Sharon Astyk and hard times
Thursday October 2, 2008
posted by Rod Dreher @ 9:07am Permalink Email This Add to »
Yesterday I was driving back from lunch and listening to a radio talk show. The interviewee was making a lot of sense. She and her husband are raising four kids on $40,000 a year in upstate New York, doing subsistence farming. When I tuned in, she was answering a listener who wanted to know how, if she worried that climate change was going to make the world a more difficult place in which to live, she could have four children. In response, she said that the problem is not too many people; the problem was the extravagant way we Americans use resources. I'm quoting from memory, but I think she said that it takes five or six Kenyans to equal the carbon footprint of one American. Her basic point was not that we Americans should live like Kenyans, necessarily, but that our views on population are skewed by the incredible, by any world or historical standard, amount of resources we Americans consume to sustain our lifestyle.
The woman was Sharon Astyk, and let me tell you, if you follow the link to her website, you'll spend a lot of time you may not have. I have a lot to do today, so I won't be able to give her site the attention it deserves. I promise to revisit parts of it in the coming days. Wired magazine describes Astyk as "kinda the Wendell Berry of soccer moms growing their own food." She's a bookish woman in early middle age who used to run a Jewish-themed CSA, but who now working full-time in farming and raising her kids. The gist of her advocacy is that we are all moving rapidly toward a condition of living a lot poorer than we do now -- but that this isn't the end of the world. We can and should live poorer, she writes, and that inasmuch as relative poverty is the natural state of mankind, traditional wisdom has a lot to offer us to help us not only survive poverty, but thrive in it. For example:
I think we are now at the point where the argument I've been making all these years - that peak oil will be less about whether there is gas in the gas stations or whether the grid crashes - and more about whether we can buy gas or whether the utility company shuts us off for nonpayment is pretty much certain. Right now, we are watching the crisis unfold mostly far from us. It is coming home - and rapidly, and we are shifting to a lower eocnomic level. For example, as the New York Times reports, retail chains are in real danger - remember, 70% of our economy depends on consumer spending. Most of us will cut back, and many chains will go bankrupt for lack of funds and credit - and that cascade of bankruptcies will further echo, as more and more of us who still have jobs and money to spend see no point in buying things at successful chains - why bother when the same jeans are available at 75% off at the going out of business sale of another store in the same mall?
We could make much the same analysis for many other segments of the economy. Whence the high paying NYC and other urban restaurants that depend on high finance types buying expensive meals? Poof! Whence travel and tourism in an era of unemployment and expensive gas. We may go some places - those who still have money may head to the beach, rather than Cancun - but the overall amount of wealth flowing through the economy will drop like a stone. And the fear takes the rest of it with us, as we become afraid to spend, afraid to invest, afraid to lose what little we've got left. Bailout or no, the economy is headed into something deep and dark, and most of us are going into this new world with it. Poverty is about to go back to being our human norm - just as it always has been for most of the world's people.
And yet, the reason I'm using Freud's language here isn't just to remind us that poverty is a normal state for human beings. It is in part to imply that there is a distinction between the deep suffering of what I would call "pathological poverty" and the functional poverty that is "ordinary human poverty", sometimes unpleasant, probably always troubling in comparison to the relative wealth we've had, but basically livable state. In it one can have periods, even long periods of happiness and security and comfort along with some less pleasant momemtns. And I believe that while none of us can insulate ourselves entirely from the trauma of the darker ends of this, there is a great deal we can do to ensure that our coming poverty is not the pathological kind.
I also love Sharon admitting that she's scared of what's to come, but that fear cannot be paralyzing -- rather, it should be galvanizing. It should make us act like grown-ups. Excerpt:
That is, when you become a parent, if you are going to be any good at it, a certain amount of selflessness and self-sacrifice is mandatory, but you do not, as some people seem to think, immediately become the sort of person who enjoys self-sacrifice and wants to be selfless. The ugly truth is that you are still the same greedy, lazy, selfish person you were before (ok, maybe you aren't, but I am). If you were the sort of person who would rather read a novel on the couch than answer the question "what does this spell" 78 times in a row, nothing about parenthood, or even love for your kids will transform you magically into the kind of person who finds having your novel interrupted every 2 minutes delightful. I know the world is full of better people than me, but the truth is that a lot of us are still the same ordinarily rotten people we were before we had kids. We just don't have the option of indulging our rottenness. That is, parenthood, for parents who really want to do it right, requires not that you be a good person or that your better nature predominate, but that you suck it up and do the unselfish thing anyway, even when it sucks, even when you don't want to, even when it is damned hard. Some people really are good, unselfish people - and that's great - I envy them. But it actually doesn't matter very much whether you are one of them or not, if you care about your kids. You have to go around pretending to be unselfish most of the time in the parent business.
The same is true about our present situation. This is scary stuff. There's nothing crazy or unreasonable about being scared by what we're facing. We've got bad news, and it is *appropriate* to feel bad about it. There's no reason we have to be fearless here - frankly, the only way I can imagine being fearless is to be stupid. But we do have to be brave - that is, we don't have to feel brave, but like the Cowardly Lion, like the Mom who doesn't really want to get up for the two am feeding, we have act the right way, to pretend as hard as we can that we have, as the song says, the nerve. And the amazing thing about pretending hard is that sometimes - not always, but just sometimes, you become, as Kurt Vonnegut put it, "what you pretend to be."
Which brings me back to fear, and the only antidote to fear I know - good work. I learned in pregnancy, facing labor (all of my labors were very, very, very long) to simply screw up my nerve, accept that the only way out is through, and to go forward. We're in the same situation now - the way out of this current crisis is through it, to go forward from where we are, with what we have and who we are. It isn't required of any of us that we not be afraid, or that we don't spend a lot of time grumpily wishing that someone else would do the work and leave us alone with our book. But it is required that while we curse fate, previous generations, the current administration, G-d and the Federal Reserve, we get to work. What work? Tikkun Olam, if you are a Jew, or even if you find the metaphor compelling - tikkun olam means "the repair of the world." In my faith, that is why we are here - to fix what is broken, repair what is damaged, to improve what can be improved. As the saying goes, it is not required of us that we complete the work, but it is not permitted for us not to try.
I'll be writing more about Sharon and her work. Meanwhile, spend some time on her site, and let us all know what you think. Oh, and buy her new book. I think we're all going to need her practical wisdom.
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