The Language of Work

“The Great Recession of 2008 proved every anti-capitalist critic right.” Thus begins a wonderful essay by Mark Kingwell, professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto in the July 2011, issue of Harper’s Magazine. He wrote the original essay for a book entitled, The Wage Slave’s Glossary. His piece caught my attention as I was meditating on the constant media calls for jobs and watching many of my neighbors without a job and the disquiet such status engenders. What is it about Americans and our addiction to work? Mark gives us some needed vocabulary to get at the back story behind unemployment and who’s to blame for it.

“The system was bloated and spectral,” Mark writes, “borrowing on its borrowing, insuring its insurance, and skimming profit on every transaction. The FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) sector had created the worst market bubble since the South Sea Company’s 1720 collapse, and nobody should have been surprised when the latest party balloon of capital burst. And yet everybody was.”

And then he adds a disturbing line, “Since then, new awareness of the system’s untenability has changed nothing. The role of gainful occupation in establishing or maintaining biological survival, social position, and, especially in American society, personal identity is undiminished.”

Capitalism is probably beyond large-scale change at this point, but we should not waste this opportunity to interrogate its most fundamental idea: work—Kingwell writes. The values of work are still dominant in far too much of life; indeed, these values have exercised their own kind of linguistic genius—creating a host of phrases, terms, and labels that bolster rather than challenge the dominance of work. Here Mark hits the mark!

The pervasive vocabulary naturalizes and so makes invisible some of the dubious, if not evil, assumptions of the work idea. First of all, what is work? To answer this question, Kingwell quotes Bertrand Russell who defined it in his essay in 1932, “In Praise of Idleness” this way: "Work is of two kinds. The first kind is altering the position of matter on or near the surface of the earth. The second kind is telling other people to do the first kind. The first is unpleasant and poorly paid. The second is pleasant and well paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension for there are those who give orders to those who give orders. A bureaucracy is composed of those who give the first order. If two opposite kinds of advice are given at the same time, then that is known as politics.”

Prof. Kingwell goes on to say that the greatest work of work is to disguise its essential nature. Work is the largest self-regulation system the universe has so far manufactured, subjecting each human to a panopticon under which we dare not do anything but work. When we submit to work we are guard and guarded at once.

Why has work as a tool of Capitalism spread so completely around the world and what purpose does it serve other than to create surplus profit for the taking? Even when we have become commodities to be bought and sold we do not stop to consider our squirrel cage plight.

Kingwell suggests that it is work that is the opiate of the people, rather than Marx’s religion. Work keeps the awareness of the hopelessness and meaninglessness of our daily lives from surfacing in our consciousness. If I’m working, I’m okay, we tell ourselves. Not to have a job or not to be working hard for the American dream is to be a loser! We never question where we got that idea.

Kingwell concludes with a quote from a French socialist, loosely translated to mean, “Beneath the pavement, see the beach!” Humans are not resources, we are not machines, we are not consumers, and the world is a site not of work but of play and delightful idleness.

An Antidote to Loneliness

One of the overriding concerns for the human species is what to do with ourselves between birth and burial. We are born alone and helpless, and for fully one-third of our lives we will require nurture and protection so we can enjoy the middle third. The last third is then on the down-hill side, when we become aware that we must meet death. At birth we are alone. And at death we are alone again. In between we spend our money and energy overcoming loneliness—which is how we express the consciousness of our de-facto aloneness and separateness from other human beings and Nature itself.

The existential question, or problem, that every human is asked by Nature is: “How can I find union within myself, with others, and with Nature? We all must answer that question, sooner or later.

We Americans often answer the question by not answering it--by living in a fantasy world, striking out reality inside of ourselves, living completely within the shell of ourselves and thus overcoming the terror of separateness. We try to overcome the anxiety of human distance by regressing to an earlier state of union before consciousness—never allowing even a crack between us and our childhood parents and the assumed security of their care. And, there are many other forms and intensities of escape which our society offers, and they serve this one purpose—to prevent a person from becoming fully born or fully conscious of our separateness and thus not having to deal with the pain.

Our society enables many to evade, or completely forget the question of Nature to us all, by occupying our minds with problems of prosperity, property, prestige, power and productivity. These occupations help us put off the question. When we deal with these distractions, we need only be awake to the degree that social functioning requires. We manage to survive rather than become fully alive, fully born.

Why is it that we are not more conscious, more alive and loving--besides the fact that our economy virtually enslaves us, and our media occupies our minds? What would happen if we were to wake up, to be born again? What happens is that, for the first time, a person becomes aware that they are alone, that they are frightened, that they are full of pain and anger. Before this moment, they lived with the necessary fiction of themselves as modest, brave and loving. This new insight will hurt, but it will also open doors. We will be required by this new self-awareness to stop projecting onto others what we repress (deny) about ourselves. Continued attacks on others is the surest sign that we have chosen not be born again in some dimension of our lives. They also assure us continued loneliness.

As a result of a new insight, we can become less repressed, freer, less in our heads, and more open to sensual awareness—especially to Nature. We can even begin to feel genuine compassion for others, which is the sine qua non for a relationship that is the antidote to our loneliness.

Based on “The Nature of Well-Being” quoted by John Welwood in Awakening the Heart.

Plum Silly

Last year, we had a very late freeze, which destroyed every blossom on every fruit tree on our place. We got nada for fruit. This year we had a normal cold winter with plenty of rain. We just missed a killing late freeze, and got our bees set up just in time for a major effort at pollination. All that to say, this spring we have had a truly awesome fruit set and promise of an overwhelming harvest. We have just harvested plums.

Never have I seen so many delicious plums on one tree. The secret? We did nothing. We don’t spray them with winter oil or any kind of insecticide, let alone fungicide. We lost one plum tree and one peach to borers, but we have nearly sixty-five fruit trees on the place. There are stink bugs on the rotting fruit, but no borers; and even the birds can’t make a dent in this harvest!

Each year we plant the trees that will take over the main production as the older ones turn into firewood and mulch. We have several varieties of plum to ensure vigorous cross-pollination. Our main producers are Methley and Bruce, but we
also have Santa Rosa and Wixson as well. All seem to love the sandy soil and sunshine. We do fertilize them in spring with either chicken litter or some triple-13 to provide some needed phosphorus for the blossoms. They are also mulched with hard wood chips. We have had to water them this spring because of the hot weather and being behind over 6 inches in rainfall.

Nevertheless, these four buckets of plum are one picking and we have had three pickings for storage. We eat as many as we can without getting sick—right off the tree! Nothing more gratifying than watching a grandchild stuff her mouth with juicy, entirely natural, home-grown fruit!

The not-so-fun part is pitting them and getting them ready for the freezer. We haven’t decided exactly what we want to do with them, except that it won’t be make jam. Not with all that sugar! We are leaning toward fruit leather and just a compote for breakfast and on desserts. As tedious and messy as the job is to cut up and pit the plums, a system like that shown in the picture allows two people to work and turn 50 pounds of whole plums into 25 or 30 pounds of pure fruit in less than a hour.

We won’t feel the pain when you pour this fantastic, sweetness over our home-made ice-cream in the summer!

Nutrient Cycling in Small Pasture Paddocks in Rotation

Spring has come to East Texas. March, and it is hot already between episodes of freezing. The fruit trees have all blossomed out and are laden with pollen which the bees are busy hauling back to their hive. Spring is a lovely time to walk about and enjoy the new life rousing from its winter slumber. Spring is also a time to get ready for the hard work of gardening and field planting if we expect a decent summer harvest.

Our veggie gardens are in good shape and the soil is ready for compost and plants. The tricky issues evolve around planting grain patches and making sure the pastures are in prime condition for forage. We are committed to grass-fed beef with supplements of grain when the mama cows are fresh. Grass, with the exception of alfalfa, and clover, just do not provide all the nutrients a cow needs for steady milk production along with a good body score. We’ll grow the grain (corn and sorghum) near the fish ponds so we can “fertigate” these heavy feeders with fish waste. Getting pasture soil fertility right—and I don’t mean in theory—is the hard part.

We know that we must build up soil organic matter to create the soil structure and fertility it needs for its own sake. Soil is a living biotic community in its own right. To grow a rich pasture forage crop on top of that means even more nutrients must be added. The problem is relatively simple to state: the mass balance of organic matter (OM) in the soil must be maintained, so whatever you take from the soil, you must put back. Here’s an example—Coastal Bermuda-grass in Texas producing a stand of grass equaling 6 tons of weight over the course of a year will remove about 258 pounds of nitrogen (N) if it has a crude protein of at least 12%. That’s pretty good coastal hay. You will also lose 60 pounds of phosphorus (P) and 280 pounds of potassium (K).

Lucky enough, the small cows we have weigh about half of a normal cow and eat about half. Our mama’s require about 40 pounds of grass a day and 2 pounds of richer supplements. Given the ideal three head herd (2 mamas and 1 bull), they together would consume 120 pounds of Coastal a day for 365 days or a total of 44,000 pounds, which is 22 tons. If we get 6 tons per acre, we will need about 4 acres in pasture. This we have already set up in paddocks for rotation.

You can begin to see the problem we face. We will remove 4 A @ 258 lbs. = 1000 lbs. of N, 4 A @ 60lbs = 240 lbs. of P, and 4 A @ 280lbs. = 1120lbs. of K out of those four acres this year. How will all that macro-nutrient get returned to the soil along with enough extra to keep the soil OM going for its own sake?

Fortunately, with the right rotation through half-acre paddocks, we can keep all the dung and urine from the cows on the pasture. Some of it volatilizes and leaves as gas, but most of it is buried underground by dung beetles and other critters. Our paddocks are contoured, so we get very little to no run-off and uniform infiltration of water and effluent. For the sake of this discussion, let’s say we get back 80% of what the animals ingest. We will need to find the lost 20%, which is not small change--200 lbs. of N, 48 lbs. of P, and 200 lbs. of K to make up the loss and maintain the forage mass balance—or maintain the soil organic matter (OM) annual equilibrium.

But the forage loss is not the only loss in the system. The soil by itself, without any kind of tillage or crop, will lose 2% of its organic matter annually. Let’s assume we begin with 40,000 pounds of humus per typical acre. We have less, but a 2% loss would leave 39,200 pounds. That’s 800 pounds of new humus to add per acre per year--just to keep up. To get that 800 pounds per acre back in the soil, I must add over a ton of plant residue per acre per year in addition to the loss from forage.

I can make up the humus loss by importing large, one ton bales of Bermuda hay in the winter. I can also mow the grass the cows leave and allow it to rot in place, reducing the nutrient demand a little. However, to get a forage crop without ruining the soil, I must buy and spread chemical fertilizers carefully, based on regular testing. No one has yet showed me how to make up the losses organically. I get lots of theory and advice, but I have not seen a system that works without chemical inputs that has functioned for longer than ten years.

The Amish get around this mass balance dilemma by using zero tillage, all their manure, and herbicides instead of fertilizer. It’s a sustainable practice, obviously, since they have been doing it a long time and are economically and ecologically successful. I cannot afford the equipment for zero tillage, nor do we have the space. The average Amish farm is over 100 acres. Mine is 12. While I understand herbicides, I choose to err on the side of limited chemical fertilizer when soil and forage tests show a need. Small amounts of chemicals will not burn the microbial biomass and do not lead to salting.

Some folks would argue that all the nutrients I need can be found in the soil microbial biomass, held in microbe bodies. If I broke them down, the nutrients they hold would be available. Let’s look at nitrogen. Say I have an optimistic 4% total biomass in my soil and the total OM (humus and microbial biomass) is 80,000 pounds. My loss is 2% or 1600 pounds of organic matter per acre per year. Of that organic matter 5% is N. I would lose 80 pounds of N per acre just from soil respiration—not a crop!. I must input over 2 tons of detritus (biomass) per acre per year just to maintain the original OM equilibrium. What would it take after that to get a crop?

I now need to know what I will lose to any crop. If I plow or till, I will lose even more OM as CO² to the air. Just to grow pasture grass with decent forage quality, I will need to find over 200 pounds of N per acre per year. 80% of it will cycle back in waste, but I have to have the N available before that. If 2 tons of detritus yields 80 pounds of N as above, then I will need to import over 5 tons per acre to get the N I need organically. Furthermore, I will lose the N in the soil to microbial decomposition of the detritus for about 4 weeks after every application.

It would seem that if I put 8 acres to grass pasture and mowed, hayed and manured all of these, I could conceivably meet all my nutrient needs organically. That’s an IF I don’t have the luxury to assume.

Wisdom from the Garden of Eden

Spring is here and thoughts turn to gardening.

One of the great, universal stories of mankind from ancient Egypt to modern America is the story of the Garden of Eden. This story explains one thing above all else when it comes to gardening—we expect it to be hard work, with lots of weeds and pests. We get our food the old fashioned way—by

working for it. No wonder the mall and fast food are satisfying. No sweat. Food appears magically.

Technology seems to have undone the curse of the Fall. At last, humans have overcome stubborn Nature that throws up its thorns and weeds to punish us. We are “round-up” ready!

Not so fast. There is another way to “read” this great story of gardens and thorns and trouble. I came across it in Gary Coate’s book, Resettling America, 1981, as he related it as originally told by Gregory Bateson, who is perhaps our centuries’ most important, systems thinker. It goes like this:

Once upon a time there were two anthropoid creatures who lived in a garden. They were more intelligent than the other creatures. They could talk and think. The garden was beautiful and provided for all their needs. It was a balanced ‘system,” an ecology, if you will, that included humans naturally. The two enjoyed the place and its ‘grace’. Everyday was a gift—each receiving and each giving.

However, one day on their walk-about, the two humans observed a new fruit way up high on a strange tree. It was beautiful. They could not reach it on tiptoe. Adam sat in the shade and began to think. He wanted to pick it, to taste it, and perhaps own it. He let Eve taste it first to be sure it wasn’t poisonous. It’s newness and elusiveness frustrated him. Suddenly he had an idea. He sent Eve off to find a box. Standing on it, he still could not reach it. He sent her for another, and another, until he finally was able to pick that fruit.

It didn’t taste that good, but the two were intoxicated by their discovery. They had found the best way to get what they wanted. Make a plan. Follow steps ABC and you get D! They began to do things the new way, by specialization and planning. This new way took over the concept of their own total system natures in the context of total systemic Nature—the Garden, or as they called the higher mysteries of how things worked, God.

After they had cast God out of the Garden, they really went to work on their purpose driven lives!

Pretty soon the topsoil was gone, plants had become weeds and some animals pests. Adam found cultivation very hard work. He did not like sharing the fruit of the “sweat of his brow.” I am being punished by an angry God, he thought. I should have never climbed those boxes.

Things began to change between Adam and Eve too. Eve was caught up in her purposive activities just as much as Adam. She resented his intrusions for sex and even more that she had to be the child bearer. The pain at birth angered her. How come Adam could do this to her and just watch? She resented him and his strength to rule over her. Her ability to enjoy being alive in her body, to love, to provide hospitality were all diminished. God has punished me, she thought. He should defend me!

They both came to resent the place and the hard work they had to do every day. They were afraid to leave by themselves, so they left together with their children. They never wanted to go back there again.

It should come as no surprise then that the next generation had a great deal of trouble with love and kindness and relationships. The humans, Home techne and Homo fabre, had difficulty finding anything meaningful in life. They wandered around a lot. Their first son, Cain, however, took this purposive business to a new level. He not only fashioned tools, but weapons. With these, who needed boxes. You could make anyone you want climb for you! Food anytime, anywhere!

But Cain grew to hate his little brother, Abel, who wandered around without purpose and did not help him with the business. Abel was a shepherd, and seemed content to live in the natural world with its constraints and limitations. He seemed lazy to his industrious brother. He refused arms to protect himself and yet he was unafraid in the wild. Able even shared food with his busy brother. So why would Cain want to kill him? The memory of the Garden was disturbing and was incarnate in his peasant brother. It haunted Cain and made him question his purpose. Cain’s new God assured him that life without this bad memory would be better. Put this reminder of the Garden out of your mind!

So he did. He literally buried it. And then Cain had his own son, Enoch. Father and son constructed the first and archetypal city where the Garden was totally out of mind. Everything was man-made and artificial. The consequence of building with boxes was long forgotten. Here was a “box” fit for human habitation--tall, neat, and controlled. This is the box in which we find ourselves today.

The Wisdom of Creation (Nature) and the consequences of disregarding The System in which we live are severe, but not irreversible. God is not a punishing God—remember, the story begins with Grace! The System still works and continues to offer all of us its original grace and wonderful gifts.

Cathy and I have left the city, but we still climb our “boxes” to get our food. We hope they will be fewer each successive year as we step down and learn to live with more Grace.

Bees

Nothing makes you feel like Spring is here than to see and hear bees buzzing in the soft blossoms of a fruit tree. There is so much hope and energy in that tiny body and the hive they all work so hard to sustain. There are thousands of books on the shelves from ancient times right up to today on the subject of bees and their culture—apiculture. None of them capture the reality and mystery of a living hive. These tiny insects draw us from our libraries into the garden to listen and wonder as they feed, clean, nurse, and defend their queen and coming generations, and, finally, die of exhaustion.

It was my privilege to work in Africa with traditional beekeepers and their iconic log beehives hung from a tree on a forked stick. Recently many Africans have found the top bar hive less destructive of hives and a shift in apiculture across the continent has occurred in the last century. They work their bees just like we do with a little narcotic smoke and no shirts or screens or gloves. African bees are anything but gentle, but they are tough. We may need to see some of that toughness bred into our very gentle but weak strains of bees. American forests still hold strong bees that are disease resistant and yet gentle, so we may yet find improved varieties that will overcome the onslaught of disease and environmental compromises that trouble American bees these days.

If bees are in the plan for your homestead, the best advice is to read everything you can find and then attach yourself to a local beekeeper with a good long history of not just commercial beekeeping but a love of bees for their own sake. They yield their secrets to love, and that may be why they are dying in this age when everything is turned to productivity and profit. I actually think they are the “canaries” in the economic mine-shaft of contemporary capitalism run amok. Their stress and immune failure and compromised health from environmental toxins parallels the human condition perfectly. Stop the gentle rain of coal fired mercury and cadmium, arsenic, nitrous oxide as well as the benzene and chlorine by-products from other industries and we may find that we and our bees are feeling better. Unfortunately, profits will trump health every time in our current economic system.

But we must go on with life and so will the bees. If you are lucky to find a hopeful beekeeper, he will surely begin his instruction by revealing the hives division of labor. Let’s assume you have figured out the bee hive structure itself from a diagram. You’ll confirm this knowledge as you go along anyway.

He will pull off the top, and using his hive tool, wedge open a brooder frame to show you his queen who is very shy and very busy—diving into cells and depositing her eggs as fast as she can. She’ll be longer than the others as you can see in the picture. She will almost always be covered by her attendant bees who feed her and clean her. There will only be one queen, although others will be nursed and ready to take over from her in a process called supersedure. If she weakens, she may be killed or have to kill a rival to continue the right to propel her genetics into the future. She manages the hive by her pheromones (scents that she emits) to signal work to do or conditions to be achieved—its too hot y’all, cool this place down etc.

The worker bees are short and have wings that do not reach their stingers, which are immature mating apparatus. They have two distinct composite eyes. They are all female, and they number in the thousands, changing their diet and work roles as needed by the hive.

The other type of bee in a hive is a drone—yup, the males, who number only a few hundred at most. Drones are bigger around and hairy compared to workers, and their wings are longer, reaching past their abdomen. They can also be recognized in the melee of a hive by their massive eyes which seem to cover their heads like helmets.

These guys, like male elephants, are sent off to a holding area where virgin queens fly to find mates of different genetics. Several drones can mate with one queen, and she holds their sperm in a vesicle in her body with which to later fertilize her eggs.

How does Nature ensure that the genetics of all these bees don’t get mixed up and weaken the entire species? It just so happens that after every drone mates, he loses his “stinger” and dies. Thus, he is unable to mate with his own progeny.

It isn’t true that without bees there would be no pollination, but they are such a pleasure to have on the property. The honey isn’t such a fantastic health food as it is high on the glycemic index, but hey it isn’t worse than sugar and far better than the toxic waste of artificial sweeteners.

But I think bees, above all, are important as a symbol of ecological health. Like hawks and owls, they signal health and the absence of toxins and pollutants in the food chain. The bees are far more sensitive and are in fact the early warning system of environmental stress. They are also a living feedback system to its caretakers, telling them how well they are doing with the bees and thus their entire ecosystem.

This pictures a friend from Africa handling his beehives, created from logs.

The Dawn of a New Age

It is winter in Texas now, and unusually cold. All of us are anxious for spring to arrive. This cold reminds me of a winter a decade ago in Raleigh, North Carolina. A group of friends had met for breakfast with one of the world’s great human beings, the late Thomas Berry.

With his back to a big fire, he spoke to us in his gravelly voice, listening to our questions and concerns. Then, gently and efficiently, with a twinkle in his eye and his crooked grin, he explained his views about our issues. I wanted to know how to guard the “individual” person, tree, leaf, etc. as we move into a new age of the ecological when whole systems are what’s important. I did not want to lose the gains of the last age, the Anthropocene, when human beings differentiated from family, tribal and now even national herds. What he said is a summary of his two books, “The New Story” and “The Great Work,” which was published before he passed away in 2009.

Essentially what he assured me was that in the new paradigm for the 21^st Century (the dawn of the Ecozoic Age) was that the positive gains of differentiation that had been won would not be lost but in fact continue. He explained three concepts that would distinguish humans in the Ecozoic Age:

differentiation, subjectivity, and communion.

As regards differentiation, it seems that one of the primordial intentions of the earth process is to produce variety in all things from the atomic structures of plants and animals to the appearance of human beings, who differ from each other more extensively than beings in any other realm known to us. Not only do human individuals differ, so do social structures and cultures.

Thomas insisted that the value of an individual was the inherent and indestructible foundation of Nature. But he then reminded us that there was no “model” for how to be an individual human. Trees and animals had one, but not people! This lack of a model offered in Nature created a spiritual vacuum in cultures, which have always sought to fill it with their religious heroes and behavioral restrictions. America today is a cultural war zone between corporate business and corporate church as to who will determine the meaning of being an individual. In response to either artifice, we must simply be what and who we are and open ourselves to the larger life.

After differentiation, the most important value is subjectivity—interiority. Every being has its own unique essence, its Self, its mystery, its sacred aspect. To deprive any being of this sacred aspect, to diminish the interior self, is to disrupt the total order and intention of the Universe. Reverence will be total or not at all! The Universe does not come to us in pieces any more than a person stands before us with only half of their body or part of their being.

Finally, there is the intercommunion of the Universe within itself and each part with the whole--each particle in communion with every other particle in the vast web of the Universe. It is our present duty to develop this capacity for communion on new and more comprehensive levels.

So the call to each of us is to become our Selves and to honor all others as we begin, each of us, the great work of learning, restoring and loving our home, this Earth. And thus ourselves!