Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

Thanks to everyone that has commented on my blog either here or to me in person! I really appreciate it.

As my daughter would say (and she wasn't even around when it started): "That was the best decade ever!"

Here's to the beautiful and tough world we live in, to grief and joy, and all the blessings that befall us everyday.

The Magic Mountain

I picked up Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" (1924) in a really good translation by the unimaginatively named John E. Woods amidst the bodice-rippers on the twenty-five cent table at the Na'alehu Farmer's Market the other day. I came across this line last night: All sorts of personal goals, purposes, hopes, prospects may float before the eyes of a given individual, from which he may then glean the impulse for exerting himself for great deeds; if the impersonal world around him, however, if the times themselves, despite all their hustle and bustle, provide him with neither hopes nor prospects, if they secretly supply him with evidence that things are in fact hopeless, without prospect or remedy, if the times respond with hollow silence to every conscious or subconscious question, however it may be posed, about the ultimate, unequivocal meaning of all exertions and deeds that are more than exclusively personal - then it is almost inevitable, particularly if the person involved is a more honest sort, the the situation will have a crippling effect, which, following moral and spiritual paths, may even spread to that individual's physical and organic life. To track that sentence down took great skill in hypotactic sentence construction, of course, but even more courage. Going there, to the place where we all measure ourselves against what the world secretly whispers to us and what we expect of ourselves, is to visit a place of great incoherence and vulnerability. Just to speak of such things sheds a little light and courage in the darkness where we all go fumbling to make a life. Thomas Mann's novels are vertiginous, often almost frightening reading experiences. Well, and to live in Germany through the first world war and its aftermath would give you a front-row seat on the catastrophic melt-down of a civilization.

Post global

We are, I'm thinking, moving into a post-global world.
It is, in some ways, a post-apocalyptic world.
The great global system crashed, and now we know that turning every place into every other place just isn't very smart. Because you lose too much of the particulars that add up to a reality worth living in and being passionate about.
We lost track of the basics - of how life and lives are sustained - because we made money the measure of all things. But we didn't measure everything in money, not the things like sanity and safety, breast-milk and soil fertility, coral reefs and fresh eggs. So we were making flawed calculations and flawed decisions, becoming more and more alienated.
We are going to need to learn how to assign value to particulars, without making these places, people, or things globally interchangeable. We are going to have to learn how to value what is most valuable, in some kind of common language like money. I'm not sure how this is going to happen but it will, because there is no other way.
And we could lead the way.

War

My daughter announced to me suddenly: "Today Samson (her aptly named classmate) and I agreed - the people in Afghanistan should stop fighting and we should just be friends." This startled me. It seemed so fresh and radical.
I said, "You and Samson are right, however...it's not quite so simple" So then I had to explain 9/11, the war on terror, Bush I & II, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and all kinds of human insanity and bad-ness. I felt like I was justifying it by making it comprehensible. It is all just so stupid and yet hasn't it always been like this?
Humans have this burning need to be important - to be on top of the food chain. It's a lot easier and faster to get important by being hard-hearted, selfish, and greedy than by being kind, humble, and generous. It all unrolls from that little kernel: all the wars, Wall Street, and most of history.
You'd think that being important would make people happy, since we desire it so ardently. Sure, being important does provide lots of adrenaline thrills and there is no greater drug than home-brewed adrenaline. It just never ever ever is enough.
Nope, it's the nurturing and generous people that are deeply happy, which is some kind of quiet justice.
But we've really got to get a handle on the adrenaline thing - if we're ever to have a sane world.

First and last

My dog died about a month ago. I've been mourning. He was old and had lived a full, happy, but intensely arduous life chasing wild cattle in the mountains with me when he was young, and then herding cattle on the ranch later. He lived well and died well, free and in his element. Still, it hurts.
In some ways I saw, or felt, the world through him. He was a dog, he had fleas, and did gross dog things. Still he had a fine mind and spirit. In his last days, in the midst of many trips to the vet to try and keep him here, he showed me something very beautiful. He showed me how to sit and listen to the world. He did this with great intensity, almost as if he were hunting but different, and I could feel his mind out there in the wind and the grasses waving, the distant sounds of the ocean and the cattle bellowing, the light on the mountains and the hours of the night. It was different than a hunting mind though, it was letting it all in, in all its fathomlessness. He showed me the simplest possible happiness.

The Tao of Ka'u

The rain has come back tonight, suddenly, though I felt it coming hours ago and made sure to put my saddles away.

I was talking with my friend Dan yesterday, who was visiting Ka'u. He was asking about the connection that the people of Ka'u have with the land. It is hard to talk about the deep stuff, the feelings that run like a river throughout our lives.

It struck me tonight that living in Ka'u is a kind of religion or belief system - a stubborn belief in intangibles. Like the feeling of living in a landscape that shimmers in the sunlight, so full of primordial power it is, or the richness of recognition in the eyes one meets everyday. Like happiness - fleeting, capricious but unmistakable - a spiritual coconut that falls on one's head. Like the freedom to live and work with and among animals.

It is a way, a compass bearing through life, that Ka'u offers to those who choose it. But you have to decipher it slowly in the little things.

Stories

Ka’u is a dream, a memory, an intuition, an emptiness, a home. Ka’u is that rarest of things: a living place, a place where each person is part of the story, in which there is no movement which is not significant, no action that is not felt. Ka’u is a cradle of stories, a web of memories.

Ka’u is a failure, a loss, a place where people are poor, conditions have always been difficult. Ka’u is backwards, behind the times. Ka’u is intransigent. This is both a blessing and a weakness.

Ka’u is a geography of meaning. The names of places have dignity and are spoken of with fondness and reverence, as if they were people, very old and embattled by the winds of time.

Ka’u is a pebble of old memories stubbornly living on amidst the plastic glamour of the First World. Ka’u has roots in the forest.

Ka’u is the cradle of stories.

Once upon a time at the beach at Waikapuna lived a young girl. She lived in a rock-walled, thatched house with pebbles for a floor. Each pebble had been sought, picked up, and carried into the house. She ate fish and seaweed. She slept on woven mats on the floor. One night a man came to her as she slept and made love to her in the night, and left before light. He came to her for many nights. And very soon she was with child. The child she bore had green skin, and when in the sea he turned into a shark. The shark protected her and all her family. He was immortal and did not die even after she had died and all of her family had died or moved away. Under the waves of Waikapuna, a shark. As surely as men make love to women and as the sea is dark and seductive, stories are born here along with the children.

Congruous & Modular

I've been asking myself the question: does it make any sense to have a local economy as a goal? Can local economies still work? Or is the whole "buy local" trend just a nostalgic or even irresponsible fantasy? Has our population even here in Ka'u over-grown to the point where we must have global economies of scale for all of us to survive?

In the big picture, there's no doubt that we need industrial agriculture, with its complex set of technologies and skills, to continue to make enough calories available to all or famine will happen. At the same time our global system of production and distribution has become rigid and therefore inefficient. It also supports and is supported by a certain world-view which is overly simplified and therefore, basically, stupid. A lot of people growl about corporations, but there's nothing wrong with corporations in and of themselves. Corporations, big and small, are just one way to organize people and materials. It is the world view - the culture - that undergirds global corporations (and hedge funds and credit-derivative swaps) that is so ridiculous. Ridiculous because blindered and short-sighted. Ridiculous because sterile, obsessive, neurotic. Does anyone like to live in a McDonalds, an office tower, or a strip-mall? The stripped down environments that this world view generates just plain suck. They really are like malignant tissue.

Bryan Fagan's book draws strong connections between rigid, top-heavy, and overly centralized civilization and the inability to adapt to the challenges which extreme weather such as El Nino inflicts. Our business culture certainly has become overly rigid (banks "too big to fail") and top-heavy (bonuses), and definitely over-centralized (just try to start a small business).

Here's the weird thing from a food producer's point of view: the more involved you become with our modern system of processing and distribution, the less -pound for pound - the stuff you produce is worth. Why? Because your carrots, corn, cucumbers, or in my case, beef have to carry the weight of the entire structure, the top-heavy and elaborate structure of distributors and government regulators, bankers and insurance salespeople, truckers, grocery-store clerks, food writers, chefs, graphic designers, window-washers, janitors, etc, etc, etc. To support all that there is a relentless pressure to drive down the costs of the actual stuff that the system exists to distribute. It's the opposite of adding value. The structure overwhelms the content. And so we have CAFOs and GMOs, giant slaughterhouses and illegal alien farm-workers. It's not somebody else's problem. We are all implicit and complicit. And it is all much more fragile than most people realize.

Which gets me back to the title of this piece: congruous & modular. Which is how I am breaking down that the all-too-ubiquitous concept of "sustainability" in my mind. I think we should aim to build systems that are congruous with the scale and character of communities and regions, that are congruous with local values, the local environment, and the particular carrying capacities of local natural resources. We also need to build flexibility into our systems by making them more modular (rather than centralized, consolidated, or global) in character. As well as being flexible, modular systems are also more human-scale, and therefore have the ability to tap into the creativity of individuals more completely, which really is a profoundly under-utilized natural resource at present. These are both time-tested grass-roots survival strategies, of course, nothing new. But I think congruous and modular - which local systems generally are- is the way to go.

Books

I just read Flat-Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People by Jon Jeter. He argues that globalization and especially the "neo-liberal" free-trade regimens imposed on developing economies by the IMF and World Bank have destroyed local, regional, and national economies by flooding them with cheap foreign goods. Sound familiar? Jeter's antidote: government investment in infrastructure, worker education, and research, regulated trade, higher taxes, and...Hugo Chavez (!?)

Then I read The New Mediterranian Diet Cookbook, which has really yummy sounding recipes, but I still found it annoying because of that tone which people adopt when they live in farmhouses in Cortona, Italy and they like to rub your face in it. And then they want you to have all these different cheeses and olives on hand to sprinkle everything with, as if everybody has time for hunting down ricotta salata.

Ka'u has amazing things to eat and they just kind of show up, if you've lived here long enough and been reasonable civil to everyone. Like pink and red mempachi (squirrelfish) with their big black eyes, to salt & fry crispy or make into soup with ginger, onions, and tomatoes. Just as ravishing.

Now I'm reading Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations by Brian Fagan (so far, amazing.)

Free Enterprise

There are certain things that just feel good to do. One of those things, for me, are farmer's markets. I like being a vendor even more than being a customer. It is gratifying in that way that very basic human technologies feel right - you sense the echoes of thousands of years of doing this. There is nothing self-alienating about it; on the contrary, one of the big by-products of a farmer's market is a very rich sense of healthy human connections. It is community development in the very best sense. Casual, voluntary, not a government program.

Too often "community development"programs are just so seriously boring.

My daughter loves farmer's markets as well. She is working on getting the skills to do a transaction by herself. It's a fantastic learning environment. She will have a better intuitive sense of how a healthy economy actually works at 9 than I probably had at 19, maybe even 29.

There is a lot to be said for decentralized local food production, but for certain essential items of modern existence a "global" system is the way to go. There is no question that large-scale commodity production and distribution is much more efficient for a lot of things, if not everything.For instance you just can't grow wheat efficiently in Hawaii. Too humid, too much slope, acid soils etc. But everybody like bread - and automobiles and cell phones.

But our global system teaches us all to be stuck-in-self-gratification-mode consumers or beast-of-burden producers. It turns money into a math game untied from the human societiesthat money is meant to serve as a tool. We become opaque to ourselves, we don't even know how what we consume relates to what we produce, or what exactly it is that we produce. We lose the ability to make mental connections - to see our society or even our communities as a whole, and to believe in ourselves.

The kind of free enterprise that a farmer's market encourages is a beautiful antidote to the global system and the mindset that comes with it. It's a lot of fun and full of yummy things, too.

Berry's Husbandry

From Wendell Berry's "Renewing Husbandry:"

Soon the majority of the world's people will be living in cities. We are now obliged to think of so many people demanding the means of life from the land, to which they will no longer have a practical connection, and of which they will have little knowledge.....The problem of renewing husbandry, and the need to promote a general awareness of everybody's agricultural responsibilities, thus becomes urgent.

Part of the problem is that so far the movement towards a new agriculture - locally adapted, deeply rooted in place, small, resilient, human-scale - has been consumer-driven. It's been a foodie/Yuppie phenomenon. The farmers, and I'm talking the kind of farmers who have farming in their blood, farmers from farming families, have been terribly marginalized in all this.

Farmers don't talk a lot, and they really don't blog a lot. If you're talking, you're not farming.

It takes tremendous focus and self-discipline to farm sucessfully. I'm talking about farming as a profession here, not as farming as a hobby. Straight-up commercial farming, not experimental farming that is supported by the government, not farming as a setting for agri-tourism or eco-tourism. Not that I have anything against any of that. I'm talking about the farmer-farmers who grit their teeth and get the food out into the world. They are the backbone of any civilizational achievement, always. They produce. We need to make the effort to listen to them and rebuild our economy starting from the ground up. We need to support farmers with the same intensity (or more) as any endangered natural resource. When we get to the bottom of all this maybe that will become clear.

Being Part of It

There are important things that are really hard to put into words.

Tracy and I were playmates in kindergarten and first grade. After second grade my family moved away from Ka'u. Eventually, when I was in my twenties we moved back and started a ranch. Tracy also helps run her family's cattle ranch in Ka'u. We share fencelines and see each other almost daily on the backroads of Ka'u.

There are a lot of differences. I have one small child; she has a large family and a small grandchild. She's being here; I've been away for roughly half my life. She knows this community inside and out in a way that I never will. She knows who dated who in high school, what their parents thought about it, how many children they have and with whom. She knows all the high school kids by name. I barely know that they exist. She has that deep, multi-generational knowledge of the community that I don't have. I don't have a knack for it, and I made different choices with my life - I know what early morning looks like in Paris and Taipei. Now I like to stay here in Ka'u and learn the intricacies of this big country and little community bit by bit, although I'm still not any good at keeping track of all the strands of family history.

I wish I could be somewhere distant and exotic sometimes but I know that you can't have it both ways. There's a story that we are all making together. You're either part of it or not.

But this story, which is the internal story of a real community, and the value of it can't be counted, measured, "monetized." It's the opposite of money. It is more like literature, but it isn't written down, published, made into somebody else's experience. It's in the little things. You can destroy it just by looking at it with greedy eyes, just like any other intimacy. This is the intimacy of people, land, and sea. It is unbearably important and incredibly evasive.

Picking

Yesterday at the farmer's market, my friend who survived the Khmer Rouge period in Cambodia showed me a picture of her sister, who survived imprisonment, torture, and near execution by firing squad. She said, "That's my sister. She only came here once. We had her picking raspberries. My sister said 'worse than Pol Pot.'"

Approach

The thing is that farmers and ranchers are not very happy with modern agriculture and the current world order either. We aren't too happy with having to make a living on razor-thin margins, with having to produce food for 120 of our fellow citizens on average.

The problem is that we know how fragile our agricultural system is. We know how tough it is to provide our families with the trappings of a modern life-style from an agricultural livelihood. We know how few people are willing to live the life. We know that our agricultural system depends on people like us - depends on us getting up at often un-godly hours of the morning to do things that are not as pleasant as drinking coffee and typing on a keyboard. We know the tough choices that we have all had to make to keep on doing what we do. We respect each other.

Living agriculture is a lot like living on a active volcano, as we do here in Ka'u. When you live on an active volcano you know that it could all explode tomorrow. When you live agriculture you stare down the basics of human life every day. You don't think about Armani Exchange or Airbooks very much. You witness and work on the difference between eating and not-eating every day. This is where you come from. It makes a lot of the criticism of the modern food system seem pretty trivial. As in, "So, don't buy the Doritos!"

Counterbalance

This is a great article.

http://www.american.com/archive/2009/july/the-omnivore2019s-delusion-against-the-agri-intellectuals

I love Wendell Berry, Alice Waters, and crew as much as the next person, but we have to temper idealism with the complex and often unpleasant realities of what it takes to have a minute percentage of the population providing the basic life support systems for the entire civilization. Unavoidably, "what it takes" isn't always all bucolic and heart-warming. I do welcome the critical attention being paid to agriculture and the heightened awareness that comes with it, but criticism has to be tempered with a big dose of respect for the system, however imperfect it may seem. If we crash the financial system, we all lose money - big deal. If we crash the agricultural system, it will be really, really bad.

No can help…

I’ve not been feeling quite right lately. I forget what I am doing, lose track of my car-keys, wallet, credit cards all the time - it’s comical. There is constant unease to everyday life, different than I’ve experienced before. I don’t know how to deal with it.

I am theorizing that this is not just a personal failure, that many others are feeling something similar, but perhaps expressing it differently - in the variegated forms and degrees of depression, anger, or numbness. We are all worried, distracted, drained, unclear how to proceed, how to get through this.

Out of one eye I see our magnificent (it is!) American civilization continuing with its usual business: people drive their cars to work, buy their groceries, watch television, go on trips. There is noticeably less activity, but in general everything seems sort of normal.

In my other eye is a vision - an intuition that our civilization grew beyond its own structural support and, what is worse, began preying on itself. We've taught ourselves to take advantage of each other whenever possible. With that ingrained in our values, it will be a long time until we figure out how to build something larger than net worth again.

Right now no one feels very good. Even if you still have a job, there is anxiety and uncertainty. Will the situation improve soon, or will things get much, much worse? What will much, much worse look like, be like? No one knows. It makes everyone a little crazy...not themselves.

Work

I went to dinner last night with a beautiful (inside and out) lady originally from Cambodia. She was pregnant with 4 children when the Khmer Rouge took over and sent them all to work in the rice paddies. She gave birth without medical assistance and survived on starvation rations - one bowl of rice per a day - "I lived on coconuts." After the Vietnamese overthrew the Khmer Rouge, she lived for six months in a Red Cross refugee camp. She made it to Oregon but there her Cambodian husband left her. But she survived it all. She remarried and she and her husband produce some of the most beautiful vegetables and herbs you will ever see. She works very hard even though she is in her sixties. She is as tough as my own mother, maybe tougher, and that is saying something. And she does it all so gracefully. The walls of her home are adorned with gorgeous Hawaiian quilts that she makes at night.

When we were driving to dinner she said, "They should only make one kind of car, one color." I think she's right.

We don't need shiny cars to make us feel good. We need more people like she and her husband - they are practical people who work fiercely hard and smart but they are also extremely creative. They have very high standards in what they do. They are willing to do new things, test the boundaries, take chances. They are, above all, tenacious.

beauty

Everyone (I hope) has been graced by one of those moments when the most everyday sight is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen. If you have children it's almost common - those moments that take your breath away. It is one of the rewards for the unremitting labor of being a parent. It is love that makes such moments possible; the vulnerability of love. The revelation of beauty that love provides is graced by gratitude. You realize how much you have, what a gift it is to be there witnessing whatever it might be.


It is such a different kind of beauty than which is constructed to stimulate our desire to consume. That beauty is all about surface gloss, ownership, power or the wish for power or status or some kind of momentary feeling of success. It is not about love at all. It is a chimera, and the pursuit of it, even if momentarily successful, is never satisfying.

Honolulu Green

I spent the last couple of days in the upscale urban heart of Honolulu, an environment so relentlessly artificial it might as well be on the moon, and I began to understand some things. I began to undertand where city-dwellers come from a little better.

With every view-plan dominated by right angles and every foot-step paved no wonder the denizens of this world crave "green." I imagine that most everyone that lives in such a world is haunted by a sense of loss - a vague desire for more life in their life, for a reconnection with "nature." The easiest way to assuage this sense of loss, as well as all other discomforts, is by... shopping. That is where green products come in.

The white-collar urban life is so physically un-demanding that being a vegetarian makes a whole lot of sense. Instead of physical work, city people have "work-outs." Honestly, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense for an actual creature to lay down its life to provide calories for work-outs.
Someone needs to figure out a way to capture all of the "work-out" energy and transform exercize into a renewable energy source.

One of the reasons that Honolulu seems so artificial is that it is a resort city. It is an apex organism, a money-making machine that serves a semi-parasitic role in the world. In exchange for providing a fantasy environment the city reaps the disposable income of the tourists that flock from East and West to escape from their overly-mechanized lives in other money-making machines.

sustainability

As futurist Lowell Catlett wisely pointed out, there is still a LOT of disposable income out there in the US. We still are ridiculously rich. Most of us have multiple vehicles per household. We may be in a low but only relative to the crazy highs of recent years.

The danger in this situation is we will damage the foundations of our economy in the downdraft. The re-assessment of our economy and society that is going on at every level is a good and necessary thing. We all knew we were in a bubble. We also all know that the stimulus funds are just a temporary cover for the real work that needs to be done. The danger is that much of the stimulus funds will go towards one-time projects, however worthy, that don't strengthen a critical capability or seed new businesses.

We have worshipped growth, out of fear that if you are not growing, you're dying. Brute growth, growth for its own sake, leads to bubbles, but we do need to make progress, keep getting better, grow in quality and not necessarily quantity. We do need to make progress and fast at finding a sustainable source of energy for our civilization. Without energy we will all need to start studying the Amish.

The concept of sustainability has its own problems. First of all, one meaning of the term seems to be about finding a stasis between available resources and our economic appetite. The dark side of statis is rigidity. Sustainability itself should not be the goal of our civilization. It is the means of the long-term survival and well-being of our communities, cultures, and natural environment.

Second, what we take for granted in the term sustainability is the assumption of a first world, middle-class lifestyle. What is coded into the term is the birthright to interact with the world at the level of products and brand names, of services and trends.

It isn't really about sustainability, but sustaining the lifestyle to which we've all become accustomed

LAX

LAX is the polar opposite of Ka'u and that's why I like passing through there.

It's an antidote to my own little not-even-rural anomaly of a world. It's like getting a slap in the face.

Any other large, completely artificial, utilitarian, and business-like installation would create the same effect. I admire the vision, will, ruthlessness that created LAX, the Burbank cargo airfield, LA in general. Maybe admire is too strong a word. Awe-struck?

This is our world, too big and complex for any one person (not even the sage of Omaha, I suspect) to comprehend. It's too big to fail. It's not working too well lately but even the smartest of us can only nibble around the edges hoping for some kind of miracle.

People can say this stuff about "this is your world" but it's only very slightly true. The world makes us. We try to find someplace where we can do our thing, pursue our dream of acclaim, prosperity, security, or whatever and hopefully won't get smashed in some turn of the gears.

I wish we could do better for ourselves.

Perhaps we need to learn to make the distinction between necessities, improvements, and entertainment, prioritize our choices, and build our economy based on these distinctions. We have to "see" all parts of our civilization, not just the finished consumer goods - the steel that goes into engines, the naptha crackers that make the plastics, the machine that plants the carrots, and the water-system that irrigates them. We need to see where the raw material comes out of the ground and the people and machines that mine, grow, transport, transform them. We need to see the value-chain of materials and labor that make up our world. We need to see these things but not in hysterical, sensationalistic, guilt and recrimination-driven "exposes" but in a serious and respectful way, so that we can see the connections between our lives and the resources that go into making them.

It is too easy to slip into a lame finger-pointing pseudo-radicalism that forgets that we are all just people doing the best we can in a world that any one of us, honestly, only partially grasp.

Rural

I'm reading a book called "Rural by Design" by Randall Arendt. If you're interested in land or community planning it's a valuable resource, providing fairly specific antidotes to the suburban sprawl and commerial strip patterns that are so obnoxious a part of modern life. This is all good stuff.

The funny thing for me is that the word "rural" means quite a different thing than it does to the author. To me "rural" means a community that still is fundamentally connected to the land. To the author, and there's nothing wrong or right about this, "rural" means rural residential lots and subdivisions, basically pre-suburbia. Farmland and open space amount to the same thing. It's something you set aside and preserve not something that is has anything to do with the residences that will go onto the landscape. At the most you might have some "community gardens" in the plan.

I find this really odd. It's an indication of how marginal my point of view is, because I know the author has the numbers on his side.

Truly rural people need a spokesperson. Lots of them, actually. What we've got out there talking for us are a bunch of omnivorous foodies.

It's a brave and beautiful thing to live with the land, to find a spot to work with and then create some piece of a working paradise. In a world that has lost its way chasing dreams of "wealth," facades of "power," and the glamour of "high" technology, it is something rare and beautiful to be strong and wise enough to be able to feed other people.

You don't make a lot of money at it, but you get rich.

Connected

Sometimes when I meet people and they'll ask "where are you from?" and I'll say "Ka'u." Then I get this look that says "why would you do that?"

I like living in Ka'u. Most other places seem a little dead to me. Which may seem like a very strange thing to say, but I'm not talking about night-life here. (Night-life is fine, I like getting really drunk in dark places with strobe lights as much as the next person.) No I'm talking about another kind of dead, dead as in disconnected. I feel very alive and connected here in Ka'u. You could say this aliveness is spiritual, cultural, and social, but mostly it is an environmental connection, and here I'm defining "environmental" my way, since I'm no kind of environmental activist.

Imagine living in a place where the winds have names. Imagine living in a place where you get most of your food by growing or catching it for yourself or as a gift from friends and neighbors. Imagine a place that makes your heart sing like a tuning fork.

When (first world!) people start going off on needed to save the planet and save this and save that, I think that this is what they are looking for: a life that is connected to the land.

But they've long ago lost the path to here. Choices were made long ago about what the world is like. Most people are prisoners to a job, a mortgage, car payments, tuition, but most of all, prisoners of what is perceived as success, what is expected of them, what is normal. They inherited a world, an operating system that floats above, disconnected from the strength of simple things.

And yet feeds off of these "natural resources" without acknowledging them. And so there is this movement to set things right, and yet it comes mostly from inside this disconnected "dream space", this operating system that is so comfortable, clean, and shiny. There is a "demand" for "green products" and "green packaging." There is this frenzy of recrimination, environmental self-righteousness, green life-style tips. It's all just noise inside a bubble, because it doesn't take into account the realities that make all that frenzy possible. Food, house, paycheck - where does it come from? If you don't start from that, if you don't have quite a bit of humility and integrity about that, you are being deeply dishonest. The wilderness is not just something to be enjoyed and preserved, it is also where we came from.

Here's the heart of it: find out where you live and live there. That is the basis of everything. You cannot have a whole and healthy society, economy, culture, environment without knowing, loving, and contributing to the place where you live. What is the wildness of it? How would you make a living here, if this place is all you had? Go out and do something if possible - build a rockwall, catch a fish, dig in the earth. Strip away all the layers of civilization and find the kernel of life that connects to a place. Then you will begin to come from someplace real.

Ka'u culture

Ka'u is a kind of island within an island. Hawaii is, so I've read, the most isolated islands in the world, and Ka'u is one of the most remote spots in these islands. We have our own world here, our own culture, and much of that culture is entirely invisible initially. We don't have colorful traditions or costumes. We don't speak a different language.

What there is - a feeling for each other that comes from shared lineages. Sometimes these are lineages of blood or marriage. Sometimes they are lineages of memory - stories and adventures that were shared however long ago. Most of all there are lineages of service to each other - kindnesses (kokua) that are never forgotten and pass on to the next generation as legacies of goodwill. That is why family names are so important.

We go on and on, weaving these stories together against the magnificence of our landscape, the sweep of the land from Mauna Kea to the brilliant dark ocean. This is the art form that we love, where the landscape, the winds, the shining grasses, the ocean, and the people are all mixed up together, so we hardly know what is what. We keep on making it and loving it, despite everything.

Daily Budget

I've been thinking about this concept of "green" a lot lately. I'm starting to get it. For a rural agricultural producer the "green trend" is a little puzzling. Especially the part where people who would starve to death in a month if the oil got shut off recommend earnestly that you go "organic."

The green trend seems to be a consciousness-raising campaign for consumers - all the people who work in offices and who sip lattes and have no idea where the coffee, milk and paper-cup came from.

At it's best "green" seems to be shorthand for "lessen mindless waste of resources and yet not give up any of the comforts of being a privileged citizen of the first world."

Here's the part where it gets dicey. I saw a clip of "Food Inc." where someone says "consumers have to demand healthy food!" That word "demand" bothers me. We've created a "consumer society" in the US. So demanding something as a consumer can be very effective in the short run. And healthier food is certainly a valid issue as 90% of the stuff in the average store (even health food store) is rubbish. Convenient rubbish. But demand only works if : 1. there is a solvent company/business model/ food system to make your demand upon, and 2. you support your demand by buying the healthier products and keeping the company/supply-chain that is trying to cater to your demand afloat. That word "demand" assumes a whole lot of work, organization, and management. Demanding is not enough. Everyone needs to look at their own lives and see what they are producing.

I've been reading a brain-candy-ish book on the oil industry "Oil on the Brain." The writer takes us on an oil-themed tour of the world: LA gas station, Long Beach refinery, East Texas oil rig, US Strategic Petroleum Reserve, NYMEX oil exchange, Venezuela, Chad, Nigeria, China, and back to the gas-station. None of it is very pretty. And yet this is what we are. It's how our lives work. We've all been eating oil for decades. What are we creating with it? I hope that it is more than a consumer lifestyle, which we will somewhat mitigate by being green. What is the point of all of our busy lives? How will we balance the budget of our own daily lives, so that we all produce or create a little more than we consume?

So I took my annual trip out of Hawai'i to the "mainland. I went to Albuquerque. I like Albuquerque quite a bit. First of all there was a lot of empty land all around the city. Desert for miles, punctuated by occasional geometries of green - irrigated alfalfa fields I'm assuming. Flying into the city there were more fields of green, this time with buildings and house interspersed. From the direction we took flying in, there were none of those tracts of pretentious houses built in the great Housing Bubble of the last 2o years. There were some pretentious country manor-type houses fronted by 5 acres of horse pasture, mixed in with fields of row crops and more alfalfa. This was a city with it's toes still in the country, which for me is a very good sign. I was visiting Albuquerque for the trienniel meeting of the National Association of Resource Conservation & Development Councils - a kind of NGO sponsored by the US Department of Agriculture.

I got to the conference late but just in time to hear the keynote speaker, Dr. Lowell Catlett, a agricultural economist, futurist, and Dean of the Department of Agriculture at the University of New Mexico. I fell in love instantly. Dr. Catlett took us on a roller-coaster ride of ideas and stories. Here's the refrain: "You cannot have healthy humans if they are separated from plants and animals!!!

He was preaching to the choir, of course. If there was one thing that binds the group of 800 representatives from councils across the country, it was that all of us, despite all societal clues and suggestions to go for the easy money, have chosen to live in the most intimate and strenuous relationhip to plants and animals possible - that of farmers and ranchers.

But Dr. Catlett made this point: science and the public are catching up to us. His speech was titled "The Greening of America." The largely instinctive choice we all made decades ago to attend to the plants and animals is now being played out as a national "green" trend.
This trend rides an inarticulate longing and a massive accumulation of wealth - "I want a farm - I don't know why." This presents, in Dr. Catlett's view, a huge opportunity for those in agriculture and conservation to provide these born-again farmers and ranchers with the services they need to fulfill their dreams. Interesting...