Essays
 

You Can Take the Boy Out of…?
An Essay by Geoffrey L. Breedon

The old adage is that you can take the boy out of the country but you can't take the country out of the boy. Being a country boy myself, I can agree with this. Although I now live in the fine borough of Brooklyn, just over the water from that supposed center of the universe, Manhattan, I still feel most at home when surrounded by trees and rolling fields. It is something so ingrained in me that I doubt it could ever be changed even if I wanted to. In fact, I used to live on the Upper East Side, but I discovered that having grown up with the constant presence of a horizon, I found it psychologically disquieting to be forever surrounded by buildings so tall that they blocked out this somehow essential perspective. Not that I don't love New York City. How can you not love a city where you don't need to own a car, you can get Chinese food delivered after midnight, and your rent costs more than most people's mortgages, car payments, and health insurance put together? There's no other city in the country I'd rather live in, and I've seen almost every major city in the United States. Now Venice, that's another story.

So, I am a country boy who loves the city and lately, I have begun to suspect that I am a disappearing breed. What I mean is, the countryside is disappearing and with it the country people, their ways of living, and their unique perspective, particularly regarding nature, the land they tend, and the notion of farming as a noble livelihood.

I grew up in a small rural town in Michigan. My family on my mother's side is quite extensive, she being one of six children. Though it was large, the family remained quite close for many years. Throughout my childhood my grandmother, my family and three of my aunts and uncles, with their children, all lived on the same quarter mile stretch of dirt road. Partly this is because we were a close knit family, whatever our typical familial tensions, but it was also due to the fact that my grandfather was a farmer with a generous heart. As wedding presents he would give each newlywed couple a plot of land to build a house and a new life upon.

Although it might seem strange at a time when families rarely live in the same city, much less along the same road, growing up so close to my relatives had many benefits, not the least of which was being babysat by my grandmother each day. It also had the benefit of activities being a gathering time for the family, whether it was building the basement for a new house, or slaughtering the chickens before winter. One of my favorite family activities was cutting wood. My parents, like many cost-minded country folk in the late seventies and early eighties installed a wood-burning stove to cut down on the heating bills. Of course, to cut costs even more, you don't buy wood, you pay a farmer to let you harvest his old trees. This is exactly what we did, led by my grandfather, also an owner of wood stove, and an expert with an axe and a chainsaw.

So, on those cool autumn weekends that other families were spending eating corn chips and watching college football, my mother, father, younger bother, grandmother and grandfather, and one of a several uncles, would pile into our pickup trucks and head for the woods behind a local farmer's corn fields. There we would fell trees, saw them into short logs, and pile them into the back of an old green '58 Chevy that had only two working gears and no headlights, a vehicle reserved just for such hard labor. In between chopping down trees for winter wood, we would eat cold meat sandwiches and hot soup served from a stainless steel thermos. During these breaks my grandfather would take me into the woods and try to teach me the names of each tree. He would show me how to identify each species by the bark, or the size and shape of the leaves. Birch, pine, oak, maple, cherry, willow, each one had its own distinctive features. Each one had a role to play in the forest.

Now I bring all this up because of something I read recently while researching a book I wrote about spirituality and globalization. It appears that while the average American can identify something like one thousand corporate logos, we seem to be able to identify fewer than ten plants, whether trees, flowers, or crops. This shocked and frightened me. At first in a superficial way, in which I mentally disparaged my fellow citizens for being so ignorant and out of touch with the natural world, and then more deeply as I remembered my wood chopping walks with my grandfather and realized that I had forgotten nearly everything he had taught me. Did the oak leaf have four points or five? How did one recognize poison ivy? What were the names of those flowers that grew wild in the marshes behind my childhood home? I realized with some regret that in the process of adapting to my urban existence I had let slip much of the knowledge of my rural past.

However, don't feel sorry for me. At least I know what I'm missing and I know how to recover it. But with some three quarters of the population of the United States living urban areas, and more of the rural countryside being paved over in a frenzy of development and sprawl, there are many, many people who will never know what they are missing, and who will have very little opportunity to discover it. I recently went home to Michigan and was more disturbed than ever by the contrast between my fertile memories of the countryside and the realities of the present.

I attempt to go home at least once a year if not more. My mother made the forgivable mistake of raising two highly independent sons, and so while the rest of the family, and indeed nearly the whole of my graduating high school class, has never left the state, my brother and I have chosen to live in opposite sides of the country, he in San Francisco and myself in New York. This trip home I was bringing my girlfriend to meet the family, so I thought it would be a good idea to show her the places I grew up in.

My first surprise came when I discovered that the dirt road leading to the road I grew up on had been paved. This road had always been in the worst condition, a road for which the description "washboard" was woefully inadequate. Named Bone Road, it would literally rattle the bones in your body no matter how slowly you drove down it. Not that it was named for this quality. It was named for the Bone family, as most of the roads where named. In fact I spent the first five years of my life living on Sager Road, my mother's maiden name and that of her father's family.

But the Bone Road I knew was no more and I sped down it at a speed I never would have imagined possible even in the most dangerous phase of my teenage driving years. But it wasn't just the road that had changed. The fields that used to grow corn were now development plots for houses. I turned on to the old road I grew up on. It was still unpaved, but it had certainly changed. When I left for college our house was the last on the road for nearly a mile. Now there are houses all along the road, wedged between small stands of trees, or squatting on what used to be golden fields of wheat. At the other end of the road, near where my grandparent's house sits, over the railroad tracks that the school bus would never cross on foggy days, I found more that just houses. The field that had been thick with rye the night I ran through it to carry out a lone act of senior vandalism upon my high school had become what was called in my youth a "subdivision," but which was now more pleasantly named a "housing community." Of course the average developer's idea of community and mine seem to differ quite a bit as these houses had no trees between them, no yards to speak of, no communal spaces, and no sidewalks. While I wasn't looking, the farms of my youth had been turned into suburbs as blandly conceived as those that had sprawled out from the edges of all the nations' cities. The startling part of this is that the nearest city of any note is nearly half an hour's drive away.

Of course, none of this should have surprised me. From September 1999 until September 2000 I traveled most of the continental United States as a tour manager for a corporate exhibit. During that time I had the opportunity to see some sixty-five or seventy major cities and much of the country in between. There were many things that shocked me about this journey, so I should have been well prepared for my annual trip home. Around the nation I found that inner cities were being deserted as living space and used, if at all, solely for business. Developers, aided by local governments, were pushing the urban living mode further and further outside the city centers. America is in the process of becoming one giant strip mall of ubiquitous stores and cookie-cutter housing. Often my traveling companions and I would be confused as to what city we were in because it looked so much like the last twenty or thirty. It had the same chain stores and the same chain restaurants in nearly the same proximity to one another. While this was occasionally helpful, because we would at least know where we were likely to get a good vegetarian meal, culturally it was stifling in its homogeneity.

So it shouldn't have surprised me that if I had seen farmland across the country consistently paved over to provide us with outlet malls and shopping complexes that a similar development would have arisen in my hometown. In truth it didn't so much surprise me as sadden me. And not simply because the nostalgic memories of my youth were being shattered by the dreams of developers, but because I feel that this very development, these antiquated ideas of modern progress, are seriously at odds not only with the realities nature, but also with the hope of creating a sustainable future for all of us.

Our current ideas of progress, particularly where urbanization and agriculture are concerned, seem very shortsighted to me. For instance, just to ask a practical, common sense sort of question; what will we farm on when we have paved all of our farmland to create parking lots, superstores, and gated housing complexes? The answer is quite simple; we have to convert it from either rangeland, farmland held for conservation, or forestland. Now, there are plenty of pro-development folks who will quickly point out that as a nation the number of acres of farmland in use has remained roughly the same for the last half of the 20th century. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Handbook #712 states that in 1945 we had a total cropland of 451 million acres of farmland with 363 million acres of land in actual use. In 1992 we had a total cropland of 460 million acres of farmland with 353 million actually in use. Pro-development folks will also mention that during that time we have increased the amount of land held for preservation and recreation nearly four fold, rising from 23 million acres in 1945 to 88 million acres in 1992. So, it would seem that we are not losing farmland at all.

In a general sense this is true, but in specific it is quite wrong. Specific farms, especially those closest to urban areas, are being developed and we are losing them. At the same time we were creating wildlife preserves and national parks, we were also quadrupling our use of urban land area going from 15 million acres in 1945 to 58 million acres in 1992. You see, the trick to maintaining the same acreage of cropland is to get it from somewhere else, and much of it comes from rangeland and forestland, which respectively went from 659 million acres and 602 million acres in 1945 to 589 million acres and 559 million acres by 1992.

While there are some experts who suggest that it is possible urban sprawl will result in a situation where the Unites States will only have enough farmland to feed itself by 2030, most prognostications are not that dire. However, farm conservation experts do say that we are losing more than a million acres a year of productive farmland to urban sprawl. In many places in the western states, particularly Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana, it is possible that we will lose some 24 million acres of Rocky Mountain ranchland to development.

Exacerbating these trends is the rise in corporate farms replacing the traditional family operated farms. According to Farm Aid, although there were 1.91 million farms in the United States in 1997, and families owned nearly 86% of them, a surprisingly small 2% of these farms, own by corporations, controlled some 50% of all agricultural business. Moreover, the trend is moving steadily toward corporate farming, with nearly 75,000 family farms having ceased operation between 1993 and 1997. Corporate farm holders will argue that they are more efficient and therefore better for the country. While the claims of efficiency can be argued, these farms cannot claim to be better for the communities that they reside in. Small family farms can support communities by providing work and income for a wide range of people while corporate farms do just the opposite, eliminating jobs and with them the livelihood that underpins rural towns. Corporate farming is devastating rural communities. Although this is more apparent in the Western states than in the Eastern states and California, because the greater urban sprawl of these places masks the effects of the shift toward corporate farming, it is becoming a reality in rural communities throughout the country.

While one would be tempted to blame this situation on the farmers who are selling the land it is difficult to hold them responsible in a nation that has so little respect culturally, socially, or economically for the small family owned farm, much less the rural way of life. Even my grandparents have optioned the land across from their house to a developer as a means of supplementing their retirement. And who can blame them? They're too old to farm the land, and a farmer's life does not come with a convenient 401K, much less a health insurance package. No, the blame, which is a strong word, but one that I think time will prove me correct in using, must be placed upon the developers and the politicians who facilitate their plans. This is not to cast developers and politicians as greedy despoilers of the nation's countryside, however true that may incidentally be. The real problem isn't that politicians and developers are evil simply that the filter with which they view the world has become clouded and less appropriate for the times we live in. Everyone has a worldview, including farmers, homebuilders, homeowners, developers and politicians, but that worldview is often inappropriate for confronting the circumstances of our contemporary world.

In the most general terms, a worldview is exactly what it sounds like, it's the way you view the world. There is a wide range of psychological and sociological research to support the idea that we all move through developmental stages as we pass from childhood to adolescence to adulthood. The interesting thing about worldviews is that they tend to become more inclusive and incorporate more viewpoints as an individual matures; at least until around the time they leave school. Psychologists Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson have correlated surveys of some 100,000 Americans and have determined that among adults in the United States there seem to be three dominant worldviews. They label these the Traditionals, the Moderns, and the Cultural Creatives. In their book Cultural Creatives, Ray and Anderson describe the Traditional worldview as "… a culture of memory. Traditionals remember a vanished America and long for its restoration. They place their hopes in the recovery of small-town, religious America, a hazy nostalgic image corresponding to the years from 1890 to 1903. This mythic world was cleaner, more principled, and less conflicted than the one that impinges on us every day today." In contrast, those with a Modern worldview "… are the people who accept the commercialized urban-industrial world as the obvious right way to live. They're not looking for alternatives. They're adapting to the contemporary world by assuming, rather than reasoning about, what's important, especially those values linked to economic and public life." Breaking with both of these worldviews, the "Cultural Creatives like to get a synoptic view-they want to see all the parts spread out side-by-side and trace the interconnections. Whenever they read a book, get information on-line, or watch TV, they want the big picture, and they are powerfully attuned to the importance of whole systems." Ray and Anderson's work suggests that about 25% of our population has a Traditional worldview, while 50% hold a Modern perspective and some 25% are what they call Cultural Creatives. Personally I suspect that this later number is actually much smaller when you begin talking about people perceiving the world with a mature "Integral" viewpoint, which is the word I usually use to describe this new worldview.

As Ray, Anderson and many other researchers, from Jean Paiget, Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan to Robert Kegan, Don Beck and ken Wilber suggest, there are deeper, more inclusive ways of perceiving the World available to each of us. If you are interested in a fuller exploration of worldviews, I would suggest reading either Ken Wilber's A Theory of Everything or my own book The Chrysalis Age.

The point of all this talk about worldviews is probably obvious. It is apparent to me, and to a growing number of people, that the worldview which developers and politicians perceive the world from, the filter they look at life through is wholly inadequate for the problems of the day. Neither a Traditional nor a Modern worldview is sufficient to deal with the questions of urban sprawl, loss of prime farmland, or the social and cultural effects of corporate farming upon rural communities. A Traditional worldview will seek to turn the clock back in to a previous time that will not be adequate for the conditions of the present. Meanwhile, the Modern worldview tends to be so utilitarian in nature as to view the natural world as merely a commodity to be exploited for financial profit and personal satisfaction. Only an Integral worldview, one that examines the details of the situation from all perspectives, cultural, social, economic, environmental, personal, psychological, and yes even spiritual, will be able to cope with the problems we are creating. Moreover, only an Integral worldview will be able to examine these problems, from various levels of depth, including the individual, the family, the community, the region, the nation, and the world. Additionally, only an Integral worldview will seek to incorporate mitigating issues that influence the situation, which in this instance would range from global produce production and consumption patterns, to the questions of genetically modifying crops and livestock.

Even the briefest Integral examination of the urban and rural situation in the country would find serious difference from our current, development minded path. In part this is because an Integral view of development and progress are a bit different than those of the dominant Modern perspective. A modern worldview sees nearly all growth as good, and all financial gain as beneficial. A Modern worldview does not weep when a field that once produced a thriving crop of soybeans is paved over to provide parking space for a Barnes and Noble. To a Modern worldview the market demands more space and the farmland fetches a fair market price. The Modern worldview has become so disconnected from nature that it no longer sees the value of nature in and of itself, and moreover, it is unable to see any value of nature beyond one that is primarily monetary. So, for instance, when a corporate farm begins buying up all the family farms in a region, as is happening quite frequently in the Western states, leaving the once prosperous and resilient farming communities to become ghost towns, a Modern worldview sees an increase in efficiency, an increased crop yield, and a mighty profit. In short, the Modern worldview sees this type of development as a clear indication of progress. An Integral worldview sees things very differently.

To an Integral worldview progress, development, and growth all have different meanings than those ascribed to these words by Moderns, particularly suburban developers and the politicians who support them. To an Integral worldview, development is a change in one or more aspects of a system, usually toward an increase in efficiency, but one that benefits the whole system, not simply a small portion of it. Growth is quite logically the physical expansion of a system, which can be healthy, as long as the environment supporting that system will sustain it. Progress is then a leap in complexity, or at the very least a change in the state of a system, that impacts positively on a broad spectrum of that systems components. For instance, real progress for the urban and rural state of affairs would be the development of manufacturing and commercial zones that did not induce sprawl, wasting prime farm land, but instead utilized existing and abandoned industrialized land. The Integral idea of progress would be to reclaim and remake urban centers to be able to provide affordable housing for the city's workers rather than inducing them to build gated communities where sunflower fields once flourished.

An Integral worldview wants a city that is pleasant to live in; that allows us to work close to home; that provides efficient and reliable public transportation; a city that doesn't separate us from the natural world; that has economic, cultural, and social opportunities for all of its citizens; that creates a sense of community rather than isolation; and that provides a healthy atmosphere to raise our children. This is the vision we should be creating for our cities, yet how many of our cities are being constructed with these desires in mind? And the situation is even worse in developing countries that are trying to mimic the madness of our Modern methods with a disastrous result. We need to construct and reconstruct our cities to align themselves with the full range of our human needs, psychological, cultural, social, economic, environmental, and again, spiritual. And just as importantly, we need to create this same vision for our rural communities. Rural communities are being given Walmarts, Home Depots, chain restaurants, and insipidly identical housing tracts when they really need vibrant small farms with diverse crops, local businesses owned by local people, and houses and towns that fulfill the full range of their humans needs, and do not simply provide a place to sleep before driving back into the city.

Moderns, and developers in particular, will tend to scoff at these notions and retreat to their somewhat justifiable claim that we can always create more farmland, so what's the big fuss? The fuss isn't simply that we are losing farmland, or that we are losing a traditional way of life, it's that we are losing these things and that we are not getting the things we really need in return. To flee the city and buy a house in the country ten feet from your neighbor's home with a lawn the size of a Buick, where you have to get in your car to buy groceries because there are no sidewalks, is not a substantial leap of progress from living in an apartment in a city with a nearby park and plentiful public transportation. Developers with a Modern worldview are not interested in building communities and providing the real needs of human existence. They are interested in turning a profit even when turning the soil might benefit the community more.

The real problem is bigger than the loss of farmland or urban sprawl. The real problem is that the Modern worldview is driving the world we are creating, and it the process, it is producing situations, some problematic, and some dangerous, that only an Integral worldview will be able to see in a complete enough manner to suggest possible solutions. For example, in regards to the issue of urban and rural planning there are some developers who have already found novel solutions, from the anti-sprawl zoning laws of Portland Oregon, to the ideas of New Urbanism found in communities like Seaside, Florida. New Urbanism, a design movement begun in large part by architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, is an attempt to replace the haphazard type of development so typical of most urban sprawl with a set of design principles genuinely intended to keep the needs of the human beings in the community as the central focus and driving force behind its construction. Their design principles include such aspects as trying to retain open spaces for nature and attempting to keep school and work spaces within walking distance from homes.

Another example of Integral thinking is the experiment in urban design called Arcosanti that has been slowly taking shape for the last thirty years in the desert seventy miles outside of Phoenix Arizona. Arcosanti is the wild fantasy made partially whole by the architect Paolo Soleri. Like some modern day Geppeto, Soleri is fashioning a community in the desert that he hopes will one day come alive on its own. Arcosanti is an arcology, a term Soleri coined that combines the words architecture and ecology. An arcology is a self-contained, single structure city that exists in harmony with its ecological surroundings. It maximizes space by eliminating streets and other wastes of land through what Soleri calls complexification, or the continual miniaturization of systems, similar to what is found in nature. Within an arcology nothing would go to waste, each waste product becoming the energy source of another symbiotic system, much like in an ecosystem. As for urban sprawl, it would all be upward, rather than outward, leaving the surrounding countryside either as farmland, or as nature preserves. Soleri's envisions arcologies ranging in size from the five thousand citizens he hopes will one day live in Arcosanti, to giant mega cities housing several millions. His ideas are revolutionary and his designs, such as those found in his classic book City in the Image of Man, are visual delights that send the imagination soaring.

We need the imagination of Soleri and those like him, but we need even more the Integral perspective that will take these ideas seriously and embark upon the thankless and tiring work of implementing them. We don't need it simply to save our farms, or to save our cities. We need the Integral worldview to save our global civilization from the dangers, potential and already present, that the Modern, and in some ways the Traditional, worldviews are creating. I'm sure you know what they are. You can probably name the list yourself; global warming, environmental degradation, nuclear waste disposal, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, genetic engineering, computer privacy, nanotechnology, economic instability, the list goes on and on. But it doesn't need to. We can change the way we see the world and we can change the way we create our lives within it.

Back in the woods when we were cutting down old trees to use for firewood I didn't give much thought to how Integral a solution it was for reducing a winter fuel bill. True, we only cut down trees that would die soon or were already dead, but was the burning of the wood less polluting than burning oil? The woodstoves of my childhood emitted between 30 and 80 grams of particulate matter per hour while today's models emit between 3 and 6 grams per hour. For comparison, the average truck emits around 60 grams per hour. But might it have been better to super insulate the house, investing in means of retaining what heat was generated? We did actually. And we covered the windows with heavy clear plastic to hold in even more heat, and kept the curtains closed when the sun went down. Today it is much more environmentally sound to use wood, a renewable energy resource, rather than oil, coal, or natural gas to heat your home if you live in the country. Is it the best solution? Were my grandfather's gifts of land as wedding presents the best solution to a need for our family's housing, or were they simply the first small steps toward urbanizing the farmland of my hometown? I'm not sure, but I am sure that we can think of more Integral solutions to all of our problems in the future if we begin today to make the effort to see the world in all its depth and complexity. Maybe it will even be some young teenager accompanying their parents into the woods some weekend to cut the fuel for the coming winters that will come up with these new ideas. And maybe it will be the children being raised on our farms today, those that are seeing their corn fields turned to housing plots, who will come up with the Integral ideas that will change the way we live in the country and in the city. Having lived in both, I can see how desperately we need Integral ideas to save each of them. If we don't, we soon will be unable to talk about taking the boy out of the country, because there will be only suburbs and strips malls left outside the cities. And how can you make a catchy phrase out of that?

Portions of this essay appear in the book The Chrysalis Age: A Handbook for Spiritual and Global Transformation for the New Millennium.

Links

Facts About New Urbanism
About New Urbanism
Acrosanti
American Farmland Trust