Four years ago, I turned my life over to subsistence farming. I wanted to find out what it cost for me to live. The answer grew until it was too large for me to hold all at once - until it hurt to hold it.
I wrote this piece, on the value on of what I produce:
Jesus himself answered the question that I asked during the school, the question you referred to:
“Might the missionaries have considered that Jesus was incarnated where and when he was because that was the place and time of greatest need?”
Following is taken Mark 2:16-17, an Indigenous Translation of the New Testament:
When the Separated Ones (Pharisees) and the scroll keepers saw Creator Sets Free (Jesus) eating with outcasts, they complained to his close followers, saying, “Why does your wisdom keeper keep company with tribal tax collectors and other outcasts?”
Creator Sets Free (Jesus) overheard them and said, “People who are well do not need medicine. I have not come to the ones who are already walking the good road, but to help the bad-hearted and broken ones find the way back home.”
This is beautiful, Vesna. Thank you for sparking the conversation. I sense we've got many more ahead of us, and I look forward to them all, should we be granted the chance. With love, Adam
I wrote this comment on Chris Smaje's blog a moment ago. It is "awaiting modernation" at the moment, presumably because of the multiple URL links within it.
* * * * *
“Imagine having an organic farm that you have brought back from continuous corn production.
What incentive do the new users have to maintain the resources (sustainability and all) when they don’t own the land?”
I’d like to offer a conceptual framing to be employed when thinking through questions of this sort.
The present globalized economic (and technological) systems are linear, not circular. These integrated systems strip the soil, ecosystems, biodiversity… everything in an extractive linear way. As Nate Hagens has wisely said recently, (paraphrase) “not a single industry on Earth today would be profitable if it internalized its negative externalities.” (negative externalities defined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality )
What I’m getting at here is that the entire system of the Megamachine has the character of cost externalization — which is really mostly just harm to the biotic commuinity, to social health (well-being), most everything of real value. If you don’t know what a paperclip maximizer is, google it. Then consider that the Megamachine is a short term ‘profit’ maximizer.
If every industry on Earth would not be profitable if it had to pay its own costs of doing business, rather than externalizing those costs, then the world system (the Megamachine) is designed to wreck everything in the name of “producing wealth”. Keep in mind that in Middle English, the root of our word wealth was wele, which meant well-being. Well-being is synonymous with health.
What we need to do, and fast (!) is facilitate the emergence of an entirely different kind of culture, one which rejects the ideology and ethos of the Megamachine. That means paying the true costs, if money is to be the means of organizing exchange. And that means keeping the soil healthy, not stripping it over time. The soil cannot lose its fertility without externalizing costs — as stripping the soil in the short run is a form of cost externalization.
The political consequences of what I say above are enormous, obviously. Our current world politics is shaped by the ideology and ethos of the Megamachine, as is our entire economy. A small farmer using non- cost-externalizing methods cannot compete in the Market with the Megamachine’s industrial agriculture. It just cannot. Not yet. We’re not that kind of a people, and we don’t have that kind of a politics.
This is largely why I believe we should remove some things from the Market altogether, first among these being basic necessities like food, shelter, medicine…. But let’s begin with FOOD. If we achieve success in removing food from The Megamachine’s Market, by making food exist within a communal and regenerative system, then we’d have a lesson from that as an emerging post Megamachine culture and politics.
Wow, James. "The cost of doing business," could also be "the cost to the world of a human life," which has been growing exponentially as of late. I'll get you some fantastic writing by my man Stephen Jenkinson on this point, and the moral and spiritual cost of turning away from the grief of it. With care, Adam
I'm actually very uncomfortable with taking a theoretical stance which places "cost externalization" in sharp focus within it, because the framing of that is within the conceptual structures of mainstream modern economics (neo-classical economics), which I think is literally ungrounded. And by "ungrounded" I'm meaning "displaced" -- as in not really having place, nor having ecosystems... or even people for that matter. It has -- instead -- abstractions.
So I suppose I'm interested in de- or dis- abstracting as an exercise in theory. How do we walk back the notion of "negative cost externalization" into a space of sense making where it finds a place within what Dougald Hine wants to call "a living culture"? That's what I'm wanting to do. What better place to do it than with something as utterly concrete (in contrast with abstract) as soil? And in doing this with soil we are doing it with the larger category of land (in the Aldo Leopold sense). And to do it with soil and land is to do it with food. And to do it with food is to do it with farms and farmers ... and with local ecologies.
The trouble with economics is that it gets lost in abstractions. Or, rather, the natural and human world become abstracted, abstractions. The flesh and soul are not acknowledged, nor the soil and the wildlife.
I basically want to help us all begin to use language in a way which allows us to make the kind of sense the soil makes. If we can do this with soil, we can do it with food... and rain, and earthworms.
I want to insist that the real world is really a real world, and that abstractions are at best maps, models, theories... and these can be useful as abstractions, but only if they keep our senses near the Earth.
Have you read Leopold's Sand County Almanac, Adam?
"Brittle stories have no room for the unwelcome stranger."
That's one of the best lines ever.
As I contemplate this line in its setting (context), I realize there are so many ways to face a brittle story one has been living within. One way (or type, with many sub-types) is to desperately cling to the story in stark terror of not knowing how to live outside of it. The other major type (with many sub-types) is to let the story's thrall over oneself begin to dissolve, with a willingness to open well beyond that story.
I've been following a path with the second major type playing a central role. And now I cannot follow it, for the story of following it has revealed itself as brittle, insufficient, lacking. I no longer have much of a story to hang onto. That may change if I am able to surrender to the unraveling of the present. It's clear to me that something is calling which is out beyond all stories -- some remembered capacity to feel the essences which the best stories often flow out of. To feel it directly, without relying on story, map, model, theory, ideas.... To feel it without hesitation or revulsion (moving away) coming from the grief so close to the use I've too often put to story. I could tell that story, but it's not important. I was born to live in the world beyond belonging as property. That's as much of the story as I can tell, to hint at the grief I hint at.
Thanks for being true, Adam. Thanks for speaking for the story under the story.
Oh, and I'm sorry for such a long delay on our little project. I've been living in a place of stripping down which is a bit tumultuous. But I'll pick it up again soon! I hope!
So so so good. And thank you from me here at what might be a brights earths church.
Blessings and thanks to you, Caroline.
'Bright' earth...
Four years ago, I turned my life over to subsistence farming. I wanted to find out what it cost for me to live. The answer grew until it was too large for me to hold all at once - until it hurt to hold it.
I wrote this piece, on the value on of what I produce:
The Value of Living Crisis:
https://walkingwithgoats.substack.com/p/the-value-of-living-crisis
I'm glad to have found you, Adam. Thank you for writing.
Thank you for your kind note. The encouragement means a lot. With care, Adam
Jesus himself answered the question that I asked during the school, the question you referred to:
“Might the missionaries have considered that Jesus was incarnated where and when he was because that was the place and time of greatest need?”
Following is taken Mark 2:16-17, an Indigenous Translation of the New Testament:
When the Separated Ones (Pharisees) and the scroll keepers saw Creator Sets Free (Jesus) eating with outcasts, they complained to his close followers, saying, “Why does your wisdom keeper keep company with tribal tax collectors and other outcasts?”
Creator Sets Free (Jesus) overheard them and said, “People who are well do not need medicine. I have not come to the ones who are already walking the good road, but to help the bad-hearted and broken ones find the way back home.”
This is beautiful, Vesna. Thank you for sparking the conversation. I sense we've got many more ahead of us, and I look forward to them all, should we be granted the chance. With love, Adam
I wrote this comment on Chris Smaje's blog a moment ago. It is "awaiting modernation" at the moment, presumably because of the multiple URL links within it.
* * * * *
“Imagine having an organic farm that you have brought back from continuous corn production.
What incentive do the new users have to maintain the resources (sustainability and all) when they don’t own the land?”
I’d like to offer a conceptual framing to be employed when thinking through questions of this sort.
The present globalized economic (and technological) systems are linear, not circular. These integrated systems strip the soil, ecosystems, biodiversity… everything in an extractive linear way. As Nate Hagens has wisely said recently, (paraphrase) “not a single industry on Earth today would be profitable if it internalized its negative externalities.” (negative externalities defined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality )
What I’m getting at here is that the entire system of the Megamachine has the character of cost externalization — which is really mostly just harm to the biotic commuinity, to social health (well-being), most everything of real value. If you don’t know what a paperclip maximizer is, google it. Then consider that the Megamachine is a short term ‘profit’ maximizer.
(Megamachine defined: https://theraven.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-megamachine )
If every industry on Earth would not be profitable if it had to pay its own costs of doing business, rather than externalizing those costs, then the world system (the Megamachine) is designed to wreck everything in the name of “producing wealth”. Keep in mind that in Middle English, the root of our word wealth was wele, which meant well-being. Well-being is synonymous with health.
What the Megamachine creates, for the most part, is not wealth, but illth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illth
What we need to do, and fast (!) is facilitate the emergence of an entirely different kind of culture, one which rejects the ideology and ethos of the Megamachine. That means paying the true costs, if money is to be the means of organizing exchange. And that means keeping the soil healthy, not stripping it over time. The soil cannot lose its fertility without externalizing costs — as stripping the soil in the short run is a form of cost externalization.
The political consequences of what I say above are enormous, obviously. Our current world politics is shaped by the ideology and ethos of the Megamachine, as is our entire economy. A small farmer using non- cost-externalizing methods cannot compete in the Market with the Megamachine’s industrial agriculture. It just cannot. Not yet. We’re not that kind of a people, and we don’t have that kind of a politics.
This is largely why I believe we should remove some things from the Market altogether, first among these being basic necessities like food, shelter, medicine…. But let’s begin with FOOD. If we achieve success in removing food from The Megamachine’s Market, by making food exist within a communal and regenerative system, then we’d have a lesson from that as an emerging post Megamachine culture and politics.
Listen to my friend Adam Wilson speaking on this.
The Food Church
https://rword.substack.com/p/the-food-church
Wow, James. "The cost of doing business," could also be "the cost to the world of a human life," which has been growing exponentially as of late. I'll get you some fantastic writing by my man Stephen Jenkinson on this point, and the moral and spiritual cost of turning away from the grief of it. With care, Adam
Looking forward to the Jenkinson, Adam.
I'm actually very uncomfortable with taking a theoretical stance which places "cost externalization" in sharp focus within it, because the framing of that is within the conceptual structures of mainstream modern economics (neo-classical economics), which I think is literally ungrounded. And by "ungrounded" I'm meaning "displaced" -- as in not really having place, nor having ecosystems... or even people for that matter. It has -- instead -- abstractions.
So I suppose I'm interested in de- or dis- abstracting as an exercise in theory. How do we walk back the notion of "negative cost externalization" into a space of sense making where it finds a place within what Dougald Hine wants to call "a living culture"? That's what I'm wanting to do. What better place to do it than with something as utterly concrete (in contrast with abstract) as soil? And in doing this with soil we are doing it with the larger category of land (in the Aldo Leopold sense). And to do it with soil and land is to do it with food. And to do it with food is to do it with farms and farmers ... and with local ecologies.
The trouble with economics is that it gets lost in abstractions. Or, rather, the natural and human world become abstracted, abstractions. The flesh and soul are not acknowledged, nor the soil and the wildlife.
I basically want to help us all begin to use language in a way which allows us to make the kind of sense the soil makes. If we can do this with soil, we can do it with food... and rain, and earthworms.
I want to insist that the real world is really a real world, and that abstractions are at best maps, models, theories... and these can be useful as abstractions, but only if they keep our senses near the Earth.
Have you read Leopold's Sand County Almanac, Adam?
The Externalizing Machine
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-10-11/the-externalizing-machine/
"Brittle stories have no room for the unwelcome stranger."
That's one of the best lines ever.
As I contemplate this line in its setting (context), I realize there are so many ways to face a brittle story one has been living within. One way (or type, with many sub-types) is to desperately cling to the story in stark terror of not knowing how to live outside of it. The other major type (with many sub-types) is to let the story's thrall over oneself begin to dissolve, with a willingness to open well beyond that story.
I've been following a path with the second major type playing a central role. And now I cannot follow it, for the story of following it has revealed itself as brittle, insufficient, lacking. I no longer have much of a story to hang onto. That may change if I am able to surrender to the unraveling of the present. It's clear to me that something is calling which is out beyond all stories -- some remembered capacity to feel the essences which the best stories often flow out of. To feel it directly, without relying on story, map, model, theory, ideas.... To feel it without hesitation or revulsion (moving away) coming from the grief so close to the use I've too often put to story. I could tell that story, but it's not important. I was born to live in the world beyond belonging as property. That's as much of the story as I can tell, to hint at the grief I hint at.
Thanks for being true, Adam. Thanks for speaking for the story under the story.
Oh, and I'm sorry for such a long delay on our little project. I've been living in a place of stripping down which is a bit tumultuous. But I'll pick it up again soon! I hope!
Meanwhile, may I republish this in The R-Word?
Hi James,
I love these musings. Yes, of course you are welcome to republish. With care, Adam
This holds so many resonances with the ideas of the gift economy - https://novasutras.org/2021/08/03/offering-gifts-novasutras-and-the-gift-economy. It also really made me smile when you began to describe the Bike Church!
Thank you for the link, Michelle.