agriculture might look like beyond the age of shit.

An image from Thoreau’s Kalendar project.

The title Thoreau used for his project is borrowed from the title of a treatise called Kalendarium Hortense, a botanical manual and almanac by the seventeenth century experimentalist, author, and founding member of the Royal Society, John Evelyn [1620-1706]. In his journals, Thoreau was so insistent upon making the connection with Evelyn explicit that, when he accidentally writes the modern spelling of calendar, he emends the text by crossing out the “C” and replacing it with the deliberately antiquated spelling. Thoreau says that he read and enjoyed the Kalendarium in early months of 1852, but he must have been a reader of Evelyn’s work from a relatively early date.3 Evelyn’s name pops up in several key passages of Walden that date to the earliest draft of the text, 1846-7—“the Bean Field” chapter, which I discuss here and will do so again soon, as well as several other places. Evelyn shows up in the journals of the 1850’s, too, going so far as to supply Thoreau with a recherché model of project he wanted to compile the last years of his life. And yet, as far as I can tell, only a handful of scholars have treated Thoreau’s engagement with Evelyn seriously (three short articles from 1960, 1967, and 1971, respectively).

Part of the difficulty stems from Thoreau’s own development as a thinker. Scholars of Thoreau often note the slow drift in the journals away from Emerson’s Romantic Neoplatonism to a materialist approach to the observation of natural phenomena. In 1850, his relationship with Emerson buckled, in part due to the intimate friendship Thoreau maintained with Lidia, Emerson’s wife. Thoreau’s departure from the Emerson household preceded a long, slow divestment from the transcendentalist project of discerning higher, spiritual laws through a humble, if not naive, engagement with the natural world. In Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Science [1995], Laura Dassow Walls argued that Thoreau’s disentanglement from the Emersonian project was caused in part by Thoreau’s engagement with the writings of that “Napoleon of science,” Alexander von Humboldt [1769-1859]. The fruit of reading Humboldt was a “proto-ecological” vision of human and natural entanglement.4 Journals from this period show a rejection of Emersonian abstraction in favor of a more relational way of knowing and encountering the natural world. Dassow Walls calls Thoreau’s post-Walden achievement an “epistemology of contact,” a sustained scientific delighting in the “raw materials” of the nature as opposed to the practice of transcending them for the higher, eternal laws that she associates with Coleridge and Emerson. The role of the scientific observer is simply to record details and make connections between them. Perhaps some deeper purpose will shine through, but only after a lifetime of meticulous, patient study. In a similar vein, Lance Newman sees an “unrelenting facticity” to the journals from about 1846 on.5 Newman suggests that this facticity is mirrored in an increasingly materialist cast of Thoreau’s social criticism. “As Thoreau moved increasingly toward a materialist understanding of nature,” Newman writes, “he applied this same mode of analysis to the capitalist social order, and was therefore was driven more and more toward radical political conclusions.6

Whatever the precise implications of Thoreau’s materialist turn, the casual reader of Walden will be struck by the late journals’ absence of the man from the recorded minutiae of Concord’s flora and fauna. But Thoreau, even at his most scientific, comes nowhere near a Darwin or a Karl Marx. Perhaps the last, nearly complete text that he wrote—a six-hundred-page tome, intended for the Kalendar project, that bore the handwritten title “Wild Fruits”—is all about how to harvest wild berries and nuts with your friends (and the spiritual benefits of doing so). In this surprisingly comprehensive text, the most revolutionary provocation you will find is Thoreau’s suggestion that towns and cities ought to maintain a orchard-like “commons” of wild fruit trees for its citizens, free of charge—not a bad idea, by any means, but hardly the sort of thing one would expect from a devotee of Humboldt or Darwin, whose Voyage of the Beagle [1839] and Origin of the Species [1859] Thoreau devoured nearly as soon as they washed up on American shores.

This only makes Thoreau’s obsession with John Evelyn’s writings even more curious. From a certain perspective, John Evelyn is about as far away as you could get from Alexander von Humboldt, the “Napoleon of science,” or Charles Darwin’s impersonal micro-studies of species development. An early experimentalist and disciple of Francis Bacon, Evelyn was fascinated by the metaphysics of soils, plants, and climate. But he addresses natural phenomena with an eye towards actively recovering Eden in the gardens and forests of seventeenth-century England. As he explains in his Sylva [1662], probably the first treatise written on the practice of agroforestry, in forests one finds “the very Infancy of the World in which Adam was entertained in Paradise.” He points out that in the second creation narrative of Genesis, God intended trees to be Adam’s first companions, not woman (cf. Gen. 2:4-18). “The Sum of all is,” Evelyn continues, “Paradise itself was but a kind of Nemorous Temple, or Sacred Grove, planted by God himself, and given to Man, tanquam primo sacerdoti [as the first priest], a Place consecrated for sober Discipline, and to contemplate those Mysterious and [143] Sacramentall Trees which they were not to touch with their Hands.” For Evelyn, the implication of the Genesis narrative is that, through careful study and experimentation, humankind might return to such an Edenic state as Adam himself experienced. Here is Thoreau’s response to this text, having re-read Sylva, dated June 9th, 1852: “[Evelyn’s] “Silva” is a new kind of prayerbook, a glorifying of the trees and enjoying them forever, which was the chief end of his [that is, Evelyn’s] life.”7

A new kind of prayerbook, indeed. Thoreau’s remarks on Sylva parody the first question and answer of the Westminster Shorter Catechism [1646-7]: “What is the chief end of Man? To glorify God, and enjoy him forever.” This was a text written in the brief (and failed) attempt to bring the Church of England into alignment with Scottish Presbyterianism—a few years before the execution of Charles I, when Evelyn was busy experimenting with trees and sharing discoveries with the members of Samuel Hartlib’s circle. I take Thoreau to be making the suggestion of alternative pathways for the development of Christian theology in the seventeenth century, pathways Presbyterians—and the Puritans of the New World, and the “mass of men” of nineteenth-century America—might have taken and might still take up. This is a path that Evelyn took up, Thoreau implies, and it is what Thoreau sees himself as having done in Walden and indeed his own life’s work.

In Senses of Walden, the philosopher Stanley Cavell argued that Walden is designed to function as a new sacred scripture for a nation hovering like a ghost at the crossroads of democracy and industrial capitalism. The letter of the Thoreau’s text frames the man’s experiences of living on the shores of Walden Pond and among its trees. But as anyone who has read the text knows, Walden constantly gestures to what it calls “higher laws,” Nature’s sensus spiritualis. Cavell writes: “Walden’s puns and paradoxes, its fracturing of idiom and twisting of quotation, its drones of fact and flights of impersonation—all are to keep faith at once with the mother and the father, to unite them, and to have the word born in us” (16). It strikes me that, for all its “drones of fact,” the Kalendar project only makes sense in the context of the ecological conversion that Walden figures forth and asks—demands—its readers to undergo.

In part 2 of this essay, I’ll look briefly at some of Evelyn’s life and writings, and then loop back one more to the famous passage in Walden where Thoreau appears to use Evelyn’s advice about working the soil. Stay tuned.

None of these hidden creatures are more welcome to the farm’s human inhabitants than the arrival of the fruit of the native passionflower (Passiflora incarnata). Like many plants that have a wide geographic distribution, passionflower goes by many names. Maypop, purple passionflower, passion vine, apricot vine—whatever you want to call it, the vine produces clusters of delicious, egg-shaped fruit in mid-September. As the fruit ripens, it produces juicy, white seed pods behind a shiny green shell. The taste is similar to the plant’s more well-known cousins, Passiflora edulis (purple passionfruit) and Passiflora granadilla: tart and refreshing. I have tried these, and this one tastes wilder somehow: bracing, tropical, earthy, quickening.

The flower of Passiflora incarnata.

There are two reasons native passionfruit is a secret. Not many people know about it, and (because?) it is so damn hard to find. The fruit pods and leaves are a shade of green that is nearly indistinguishable from the greens of grasses and legumes that it tends to grow on top of. A few weeks ago, I stood in our pastures among many passionfruit vines, scanning the ground for fruit. I wasn’t able to see them until I got down on my hands and knees and turned my head sideways so I could look underneath the vine’s shady leaves. Sometimes you have to put your hands on the vine itself and follow it and hope you come across something that a deer or a rabbit hasn’t mangled. Children are more skilled and patient with this method, and they are usually willing to help if you promise they can keep some of what they find. Here’s another way you might discover them: if you step on one and hear the classic “pop” of the shell cracking, you know you are among the maypops, or at least one ruined maypop.

The fruit’s elusiveness is not because the vine has failed to make itself known. In July, passionflower produces the most delusionally beautiful blossoms: spiky, three-dimensional towers of lavender (or sometimes white) petals, squiggly purple filaments, and five yellow anthers on top that actually look like antlers. When passionflower is in bloom, you can spot the flowers from many yards away. But unless you flag the spot of ground where you saw the flowers, you’ll be hard-pressed to find them three months later, when the blossoms are long gone and the fruit is ripening.

A shirt full of maypops.

The Latin for maypop is Passiflora incarnata. It means something like “incarnated flower of suffering.” Carl Linnaeus, the founder of the binomial system still used to categorize all living things, named the plant himself. He chose a name that tried to pay homage to the first Europeans, Jesuit missionaries, who found this remarkable vine in their journeys to the Americas. Sometimes the Jesuits called the vine granadilla, “little pomegranate.” More often, they called it the flos passionis, the flower of the Passion, or the flower of suffering.

An image of a passiflora species first shows up in the famous Codex Badianus, an herbal formulary complied by some of the earliest Spanish missionaries to Mexico. The codex contains beautiful, hand-painted images of the medicinal plants the Aztec people cherished and how they used them. The authors of the codex note that passionflower (coanenepilli in Aztec) is good for reviving prisoners who have been handled too harshly. By 1580, it is supposedly being cultivated in the gardens of the the Spanish king Philip II. From here on out, Passiflora sp. show up frequently in Jesuit herbal and botanical manuals, and with increasingly fantastic proportions.

A drawing of what is probably a Passiflora sp. from the Codex Badianus, 16th cent.

Here is an image of flos passionis that circulated widely in Europe in the early 1600’s: a tall, faintly Greek pedestal is set upon a circular platform with polka dots lining the rim. The pedestal props up three sharp swords that jut up and outward towards the viewer. The swords are encircled by what looks like a crown of thorns. Nicolas Monardes, a Spanish doctor who compiled “Ioyfull newes out of the newfound world” [trans. English, 1577], was the first to connect in print the appearance of the passionflower to the Passion of Jesus. This strange vine “casteth a flower like to a white rose, and in the leaves it hath figures which are signes of the passion of our Lorde, that it seemeth as though they were paynted with muche care, where the flower is more particular than any other that hath beene seene.”

Later commentators were less restrained. Antonio de Leon Pinelo [1589–1660], a historian who trained with the Jesuits in Lima, insisted throughout his career that the original garden of Eden was located somewhere in his native Peru. What fruit might have tempted Eve, if not the fruit of the flos passionis? Never mind that passionflower is a vine, and not a tree. Here is a sign of the felix culpa: the remedy and the curse contained within the morphology of the plant itself. How fitting that the fruit of the flower of the Passion should serve as the object of Eve’s first sin. Giacomo Bosio, an Italian member of the Knights Hospitaller (a Catholic military order based in Malta), goes even further in his apology on behalf of “The Triumphant and Glorious Cross” [Triomphante e gloriose croce, Rome, 1609]. After discussing the Christological significance of the unicorn, Bosio turns to the passionflower. He claims that the Spanish call the vine “la flor de las cinco llagas [wounds]”, because its flower displays in detail all the traditional symbols of Christ’s passion. The five anthers on top are the five wounds of Christ (two in the hands, two in the feet and one in the side); the tendrils are the whips the Roman soldiers used to beat him; the three stigmas are the three nails; the “crown” of filaments are the crown of thorns; and the five petals and five sepals point to the ten disciples who remained faithful to him (Judas and Peter, of course, go missing). How marvelous and strange, Bosio says, that God would hide the mystery of his Passion in plain sight of so many ignorant and impious heathens who had no clue what they were looking at.

from Bosio’s Triomphante e gloriose croce [Rome, 1609], Libro secundo, p. 164.

Protestant botanists had none of this. Using a plant to teach doctrine was one thing. Suggesting that God had placed an icon of the most powerful devotional object of the Counter Reformation in the middle of a pagan paradise was something else. For John Parkinson, an English apothecary and the royal botanist of Charles I, the worst was that it encouraged botanical misdescription—“lyes” “from the Divell,” as he put it in Paradisi in sole paradisus terrestris [London, 1629] (The Latin title is confusing because it puns on Parkinson’s name: “park-in-sun’s terrestrial park”). In his discussion of the “virtues” of the passionflower, Parkinson incorrectly identifies the vine as a species of clematis before letting his readers know that the English have taken to calling it the “Virgin or Virginian Climer,” because it is a vine first discovered and sent back to England by an agent of the Virginia Company (probably John Smith). The Virginians call it “maracoc,” after the custom of the Powhatan people. Spaniards of the West Indies call it granadillo. Still others, after the manner of “some superstitious Jesuite” (he won’t even mention the name!),

would faine make men beleeve, that in the flower of this plant are to be seene all the markes of our Saviours Passion; and therefore call it Flos Passionis: and to that end have caused figures to be drawne, and printed, with all the parts proportioned out, as thornes, nailes, speare, whippe, pillar, &c. in it, and all as true as the Sea burnes which you may well perceive by the true figure, taken to the life of the plant, compared with the figures set forth by the Jesuites, which I have placed here likewise for every one to see: but these by their advantagious lies (which with them are tolerable, or rather pious and meritorious) wherewith they use to instruct their people; but I dare say, God never willed his Priests to instruct his people with lyes: for they come from the Divell, the author of them.

“As true as the Sea burnes”: this Jesuitical fiction, reproduced faithfully from Bosio’s text, lies on the page opposite Parkinson’s own meticulous rendering. He’s certainly got a point. Parkinson’s drawing is impressively accurate. The “lye” is plain for all to see. Let the reader understand, etc.

Parkinson’s drawing of Passionflower incarnata, Paradisi in sole Paradisus terrestris (London, 1629), p. 395. Below, his reproduction of the image from Bosio’s text.

It’s strange to look out in your pasture and find a plant that holds such a modest yet vexing place in Western history—a plant that, through no fault of its own, absorbs and reflects back to us our own histories of colonization, the extermination of indigenous peoples, doctrinal disputes between Protestants and Catholics. Once you see it, it’s hard to unsee. Passionflower, indeed. In a book on the philosophy of plant life, Michael Marder suggests that the sheer exposure of plants—their rootedness to a single place; their horizontal, chlorophyllic embrace of sun and sky—is the key to understanding their relationship to other living things. Plants always go before animals, so to speak, creating the atmospheric and metabolic conditions that make other lives possible. Plants therefore signify a “primordial generosity” that precedes and encompasses the animal. But exposure is also what sometimes tempts us into thinking that they are pure passive—as if plants were simply waiting around for someone (or something) to take them away.

Over the course of September, the kids and I collected about a hundred passion fruit from the farm. We devoured them almost as quickly as we could pick them. Before long, the deer found them, and then the sheep, and then the cows. It is the middle of October now, and all the maypops and maracocks have gone. They are a short-lived fruit; you have a very narrow window to catch them before they go bad or go missing. The vines have gone, too. Evidently the animals found them tasty. Passionflower will be back next year, though, in new and surprising places. Ever since we stopped clipping pasture, we find it somewhere every year. In gobbling up the fruit we do our part—the animal part—spitting out the pips as we make our way back to the house or to the next job.

From one perspective, I’ve been practicing silvopasture since I started farming over ten years ago. Our farm has quite a few trees, and since the beginning, I have tried to find ways to use different animal species to help manage forested lands on our properties and those that we rent. Only in the last five or so years have I gotten serious about intensively planting and managing new trees. In this workshop I’ll talk about my approach to what I call practical silvopasture: the incorporation of trees and shrubs into grazing systems by focusing on getting lots of native trees planted as quickly and as cheaply as possible. We’ll also talk about contour planting, tree selection, and how best to manage animals in these systems.

If you’re around, and you’re interested, sign up via the QR code below. I hope to see at least a few of you there!

If you are new here, welcome. I’m glad to have you. Here are a few brief words about myself and what you’ll find on this Substack.

Jack, Goodie, and the rest of the Bell Farm gang.

WHO ARE YOU? I graduated with a Ph.D. in English literature from Duke University in 2016. After teaching in the English Department at Wake Forest University for five years, I quit academia and started a farm in Granville County, North Carolina, which is about a half hour north of Durham. In my tenure as a farmer, I have focused mainly on animal agriculture and holistic grazing. We’ve always kept a vegetable garden and plant lots of trees and shrubs, but the size of the farms we manage makes keeping ruminants like cows and sheep a necessity. At one point we were managing nearly four hundred acres of pasture land, much of which was under conservation with the state of North Carolina. Two years ago, I began a very different sort of project and renovated our hundred-year-old farmhouse. Since then, the farm business has shrunk to the original footprint of the farm we bought way back in 2017: fifty acres, give or take, and I devote more and more time to writing, thinking, and lecturing about farming, literature, theology, philosophy, and climate justice. I also home school our four children.

What else is there to say? I am married to the incomparable Goodie Bell, senior pastor of Blacknall Memorial Presbyterian Church in Durham, North Carolina. The country and the city are two poles around which our lives are threaded. Amongst agrarians, this makes our lives somewhat unusual. But we wouldn’t really have it any other way. Our love for the city of Durham and the land we farm both feel like vital, nourishing spirits in our life together.

WHAT WILL I FIND HERE? I tend to fill this Substack with short essays on topics I am researching or writing about for bigger projects, like the book I am currently writing about farming and climate justice. I’ll also post links to articles and essays I write elsewhere.

The truth is that I have always been a magpie. For example, on this Substack, I’ve written about the realist novel, climate change, sustainable energy, patristics, medieval iconography, 18th-century poetry, contemporary music, the industrial revolution–among many other topics. I tend to use Substack as a way to force myself to make explicit the connections I find across vastly different texts and disciplines. Sometimes I’ll post essay fragments that I don’t have time to expand and turn into something longer form.

Among my motivations as a writer is a growing sense that the ways modern people relate to and encounter the natural world are impoverished and in need of deep rehabilitation. This impoverishment is connected in obvious ways to the global ecological crisis the world is enduring, but I think it also has something to do with the myriad social fractures that have increasingly come to characterize life in twenty-first-century America. I also think that the intellectual and liturgical traditions of Christianity, in all their complexity and confounding contradiction, offer surprising resources for thinking about how to relate to, and rehabilitate, our relationships with the created world.

Everything that I write on the BFM is free to the public. I’d like to keep it that way, but if you read something I’ve written and find it helpful, I ask that you think about contributing $5, $10, $15 dollars a month to keep the thing going. It may not seem like much, but it does help keep the lights on (so to speak.)

Enough about me! Whether you’re new here or not, take a moment to look through the archives and tell me what catches your eye.

Cheers,

Jack

A real image I pulled from a real tweet posted by our very real Department of Energy.

Last week Bill McKibben ran a piece unpacking the implications of Trump’s absurd energy policy. For context: before the election, Trump famously promised executives from the fossil fuel industry that he would ease restrictions on oil, gas, and coal if they helped raise a billion dollars for his campaign. When Trump won, the administration trundled out a cartload of executive orders that, among other things, rolled back regulations on fossil fuels, cancelled clean energy projects on federal land, and abolished the IRA benefits for new clean energy infrastructure–all while increasing subsidies for coal. The reasoning (that was made public, anyway) was that America needs bigger and more reliable energy sources to bring back manufacturing and win the AI arms race with China. As one of the orders from April put it,

Our Nation’s beautiful clean coal resources will be critical to meeting the rise in electricity demand due to the resurgence of domestic manufacturing and the construction of artificial intelligence data processing centers. We must encourage and support our Nation’s coal industry to increase our energy supply, lower electricity costs, stabilize our grid, create high-paying jobs, support burgeoning industries, and assist our allies.

McKibben says this is “nonsense on a cracker.” For one, it now seems plain that Silicon Valley hoodwinked the Trump administration (and we can add to this list most of Congress, as well as a great number of institutions of higher education) with AI hype. A new study out of MIT suggests that 95% of new AI ventures have fallen flat and will have no positive impact on companies’ and non profits’ P and L. In light of such news it seems unlikely that our “beautiful” nation will receive all the data centers we’ve been promised (thank God). But the truly baffling claim here has to do with coal. McKibben points to a new report that argues that keeping coal power plants alive beyond their lifespan will cost American consumers somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 to 6 billion dollars. Electricity prices are already going up for many Americans; they will only go higher under Trump’s plan. According to an NPR report from two weeks ago, electricity prices are increasing twice as fast as the cost of living. 

I have learned a lot from McKibben over the years. It’s fair to say that, in the last thirty or so years, no journalist or activist has fought quite so hard and well as he has against the fossil fuel industry. He’s also a Christian, a fact that I have trouble separating from the deep moral clarity with which he writes and speaks. But the man is not without his flaws. On occasion he will suggest that a global green energy transition is destiny, and that Trump and his retrograde cronies are merely delaying the inevitable. It’s true that, on a global scale, the cost of renewables is going down, and steeply. But important research casts doubt on the idea that a green energy future will take hold once the technology becomes cheap and widely available. Consider for example the transition from coal to natural gas and nuclear. In the US in the 1950’s, at the very moment coal ceased being used in households and in industry, its use in production of electricity skyrocketed and remained at very high rates up to the 2000s. As a matter of general rule for the twentieth century, the old forms of energy aren’t discarded so much as they are repackaged, exported, or repurposed in different applications and different settings. The picture muddies even more when you look at energy production on a global scale. The world continues to burn more biomass for fuel than it ever has before. Global consumption of coal in 2020 was 60% higher than in 2000. While coal use in countries like the UK and Europe seems destined to decline, its future is bound up with the very small number of countries that burn 70% of the world’s annual coal supply: China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines and Vietnam. Adam Tooze frames the matter helpfully (if with syntactical awkwardness): “energy transitions are not so much a general historical phenomenon, or societal regularity, so much as a sectoral and regional particularity dependent on technologies and complex and long-lasting investments in infrastructure.” A global green energy transition isn’t out of the question, but it will require high levels of coordination between large, cumbersome economies and governments whose goals are far from clear. And the dream of that happening of its own accord is (if you’ll again forgive the expression) nonsense on a cracker. 

Here are a few points I didn’t have the space to address in the review.

(1) Urban housing markets have feasted on the poor for a very long time—perhaps for as long as the industrial cities have been in existence. In 1842, when Friedrich Engels (of Communist Manifesto fame) moved to Manchester, England to help manage his father’s cotton mill, he spent his off-hours documenting the ways that urban landlords systematically hid from view the poorest of the working class, all while reaping huge profits from unsafe dwellings. In some districts, the city’s poorest residents, usually Irish immigrants, were crammed into shelters beside hogs destined for the slaughterhouse. He wrote: “the industrial epoch alone enables the owners of these cattlesheds to rent them for high prices to human beings, to plunder the poverty of the workers, to undermine the health of thousands, in order that they alone, the owners, may grow rich” (Conditions of the Working Class, 66). Since the 1840s, cities have gotten smarter about sanitation and preventing cholera outbreaks. But the structural problems around housing the urban poor remain as entrenched as they were for capitalist societies of the mid-nineteenth century. The sociologist Matthew Desmond sums up the matter rather dryly in his bestselling study of Milwaukee’s unhoused: “there [is] a business model at the bottom of every market” (Evicted, 61).

(2) Goldstone suggests that there are currently four million chronically homeless families in the US. Another 12 million are severely cost burdened and at imminent risk of being unhoused. What often gets lost in these figures is just how many of the unhoused are children. No one knows for sure, but every number I’ve seen is staggering. For example, just before Hobbs’s book was published (February 2025), officials in LA suggested that there are approximately 64,000 homeless children in the city of Los Angeles alone. 64,000. Let that sink in.

(3) Reductive explanations of what causes homelessness—drug addiction, alcohol addiction, mental illness—these are almost always distortions of the truth and characterize a small fraction of those who are chronically unhoused. The psychological costs of not having a stable home are well documented. Look up the studies if you’re not not convinced. It’s easy to lose sight of the brutally obvious fact that, as Goldstone and other people who study homelessness have pointed out repeatedly, the cause of homelessness is not having a home.

(4) The homeless crisis in the US is, above all, a uniquely American problem. It is undoubtedly a bipartisan failure; both parties are to blame. However, the current administration’s attempts to criminalize homelessness have a special cruelty to them. Reports of federal officials demolishing homeless encampments around DC are widespread. But there are also more sinister things going on across the country. In These Times reports that the scurrilously named Cicero Institute, brainchild of tech investor Joe Lonsdale, has written “cut and paste” legislation for state legislatures across the country. The bill makes it easier for states to prosecute homelessness as a crime. (If you go to the Cicero Institute website, which I won’t hyperlink here, you can read a draft of the bill.) The Institute pushed a version of this policy through in the city of Austin, Texas, where the group is based, but now they are taking their show on the road. The bill they’ve sponsored Kentucky may grant its citizens the right to pursue vigilante-style “justice” against anyone sleeping on the streets. From what I’ve been able to tell, the version of the bill in the North Carolina house has stalled.

(5) Last but not least: a simple reminder to those of my readers who are Christians that Jesus himself was homeless. “Foxes have dens and the birds of the sky have nests,” he says in the Gospel of Luke, “but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”

One of the first things I noticed when I got home was the sorry state of my boots. I’m not sure how I hadn’t noticed before I left, but they’re looking particularly shabby these days. The stitching is worn away in places, and while none of the seams is coming apart yet, hundreds (truly thousands) of days trudging through pasture, gravel, and mud have abraded the slick, oily sheen the boots used to have. I’ve done my best to care for them—especially in the winter, which is the toughest season for boots—but I see new fissures and cracks spreading across the surface of the leather. Of course the boots leak, but that’s true sooner or later of any boot that steps on Bell Farm. (Better to have boots that water can get out of than boots that trap water inside, I say.) At this point in my life, I’ve been through so many pairs that I know I’m not that far away from needing something new.

I’ve grown particular about my footwear on the farm. When I first started farming, I wore my hiking boots all the time. These lasted about six months before the briars and blackberry tore the synthetic bits to shreds. Then I experimented with fancy rubber boots, which are good for sloppy conditions in the weather. But heavy treds hold a lot of mud, and in the summer rubber overheats quickly. Also, I could never get them to last longer than a season or two. Four or five years ago I settled on a simple, lace up leather boot with no tred. They’re made by Red Wing, and I can usually get them to last longer than anything else I’ve owned. The laces can be annoying, but they shed mud and water better than any boot I’ve worn before.

Seeing my boots in their sorry state reminded me of a painting by Van Gogh entitled Shoenen [Shoes]. The story goes that Van Gogh bought some old boots at a flea market and brought them back to his studio in Montmartre, where he painted them multiple times over several years. This particular painting is late—1886—and perhaps ‘post-impressionist’ is the best marker of its mode of representation. Even so, the boots in Van Gogh’s painting bear an uncanny resemblance to my own.

Vincent Van Gogh, Shoenen [1886], oil on canvas, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Then I was reminded of an essay by the philosopher Martin Heidegger where he discusses this painting at some length. I wanted to use this post to share some of what he says about shoes. Here is what he has to say about Van Gogh’s painting:

“The peasant woman wears her shoes in the field. Only here are they what they are. They are all the more genuinely so, the less the peasant woman thinks about the shoes while she is at work, or looks at them at all, or is even aware of them. She stands and walks in them. That is how shoes actually serve. It is in this process of the use of equipment that we must actually encounter the character of equipment. As long as we only imagine a pair of shoes in general, or simply look at the empty, unused shoes as they merely stand there in the picture, we shall never discover what the equipmental being of the equipment in truth is. From Van Gogh’s painting we cannot even tell where these shoes stand. […] A pair of peasant shoes and nothing more.”

What Heidegger is saying something like this: shoes reveal their essence as equipment, as tools (I’m using these terms interchangeably), when the peasant uses them to walk across the field or village—and all the more so the less the peasant is even aware of them as shoes while walking. The reality of the being of shoes is hidden in their use. When shoes distract us—with pain, annoyance, or a distinctive design—they chafe against their own character as equipment. The “equipmental being” of boots resides in their usefulness, which itself resides in their reliability, a durability that lasts beyond the hour of its use. “The former [usefulness] vibrates in the latter [reliability] and would be nothing without it,” Heidegger says. Heidegger thinks that tools disclose themselves precisely in the moment of their disappearance in our work or in our living. My boots express their being best when I am oblivious to their shape or quality or the character of their physical extension in the world around me. They may have been pleasing to look at, but the pleasure arrives on the heels (so to speak) of what the boots really are—the place they have in my life and work.

But that’s not all that Van Gogh’s painting has to show us, Heidegger thinks. When we bring ourselves before this painting—when we attend to the fullness of the picture, when we allow it to question us—when we place our own being in “the vicinity of the work,” we find—

“From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining anxiety as to the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once more withstood want, and trembling before the impending childbed and shivering at the surrounding menace of death. This equipment belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. From out of this protected belonging the equipment itself rises to its resting-within-itself.”

Again, having situated himself before the painting, the painting then discloses something essential to Heidegger about “what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, is in truth.” Van Gogh’s painting facilitates the emergence of shoes “into the unconcealedness of [their] being.” As the painting stands, it doesn’t do a very good job of providing a visual representation of what shoes or boots look like. We can’t even tell what they are resting on. It’s not a pleasant or titillating image. Rather, what happens in the work of art is “a disclosure of a particular being, disclosing what and how it is.” Art, he says, is “truth setting itself to work.” Encountering Van Gogh’s painting means letting the work tell us what boots are—what in the everyday reality of our lives equipment really is. And the essence of boots is a “protected belonging” that covers over every object of use in our world.

Heidegger is using this phrase in a more general sense than I intend to, but I like the notion of protected belonging very much. I wasn’t able to save my boots from the silent call of the earth, but I was able to prolong their stay. It seems to me that the phrase describes what agriculture is about: a craft that belongs to the earth and is protected by the world of the farmer.

More soon.

Jack

George Washington as a Farmer at Mount Vernon (1851), Junius Brutus Stearns (1810-1885), oil on canvas, Virginia Museum of Fine Art.

Before the war, when he first took over the estate of Mount Vernon in the early 1760’s, Washington amassed a collection of books on methods of agricultural improvement: Jethro Tull’s Horse Hoeing Husbandry (1731); Lisle’s Observation in Husbandry [1757]; Batty Langley’s New Principles of Gardening [1728], six volumes of Museum Rusticum [1769]; and Duhamel du Monceau’s Practical Treatise of Husbandry [1750].2 In 1765, Washington oversaw the conversion of the farm’s arable land (over one thousand acres) from the cultivation of tobacco to wheat. With tobacco prices depressed in the middle of the century, Washington, with Horse Hoeing Husbandry as his guide, conducted a series of experiments in the 1760’s in how to grow other cash crops. Relying on the careful deployment of the labor of the hundred or so slaves that lived at Mount Vernon, Washington began rotating crops (wheat, then corn, then fallow) and amending soils with substances like marl and river muck. In 1765, Washington pivoted and grew no tobacco at all on his main estate at Mount Vernon, relying instead on the cultivation of wheat. His slaves reconfigured the buildings at Mount Vernon estate to hold grain instead of tobacco. 

Wheat, Washington thought, would free the colonies from dependence on distant markets of the empire across the Atlantic. Everyone needed flour, and unlike tobacco, wheat need not be shipped across the Atlantic to find a large enough market for it. Above all, Washington thought, the colonies needed a steady supply of domestic grain to support the nation’s growing population. Wheat represented independence; it stood for prosperity. As the historian Bruce Ragsdale recently explained, Washington fantasized about creating an autonomous agricultural district stretching from “the transmontane west via the Potomac to the Chesapeake.” For Washington, agriculture–modelled on the British system–combined private interest and public good. In enriching himself and his lands, he would open up pathways towards the enrichment of this new nation and its population.

Over time, however, Washington became disenchanted with the transformation of his farm. The Tullian model seemed not to make much agronomic or economic sense. Since before the war began, Mount Vernon had run a deficit every year. It would continue to do so until 1787. Most depressing of all were the declining crop yields he observed from season to season. After obtaining the first four volumes of Annals of Agriculture, Washington concluded that his farm had fundamental problems in soil fertility. He told Young that “the system of agriculture (if the epithet of system can be applied to it,) which is in use in this part of the United States, is as unproductive to the practitioners as it is ruinous to the land-holders” (6). Pulling continuous yields of wheat and “Indian corn” or maize–what Washington described as a “great exhauster” (48) of the soil–destroyed the land’s ability to sustain future crops. A year of fallow wasn’t enough to replace the crops you took from the soil the previous year. Nearly two decades later, then, Washington found himself turning again to the latest advice in British agricultural management. At this point in his career as an agriculturalist, Washington was all too eager to connect with Young. 

For eight years, from 1786 to 1794, Washington and Young sent letters back and forth across the Atlantic. Washington requested the latest and best seeds and tools; Arthur Young obliged. Washington posed specific questions about method and management of farms; Young dispensed with as much advice as Washington could take. Soon, Washington reached out to his contacts in the colonies to find a farm manager schooled in the latest modes of British husbandry–someone who knew “how to plough—to sow—to mow—to hedge—to Ditch & above all, Midas like, one who can convert every thing he touches into manure, as the first transmutation towards Gold: in a word one who can bring worn out & gullied Lands into good tilth in the shortest time” (90). 

At one point in the correspondence, Washington finds himself quite taken with Young’s description of the Holkham estate belonging to William Coke–the same Holkham I examined in my previous post. Young had written that the buildings around Holkham’s manor house serve as “ornaments” to the surrounding agricultural landscape. To see the “new-built farm-houses, with barns and offices, substantially of brick and tile,” one can only conclude that  “we approach the residence of a man, who feels for others as well as for himself.” Inspired by Young’s account of the grounds, Washington wants to construct a barn in imitation of Coke’s. Washington solicits input from Young; Young provides detailed commentary. When the structure was completed, Washington boasted that it was “the largest and most convenient [barn] in this Country” (ibid.). A threshing floor–”large enough for three laborers [slaves] to clean the wheat of a five-hundred acre farm over the winter months”--was located in the middle of it. On the outside stood “a great door [that] allowed the entrance of wagons” (ibid.).

Throughout their correspondence, Young and Washington both take great pains to clarify what the problem with American agriculture is. Like Washington himself prior to his conversion to the seemingly alchemical properties of dung, American farmers neglected the incorporation of animal agriculture in the cultivation of annual cash crops. Manure, Young insisted, was the key to soil fertility and profitability. Without dung, there can be no long term fertility or viability. Instead of gathering animal manure and spreading it over arable fields, American farmers (in the words of Washington himself)

If they can be so called [farmers], cultivate much ground for little profit, because land is cheap, and labour is high; but you will remember that when I informed you of this fact, I reprobated, at the same time, both the practice and principle. The history, however, of it is this–a piece of land is cut down, and kept under constant cultivation, first in tobacco, and then in Indian corn (two very exhausting plants), until it will yield scarcely anything–a second piece is cleared, and treated in the same manner; then a third, and so on, until probably, there is but little more to clear. When this happens the owner finds himself reduced to the choice of one of three things—either to recover the land which he has ruined, to accomplish which, he has perhaps neither the skill, the industry, nor the means–or to retire beyond the mountains–or to substitute quantity for quality, in order to raise something (53).

Washington is describing both the history and logic of colonial expansion that drove farmers of “the tobacco states” (ibid.) continuously westward into indigenous territory. At the same time, it’s not a stretch to say that he is also describing his own practice of acquiring vast swathes of lands to the west–tens of thousands of acres–and trying to lease them out to new tenant farmers who don’t have land or had exhausted what they have. Whether or not he acknowledges his own participation in this history, the pattern is the same: colonists cut down timber, clear the land, and keep it “under constant cultivation” until all fertility expired. If they didn’t pick up and move west, they would try to recover the land as best they could. But improvement is an impossibility at this point, Washington says, owing to the ignorance surrounding methods and management. Lastly, if farmers had the capital, they might acquire as much land as possible around them and settle for “quantity over quality” of land. 

According to Washington, the problems facing American farms were the obverse of those in Great Britain. In England and Scotland particularly, centuries of enclosure contributed to the formation of a cheap and reliable source of rural labor power. Peasants no longer had their own fields and cottage gardens to tend. Instead, they were forced to labor at the mercy of large farmers. And because arable land was in short supply, it cost farmers a lot to rent it. Thus, if yields could be increased through improvement, farmers had every incentive to mend the land and not the wages of their workers. By contrast, America had plenty of land but hardly anyone to work it. What incentive to improvement would a farmer have if he could just pick up and move westward, or simply buy out his neighbors’ farms? Washington explains: 

an English farmer must entertain a contemptible opinion of our husbandry, or a horrid idea of our lands, when he shall be informed that not more than eight or 10 bushels of wheat is the yield of an acre; but this low produce may be ascribed, and principally, too, to a cause [...] namely, that the aim of the farmers in this country, (if they can be called farmers) is, not to make the most they can from the land, which is, nor has been cheap, but he most of the labour, which is dear; the consequence of which has been, much ground has been scratched over and none cultivated or improved as it ought to have been: whereas a farmer in England, where land is dear, and labour cheap, finds it his interest to improve and cultivate highly, that he may reap large crops from a small quantity of ground. (22)

The eight-year correspondence between Young and Washington forms one node in a network of dissemination of British agricultural ideas to America from the 1780s to 1848. This network was composed of a small but vocal minority of American farmers, most of whom were based in New England. They embraced the latest, manure-centered methods of British agriculture and argued on behalf of their adoption in the former colonies. As Steven Stoll argues in Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (2002), while they were small in number, improving farmers in America established norms for thinking about sustainability, conservation, and the aesthetics of rural life in the latter half of the nineteenth-century. For improvers, “the richness of well-managed tilth became a standard against which civilization in the US could be judged.” “during the period of its brief ascent,” Stoll argues, “[American] improvement stood in opposition to the most astonishing period of Indian dispossession and white settlement yet seen in North America” (30, 48). 

One of the reasons improvement was so attractive to American farmers was that it seemed to offer farmers “ecological stability in a capitalist mode of production.” Instead of chasing fertility from one farm to the next, farmers could remain in place and increase yields and boost their bottom line–that was the theory, at least. Without improving soil fertility, the reasoning went, there could be no economic progress in the country. And without economic progress, the young country could never sustain a democracy. By the early 1800’s, apologists of improvement worried that the degradation of soils along the Eastern seaboard was so bad that “the old states” could never sustain the population that was badly needed for the growth of industry. Jesse Buell [1778-1839], a New York editor and agriculturalist, explained: “our policy has been, by the prodigal management of our public domain, to set in motion a constant current of emigration, which has not only carried off from the sea-board, all accessions of labor and capital from Europe, but which has drained the old states of their most active and vigorous population,” (23). The soil is squandered, and with it go all the “labor and capital” that flow from Europe to the former colonies. 

According to the American improvers, the only alternative was to turn the farmer’s attention back to the animals on his farm. John Sinclair, a British agriculturalist and contemporary of Young, put it this way. Cattle are “machines, for converting herbage, and other food for animals, into money.” (56). Buell articulated the same principle on a more concrete scale: “cattle and sheep make manure,--manure makes grain, grass and roots–these in return, feed the family, and make meat, milk and wool;--and meat, milk and wool are virtually money, the great object of the farmer’s ambition, and the reward of his labors” (51). Manure equals fertility equals money. However, the simplicity of these formulae belie the fact that this was a radically interventionist approach to growing food. Rather than waiting on nature to take care of itself, farmers were exhorted to step in and harness the potency of their animals’ dung. Monitor your animals, collect their manure, distribute it across your arable land, and soon your soil would make you rich. 

If the economy of the young nation were to grow, the country needed to turn its attention to the soil. As Richard Peters put it, “soil is the basis of national wealth, and its cultivation the only permanent source from which its prosperity can be derived” (47). Peters was a member of the Continental Congress, friend of George Washington (one of his letters is appended to Washington’s own and sent to Arthur Young), and the second president of the Philadelphia Society for the Improvement of Agriculture from 1805 to1818. Here he is insisting that soil is“the only permanent source” of wealth. He sounds like a physiocrat or a classical economist like Adam Smith or David Ricardo. The difference is that, unlike Ricardo (whom Marx ridiculed for his outdated views on agriculture), the permanence of fertility is totally upon the farmer’s correct management of the soil.3 Fertility is no longer a permanent feature of “good land.” For the improvers, animals needed to become the “nexus” of a farm’s activities. Otherwise, a farmer’s arable land–and therefore the country itself–would eventually fall into ruin.  

But it wasn’t just the threat of a soil crisis or the promise of future wealth that moved farmers to try their hand at improvement. Promises of future plenty were persuasive, but images of “cattle and rich grasses” in England also pushed farmers to replicate the methods and systems of their British counterparts. “The American tutorial conducted by British authors should not be underestimated in its importance,” Stoll writes, “for the image of rural England–sod green and garden damp–deeply affected admirers in North America,” (57). No one did more to perpetuate these images in America than Arthur Young himself: “Young showed [American farmers] a grassy, burgeoning, and patrician rural life, which remained in the imagination of educated farmers from Washington’s time to [Frederick Law] Olmsted’s” (58). Young’s apologetic turned England’s luminous sod into a symbol of American aspiration. 

In America, the core methods of British improvement never caught on in a lasting or substantial way. In the tobacco and cotton producing regions of the South, farmers found little incentive to spend more capital on labor, especially when large farms and small slave populations could generate handsome profits. For many, the temptation of unspoilt indigenous land further west in Alabama and then Louisiana proved insurmountable. However, by the 1850s, agriculture in the Northeast–and indeed the whole nation–had also undergone a transformation of a different sort. 

The discovery of massive deposits of guano on the Peruvian coast upended the ecology of American agriculture and set off an international race to claim as many Pacific territories as the American (or British, or Spanish, or French) empire could find. Harvested by Chinese bondsmen (the infamous “coolie” trade) working in unimaginable conditions, guano had soared in global popularity following the publication of Elements of Agricultural Chemistry: In a Course of Lectures for the Board of Agriculture Delivered between 1802 and 1812 by Humphry Davy [1778-1829], the experimental chemist, Romantic, and close friend of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Davy’s analysis of samples of guano concluded that the foreign substance was far more potent than cow dung, easier to spread on the land, and the deposits along the Humboldt Current in the Pacific appeared to be inexhaustible (the current was later named for the German polymath Alexander van Humboldt [1769-1859], the first European to “discover” it–it had long been sacred to many of the indigenous peoples who inhabited this region).4 By 1850, guano was the preferred remedy to soil infertility for most farmers in Britain, Europe, and America. The historian Gregory Cushman writes that, by 1871, Peru had exported 12.7 metric tons of the substance to Europe, America, and the Caribbean. Guano–paired with the invention of the McCormick reaper (sold commercially beginning in 1840)--did more to make modern agriculture than anything else. Together, they provided a solution to the two great problems that plagued American agriculture: rapidly declining soil fertility and costly labor. In doing so, however, they yoked the production of food to global supply chains and the massive infusion of external inputs that dominate modern agriculture to this day. 

***

Stoll suggests–ever so slightly–that for a brief moment it was possible for the nation to go down a very different path. If American farmers had heeded the cry of improvers, the nation might have slowed the ruination of its soils or the genocide of indigenous peoples who lived to the west. Perhaps this is true, but it runs the risk of obscuring the intractable problem of scale that agrarian improvement bequeathed to its practitioners. I mean “scale” in all its senses: the immense quantity of capital needed to initiate the system; the vast quantity of laborers; the acreage of arable land; the scale by which the aesthetics of the land itself was measured and judged and yearned for. Washington is a prime example for illustrating this problem. 

Although Washington was hardly fond of the peculiar institution, he, like Thomas Jefferson, came to view slavery as essential to the success of his improvements. Without slaves, Washington simply could not make his farm profitable. He came to rely on increasingly detailed surveys of what each slave did each day and what they accomplished. The historian Justin Roberts points out that, throughout his halting career as an agriculturalist, Washington required “meticulous weekly statistics” regarding every one of the several hundred slaves that he owned. So attentive was he to what they were doing each day that, when his overseer accidentally omitted a name, it was not unusual for Washington to ask for specific details about what that particular slave had been doing and why (“what has Frank, Hercules and Cyrus been employed in? [...] No mention is made of any work performed by them in the Gardeners or other Reports”). Washington devised a sophisticated system to quantify abstract units of slave labor, and he also developed a variation on double-entry bookkeeping to track whether or not those units were being employed profitably. Both innovations, Roberts argues, “drew heavily on contemporary accounting theory”.  Roberts’s description of the system makes Washington sound like a forerunner of the scientific management of labor later developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915): 

“Washington required that his managers use a system of debiting and crediting his labor account in the farm reports. The total labor pool appeared as a credit above each farm or group of skilled slaves (such as gardeners), and the tasks done by slaves, as well as their sicknesses, pregnancies, or absence, were recorded as debits to that account. [...] From timing his slaves to tracking missing individuals in meticulously detailed work logs, Washington was improving his estate by ensuring that no time was lost”  (68).5

I want to end this essay by returning to something that Thoreau wrote in Walden sometime between 1845 and 1854. If you remember my little essay from a few months ago on growing beans, Thoreau had refused to amend his crop with manure, marl, ash, guano or anything else he might have had to import from off of his land. He had done so in spite of the gentlemanly farmer passing by his fields. The man had implored Thoreau to do something to the two and a half acres of poor soil he tilled up. I suggested that Thoreau’s bizarre form of agrarian ascesis was a response to the feverish, colonizing impulses of nineteenth-century American political economy. The problem with America, Thoreau suggests, is that it cannot do anything without expecting something in return. The soil, through centuries of despoliation, has lost its character as gift: “by avarice and selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives” (134). Our problem, the problem of America, the problem from which none of us is free (there is no reason to doubt that the author includes himself)–is that we cannot see the land as our kin, as the same stuff that human beings are made of. Its destiny is no longer bound to our own or the destiny of other species. It is merely the means of making us rich. Then, he writes this: 

The ear of wheat, (in Latin spica, obsoletely speca, from spe, hope,) should not be the only hope of the husbandman; its kernel or grain (granum, from gerendo, bearing,) is not all that it bears. How, then, can our harvest fail? Shall I not rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary of the birds? [...] The true husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest no concern whether the wood will bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing not only his first, but his last fruits also.

The number of biblical allusions buzzing around this passage is remarkable. I’d like to mention a few of them. Matthew 6:25-7: “therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?” Then there is the parable of the sower, Matthew 13, which I won’t quote in its entirety here. Then there is St. Paul, with what may be Thoreau’s favorite passage in all of Christian Scripture: “he that ploweth should plow in hope” (1 Corinthians 9:10). In the same letter, St. Paul describes Jesus as the “firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (15:20). James 1:16: “by his choice, he gave us birth by the word of truth so that we would be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.” There is Leviticus, too, which outlines what the Israelites are supposed to do with first and last fruits: “celebrate the Festival of Harvest with the first fruits of the crops you sow in your field. Celebrate the Festival of Ingathering at the end of the year, when you gather in your crops from the field,” (Leviticus 23:16). 

But there is one verse that is particularly apposite to the model of agrarian resistance that Thoreau is exploring in his bean field. “I say unto you,” Jesus declares in the gospel of Luke, “that even so there shall be joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, [more] than over ninety and nine righteous persons, who need no repentance” (Luke 15:7). One sinner, one grain, one farmer, one field, one day: are these not places to begin from, again and again, with joy? 

In the selections I quote below, Arendt begins by elucidating the significance of forgiving and promising as speech acts. If you are acquainted with ordinary language philosophy, you’ll notice that what she says here rhymes with some of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s insights in Philosophical Investigations [1953]—particularly, the public character of the rules governing human speech and the role of acknowledgment.Without forgiveness, Arendt says, we’d be consigned forever to the fate of having done some deed. Without promising—an equally crucial faculty for Arendt—we would be “condemned to wander helplessly and without direction the darkness of each man’s lonely heart.” Then, I fast forward a bit and take up her discussion of love as the most “antipolitical” of passions and the role of the child. If you’re curious and want to see more, the full discussion is on pp. 236-47, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1998).

Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer’s apprentice who lacked the magic formula to break the spell. Without being bound to the fulfillment of promises, we would never be able to keep our identities; we would be. condemned to wander helplessly and without direction in the darkness of each man’s lonely heart, caught in its contradictions and equivocalities—a darkness which only the light shed over the public realm through the presence of others, who confirm the identity between the one who promises and the one who fulfills, can dispel. Both faculties, therefor, depend on plurality, on the presence and acting of others, for no one can forgive himself and no one can feel bound by a promise made only to himself; forgiving and promising enacted in solitude or isolation remain without reality and can signify no more than a role played before one’s self. […] (237)

Perhaps the most plausible argument that forgiving and acting [or action, which I’d gloss here as meaning “political doings”] are as closely connected as destroying and making comes from that aspect of forgiveness where the undoing of what was done seems to show the same revelatory character as the deed itself. Forgiving and the relationship it establishes is always an eminently personal (though not necessarily individual or private) affair in which what was done is forgive for the sake of who did it. This, too, was clearly recognized by Jesus (“Her sins which are many are forgiven; for she loved much: but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little”), and it is the reason for the current conviction that only love has the power to forgive. For love, although it is one of the rarest occurrences in human lives, indeed possesses an unequaled power of self-revelation and an unequaled clarity of vision for the disclosure of who, precisely because it is unconcerned to the point of total unworldliness with what the loved person may be, with his qualities and shortcomings no less than with his achievements, failings, and transgressions. Love, by reason of its passion, destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others. As long as its spell lasts, the only in-between which can insert itself between two lovers is the child, love’s own product. The child, this in-between to which the lovers now are related and which they hold in common, is representative of the world in that it also separates them; it is an indication that they will insert a new world into the already existing world. Through the child, it is as though the lovers return to the world from which their love had expelled them. But this new worldliness, the possible result and the only possibly happy ending of a love affair, is, in a sense, the end of love, which must either overcome the partners anew or be transformed into another mode of belonging together. Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but anti political, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces. (242)

The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope, those two essential characteristics of human existence which Greek antiquity ignored altogether, discounting the keeping of faith as a very uncommon and not too important virtue and counting hope among the evils of illusion in Pandora’s box. It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their ‘glad tidings’: “A child has been born unto us.” (247)

The Hay Wain [1821], John Constable (1776-1837), oil on canvas, National Gallery.

Consider the case of Arthur Young (1741-1820), farmer, writer, pamphleteer, and champion of “improved” agriculture in the British Isles. Across a fifty year career, Young authored numerous books, pamphlets, and articles on agricultural method and political economy. It’s not an exaggeration to say that he did more to disseminate the core ideas of “convertible husbandry” and the ideology of improvement than anyone else in Britain or the Americas. “Convertible” refers to the rotation of crops, grasses, and fallow through the same acreage in regular, labor-intensive patterns. Without getting too deep in the weeds, in the convertible or “improved” system Young championed, the same piece of land goes through a couple of rotations of “corn” (wheat or barley), a leguminous crop like clover or sainfoin that fixes atmospheric nitrogen in the soil, and then pasture for sheep, before starting the whole process again. 

In the older, open-field system, arable land was broken up into strips that were divided between peasant families living on a manor. Rotations between crops usually happened according to the “three field” system: ⅓  wheat or rye; ⅓ oats, barley,  or legume; and ⅓ fallow. Both commons and waste were managed cooperatively and overseen by the manorial court system. Except in extraordinary circumstances, customary rights were passed down or exchanged between peasant families from one generation to the next. 

However, for the convertible system to work, farmers and landowners needed a couple of conditions in place. First, they needed unfettered access to the land. Convertible husbandry required constant intervention in the biology of soil. Without the dissolution of the customary rights of the peasantry, farmers and landowners were unable to reap profits from significant portions of their holdings. It’s hardly a coincidence that, from 1750 to 1850, approximately 7 million acres were enclosed and the customary rights of the peasantry dissolved.1 Second, they needed a steady and cheap supply of labor to enclose the land and amend it. Champions of convertible agriculture insisted on the importance of animals and marl (or limestone chalk). These were two keys to fertility, but digging up chalk and collecting manure were extremely labor intensive. So, too, was the even application of these materials at regular intervals across the growing seasons (not to mention the labor that went into enclosing/improving commons and waste, sowing, weeding, and harvest). Landowners and farmers seeking to enclose and improve land came to see that a cheap and steady supply of wage labor was necessary if profits were to roll. The rural population became less of a problem than an opportunity. 

 Young’s personal record as an improver was mixed. Most of his own farming endeavors ended in failure. But for many years Young served as the secretary of the newly formed Board of Agriculture, a “semipublic instrument” by and for large landowners that advocated for the enclosure and improvement of common and waste lands.2 He also served as editor and contributor to the forty-five volumes of his own widely read periodical, the Annals of Agriculture and Other Useful Arts (1784-1806). 

The historian Jim Handy has argued that, in the early years of the Annals, Young took a proto-Malthusian attitude towards the rural population.3 It was plain to Young that the peasantry stood in the way of progress. So long as they maintained their cottage gardens and the open field system, the whole country would suffer. “Without inclosures there can be no good husbandry; while a country is laid out in open field lands, every good farmer is tied down to the husbandry of his slovenly neighbours, it is simply impossible that agriculture should flourish.”4 The only solution to the “slovenly” way that peasants managed their farms was to enclose their arable land and tear down their cottage gardens and orchards. To Young, peasant agriculture represented a vestigial way of life that jeopardized national prosperity. As late as 1807, well into the agricultural revolution of the early 1800s, Young was still bemoaning that “the Goths and the Vandals of open fields touch the civilization of enclosures.”5 A not-very-thinly veiled racial logic overlay the transformation of the English countryside. The peasantry was past, an older, less civilized, less developed way of living on the land that was incapable of contributing to the national economy. The only solution, Young insisted, was to deprive the rural laboring class of their property and let poverty goad them to greater industry. What else but hardship would make them work? In turned out that deprivation did the poor a favor. “Every one but an ideot [sic] knows that…the lower classes must be poor, or they will never be industrious.”6

In the early 1800’s, poverty deepened in the most agriculturally productive regions of England’s south and east. War and poor harvests were partly to blame, but the rural poor became harder for people like Young to explain away. As some of England’s farmers and landlords got stupendously rich, how was it that their workers grew ever more destitute? Young’s antipathy began to soften somewhat, and he began to champion “the enchantment of property”: giving cottagers little plots for them to garden in, either by means of rental from landlords or public dispersal of wasteland, would work like economic “magic.”7 Gardens would keep rural workers well-fed, able-bodied, and ultimately enhance the labor power employed by capitalist farmers. Curiously, in later years, Young’s involvement in nonconforming religious circles deepened, and he began to treat the topic of the rural poor with something that resembled regret. “I had rather that all the commons of England were sunk in the sea, than that the poor should in future be treated on enclosing as they have been hitherto.”8 Quite the about-face for the man who did more than anyone to convince the landed class to boot the peasantry from the countryside in the first place. 

The text I want to take a closer look at comes years before Young’s attitude towards the rural poor began to change. In the late 1760’s, Young embarked on a six-week journey across England and Wales. As Young explained, the aim of his six weeks’ tour was to “gain as complete a knowledge as possible of the present state of the agriculture, manufactures, and population of the several counties through which I shall pass.”9 Given Young’s stated intention, it’s all the more bizarre that he begins the Tour not by recording his observation of agricultural method but the “celebrated house” of Holkham Hall in Norfolk (3-24). Although he professes ignorance about architecture, Young records his personal titillation at approaching the house from the south (he had heard this was the best view) and went out of his way to get on the right track. Young gives as detailed a report on the exterior of the house as he can. What follows this is an inventory of the most fetching and opulent rooms inside the mansion: observations about specific styles of decoration and pattern ( walls in“crimson flowered velvet” or “blue damask”; a bas relief on the chimney piece of “white marble finely polished”, p. 11), the dimensions of each notable hallway and room (“the saloon [sic] is 42 feet by 27, a proportion much condemned, but it is by no means displeasing to me” 7). Just before Young reports on the grounds around the house and the agricultural methods that lie beyond, he includes a detailed catalogue of paintings at Holkham that would make most European museums blush: works by a litany of Renaissance masters like Titian’s Venus, Rubens’s Flight into Egypt; paintings by van Dyck, Raphael, and many others (15-21). 

It’s not all praise on Young’s Tour. Occasionally, he will record some hesitation about a detail at Holkham or the other grand estates he gets to see on his journey through England and Wales (Holkham: “when you advance near, you find no entrance to the house; there are no stairs up to the portico, and this circumstance…becomes a disappointment, and a fault in the building” (6)). Still, the rather obvious point of these exercises is to observe, itemize, and survey the estate’s domestic interiors, not just the condition of the out-of-doors husbandry on which the wealth and opulence of the estate itself depend. Stylistically, Young’s Tour mimes the observational habits of Daniel Defoe’s Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain [1724] or the actuarial tabulation of data in Robinson Crusoe [1719]. What’s perhaps different here is that the lists of data operate like a hermeneutic frame to the social world encircling the estate. To understand what happens in the field, the quantity of labor hours, the pounds of marl and manure, the types of turnip and the stupendous yields, one must first encounter the wealth those commodities and methods make possible. The opulence of the domestic interior is essential to comprehending what happens in the fields and pastures outside of it. The house is, quite literally, the accumulation of surplus wealth extracted from the land and its laborers. 

Perhaps it’s no coincidence, then, that Young’s tour of English husbandry begins on the (bizarrely stairless–I agree with Young) entry of a mansion that belonged to one the great capitalist “improvers” of the 18th century, a man named Thomas William Coke, who was (incorrectly) believed to have invented the “Norfolk four-course system,” a “local variation” on crop rotations that made Coke very rich.10 Coke was one of the big “bullfrog” landowners whom William Cobbett railed against incessantly in his own Rural Rides through the English countryside. From his seat at Holkham, Coke owned approximately 13,00 acres of arable land in the Norfolk region. After inheriting 30,000 acres from his family, Coke went around buying up strips of open field and enclosing them. Young reports that around 8-9,000 arable acres are rented to other farmers, with individual holdings from a little over 1,000 to 3,000 acres. Afterwards, Young tells us what the land looked like before Coke and his predecessors got started, and what difference Coke has wrought on the landscape: 

“All the country from Holkam to Houghton was a wild sheep-walk before the spirit of improvement seized the inhabitants; and this glorious spirit has wrought amazing effects; for instead of boundless wilds, and uncultivated wastes, inhabited by scarce anything but sheep; the country is all cut into inclosures [sic], cultivated in a most husband-like manner, richly manured, well peopled, and yielding an hundred times the produce that it did in its former state. What has wrought these vast improvements is the marling; for under the whole country run veins of a very rich soapy kind, which they dig up, and spread upon the old sheep-walks, and then by means of inclosing they throw their farms in a regular course of crops, and gain immensely by the improvement.” (21-22). 

Coke and the farmers who leased his land were people who profited immensely from convertible husbandry and the ecological and social conditions that made it possible. It’s difficult to imagine the size of Coke’s estate without a very large labor force and very large amounts of capital on hand. Young was quite clear that small and middling farmers shouldn’t bother with convertible husbandry; it was best left to the big ones: “how in the name of common sense were such improvements to be wrought by little or even moderate farmers! Can such inclose wastes at a vast expense–cover them with an hundred loads an acre of marle–or six or eight hundred bushels of lime–keep sufficient flocks of sheep for folding[…] No. It is to GREAT FARMERS you owe these. Without GREAT FARMS you never would have seen these improvements.”11

Still, the trouble with Young’s picture of the Norfolk countryside–a landscape “saved” from barbaric obscurity by large, capitalist improvers–is that it rests on multiple distortions. For one, marl had been used in this part of the world as a soil amendment since the prehistoric era.12 The four-crop system, so lauded by Young, had been around for at least a hundred years prior to Coke’s employment of it. It’s not clear that Coke himself invented anything. He seems to have been one particularly wealthy exponent of the system. And then there is enclosure itself, the civilizing miracle of the countryside. In Norfolk, the practice was much older than Young suggests. The very earliest enclosures in Norfolk took place in the 12th century and then again in the 15th century. About a hundred years later, Kett’s Rebellion (1549), in which approximately 16,000 smallholders and laborers tore down hedges and fences put up by the rich in a massive spate of enclosure, began about forty miles south of Holkham–just outside Norwich. 

Perhaps the best way to put the situation is this: Young’s fixation on domestic and agricultural detail obscures the real condition of capitalist prosperity, which was the propertylessness of the laboring poor in Coke’s employ. They almost never make an appearance in Young’s letters. Labor will show up in the speculative ledgers Young draws up when he wants to figure out just how profitable these stupendously large farms are (e.g., “Harvest, on a medium, 4 s[hillings]. an acre” (28)). And we see them for a split second as Young’s eye roves the landscape and notices its “well-peopled” (21) villages. But laborers and small farmers otherwise do not make much of an appearance. If their farms and gardens haven’t been enclosed, they are the “slovenly” neighbors who justify the big bullfrog farmers’ gobbling up of the landscape.

Young’s icon of rural prosperity reminds me of a poem from a very different era (early 1600s) and a very different author (Ben Johnson), written in the middle of an earlier but no less feverish burst of rural enclosure. It is an example of the country house poem, a poem that praises the elegance of a rural seat belonging to this or that nobleman. In “To Penshurst,” Ben Jonson begins by celebrating the restrained beauty of the house itself (no “polished pillars, or roof of gold”) and suggests that this architectural modesty is a fitting emblem of the lord’s quiet dominion over the landscape surrounding him: “Thou joy’st in better marks, of soil, of air,/Of wood, of water; therein thou art fair.” The mansion does not browbeat the natural world surrounding it. The lord’s enclosing hand is firm and controlling, but the lord does not glory in his own surplus. In response, nature gives herself up freely to the lord’s expropriation: “The painted partridge lies in every field,/ And for thy mess is willing to be killed”; “Fat aged carps [...] run into thy net”; and the eels “leap on land/Before the fisher, or into his hand.” Property yields itself willingly to the proprietor who does not force things. The same is true of the people who live and work on the lord’s estate: 

And though thy walls be of the country stone,

They’re reared with no man’s ruin, no man’s groan;

There’s none that dwell about them wish them down;

But all come in, the farmer and the clown,

And no one empty-handed, to salute

Thy lord and lady, though they have no suit.13

Jonson’s poem is of a very different time–almost a different world, one is tempted to say, than Young’s description of Holkham and its farms. And yet there is a way of seeing both obfuscations of labor as bound up in the same process of economic and ecological myth-making: rural people yield their labor to the lord’s grasp as willingly as the pike in the stream or the plum in the tree, and they are not the worse for it. Indeed, for Young, no less than for Jonson, exploitation is good for them: how else would people or places learn to be productive if not for the firm hand of their lordly masters? 

***

In the next longform post on the Bell Farm Miscellany, I will take up a question I’ve been pondering for a long time: how was the ideology of improvement received in the Americas? Stay tuned for more. 

The family that controls the largest US egg seller is seeking to cash out amid a bird flu crisis that has driven prices to all-time highs. The four daughters and son-in-law of Cal-Maine Foods founder Fred R Adams Jr reached an agreement with the company to convert their super-voting shares to common shares, relinquishing control ahead of a “potential diversification of their individual financial portfolios”, according to a securities filing by the company. The family’s stake in Cal-Maine is held through a shell company called Daughters LLC. At Friday’s close, the stake is valued at nearly $532mn, including $434mn in super-voting shares and another $98mn in common shares. At the same time, Cal-Maine, based in Ridgeland, Mississippi, said it would undertake a $500mn share buyback programme, its first in two decades, and disclosed it could use the initiative to “repurchase some of the family members’ common shares” as they sold their holdings. … US egg prices reached $8.58 per dozen in wholesale markets this week amid a severe bird flu outbreak, a 70 per cent increase from year-ago levels, according to a commodity price information service Expana. The outbreak has led farmers to cull 100 million chickens, turkeys and egg-laying hens in the US since 2022, according to the US agriculture department, creating an egg shortage that experts forecast to keep prices near all-time highs for months to come. … “Dominant egg producers — particularly Cal-Maine Foods — have leveraged the crisis to raise prices, amass record profits, and consolidate market power,” advocacy group Farm Action wrote in a letter to the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice. “The slow recovery in flock size, despite historically high prices, further suggests co-ordinated efforts to restrict supply and sustain inflated prices.”

1. Death of the pastoralists: The Great Serengeti Land Grab (The Atlantic)

Shortly after writing my little essay on the tragedy of the commons, I came across this devastating article in the Atlantic about the Maasai land grab in Tanzania. The gist is that the Tanzanian state, at the behest of foreign investors wishing to develop the big game industry, forcibly removed most of the remaining semi-nomadic Maasai people from their ancestral lands. The lands have been placed under conservation, but what exactly is being conserved? It is a heartbreaking read. Unfortunately, the arc of the story is one that readers of my Substack will recognize. The state tends to see such peoples and their way of life as obstacles to conservation and/or development. The magazine has made the following extract available for preview: 

It was high safari season in Tanzania, the long rains over, the grasses yellowing and dry. Land Cruisers were speeding toward the Serengeti Plain. Billionaires were flying into private hunting concessions. And at a crowded and dusty livestock market far away from all that, a man named Songoyo had decided not to hang himself, not today, and was instead pinching the skin of a sheep.

“Please!” he was saying to a potential buyer with thousands of animals to choose from on this morning. “You can see, he is so fat!”

The buyer moved on. Songoyo rubbed his eyes. He was tired. He’d spent the whole night walking, herding another man’s sheep across miles of grass and scrub and pitted roads to reach this market by opening time. He hadn’t slept. He hadn’t eaten. He’d somehow fended off an elephant with a stick. What he needed to do was sell the sheep so their owner would pay him, so he could try to start a new life now that the old one was finished.

The old life: He’d had all the things that made a person such as him rich and respected. Three wives, 14 children, a large compound with 75 cows and enough land to graze them—“such sweet land,” he would say when he could bear to think of it—and that was how things had been going until recently.

The new life: no cows, because the Tanzanian government had seized every single one of them. No compound, because the government had bulldozed it, along with hundreds of others. No land, because more and more of the finest, lushest land in northern Tanzania was being set aside for conservation, which turned out to mean for trophy hunters, and tourists on “bespoke expeditions,” and cappuccino trucks in proximity to buffalo viewing—anything and anyone except the people who had lived there since the 17th century, the pastoralists known as the Maasai.

2. Adam Tooze on the Green Energy Revolution (Adam Tooze’s Chartbook) 

We tend to think that revolutions in energy technology make old energy sources like coal obsolete. Once new energy stock like gas, nuclear, solar, and wind become (or will become) widespread, their cost goes down–and alongside that cost our reliance on older, cheaper, dirtier energy sources diminishes. Not so, the economic historian Adam Tooze reminds us. If you examine overall energy use on a global level, what you find is instead an “accumulation and agglomeration of [all] energy sources”: in other words, more fuel sources, old and new, in use than ever before. As Tooze points out, “even the use of traditional biomass has not decline[d] in absolute terms. More poor people consume more firewood for fuel. More rich people eat meat that drives deforestation.” Based on the data available, the vision of an inevitable green energy future appears to be a consoling fiction. Part of the problem, he thinks, may be outdated conceptions of energy: 

As Barak points out, part of the problem in understanding the true complexity of modernity is the very conception of “energy”. 19th-century physics defined energy as a universal force capable of being converted into different forms. It was thus fungible and universal. This conception set the stage for the stories of energy transition which both he and Fressoz expose as fragile historical constructs. Coal became the quintessential expression of that new idea of energy, allowing a mapping of the world in terms of energy flows.

That same universalized conception of coal as energy also then allowed one to imagine, coal being displaced by oil, which in turn will be displaced by nuclear power or renewables. What this ignores are the peculiar characteristics of each energy source, which means that as new sources of energy are introduced, the old are not generally discarded or simply replaced, but reconfigured and repurposed in new ways.

Side note: one of the things that interests me is the way that the physical characteristics of fuels determine energy flows and, in turn, shape our experience of the built environment. For example, oil and gas are moved through complex networks of hydraulics. Coal can be harvested, moved, stockpiled, and moved again; water energy is geographically bound to particular places. These characteristics determine the type of energy infrastructure we build and in turn our experience of the world around us. I’ve written about this elsewhere.  

Charles Joseph Minard, British Coal Exports, 1864 (from Chartbook)

3. “The future was social”: Stefan Collini on Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation (London Review of Books)

If you are interested in 20th-century economic history, consider taking a bite out of Stefan Collini’s lecture-ish review of a new edition of Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation, a seminal study of the revolutionary changes in England’s economic circumstances in the late 18th, early 19th century. Some of Polanyi’s claims have been superseded in the historical scholarship of the last four or five decades, but concepts like the fictitious commodity still have teeth (for this reader, anyway). Well worth a read. 

4. The Collected Letters of Emily Dickinson (New York Review of Books)

“A Letter always seemed to me like Immortality, for is it not the Mind alone, without corporeal friend?” Dickinson 

On a somewhat lighter note, two scholars of Emily Dickinson have finished producing a 955-page edition of the poet’s letters. It is an amazing accomplishment many years in the making. According to Christopher Benfrey, who reviewed the edition for The New York Review of Books, Miller and Mitchell (the editors) make a convincing case for approaching the letters with the same care and attention that scholars give her poems. The best course may be to see her letter writing and poetry as continuous practices that interweave one other. “Dickinson emerges as a great writer of prose as well as poetry,” they say, “that is, a writer for whom letters in part suspend the distinction between poetry and prose.” The review is full of examples of the gnomic, terse lines that you expect to find in her poetry, like this: “You ask of my Companions. Hills-Sir-and the Sundown–and a Dog–large as myself, that my Father bought me–They are better than Beings, because they know–but do not tell–and the noise in the Pool, at noon–excels my Piano.”