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I strongly recommend James Rebanks’ The Shepherd’s Life. Some of you may already know about @herdyshepherd1 on Twitter (where I first ran across him), and you may wonder if the book is as good as his tweets. Better. You can find lots of reviews now, and his status on the bestseller lists (way higher than I’ve ever been, and deservedly so). He’s not just reminiscing about his life as a shepherd…he’s presenting an alternative life view to that most of us are familiar with. In brief, he’s from a many-generations-farming family in the Lake District, a region that, as he says, is perceived by England as a national playground, in which the only encounters between those who live there year ’round and those who vacation there tend to be confusing to both sides. As someone who grew up in a farming area with annual influxes of tourists (ours came in winter, from the upper Midwest and northern Great Plains mostly–seeking a cheaper Florida, warm and citrus-scented) I found a lot of parallels, even though South Texas has a much shorter history of crop farming…our farmers had all come in the 20th c.; my grandfather was one of the first. His “day job” was a hardware store; he worked on his land in the evenings and early mornings. Certainly our schools, like Rebanks’ school, had by the 1950s turned away from considering farming (other than large agribusiness) a suitable occupation for young men–unless of course they were “Hispanic” (newer term, supposedly less pejorative) in which case they were assumed to be capable of only manual labor. Men and women who were thought disposable, whose stories were never told because they weren’t the right kind of people. Eventually a brighter future would make them unnecessary.
From my own family, and from observation, I saw similar changes through my childhood and adulthood–a loss of respect for any traditions of land use, of older crafts and knowledge transferred hand to hand (like knitting) and generation to generation, with a strong push to move people towards more consumerism, more “progress,” more modern and post-modern attitudes. My mother–college educated, trained as an engineer–had nonetheless grown up among people who knew how to grow their own food, make their own clothes, build their own houses, and connect and cooperate with one another to make sustainable (imperfect, like everything human) communities. She loved new things, leaned to the future in many ways, but said one day “The day may come when you need to know how do the things everyone knew when I was young–and that knowledge is being lost, within your generation.”
Almost but not quite. I knit socks. I can make good bread. I have killed and helped process my own meat (not always, but more that a few times.) At one time, living in a city on a small lot, we raised about 35% of our calories. But what about the other way of thinking? I read an article in The New Yorker on the trip, about Marc Andreesen. “Tomorrow’s Advance Man,” by Tad Friend, presents Andreeson’s world view as the epitome of post-modern thinking: technology will solve all problems, anything standing in the way of any innovation should be ground down (“creative destruction”), the world is better for everybody than ever before (a sentiment quite a few people would find…peculiar) and so on. There’s a lot of the same contempt for people who do manual labor and especially those who like it as expressed by Rebanks’ teacher in a speech that finally sent him away from school at age 15. It’s the antithesis of Rebanks’ understanding of and respect for sustainable traditions and mindful “progress.”
When I got home from the trip, my copy of Rebanks’ book was in the store waiting for me, so reading it side by side with the article on Andreesen put a searchlight on the differences. Andreesen never talks about his parents–it’s over, he’s not there anymore, good riddance, is the tone. He is the man alone, the self-made man who needs no background, only his forward thinking mind. He might have sprung full-grown from a flask of genetic material. Rebanks talks about his grandfather, his father, the intergenerational struggles and conflicts and the final peaceful acceptance, about the community he lives in, as organic, complex organisms that have preserved life and productivity over many centuries. He loves the land, yes; he knows that shepherding, producing breeder sheep for other parts of the UK, is the way this land has been preserved and sustained for all that time.
Read his book. Read it again. I won’t tell you more of the story–it’s his life and his story to tell, and he tells it well. Compare it to the article in The New Yorker and to the articles and books by those who tout the perfect technological future and are willing to shrug off the hard-won wisdom of ages past. Do I hate technology? Of course not. I sit here typing away at a computer on a home wireless network in a house with electricity, where food is stored in a fridge and a freeze; my water comes from the city water supply (albeit we have the backup rainwater storage tanks); most of our food comes (unprocessed or processed) from the store, due to the uncertainties of rainfall here for the garden. I email manuscripts to my publishers; I have (now) a hybrid car; I hope to get solar panels up on the barn some year soon. Etc. Etc. But. But I know that technology has NOT made all the poor richer in what life really needs, not when people are living on landfills picking through the trash for little bits of things to sell, not when slavery still exists…and not when so many people, with or without enough food and a place to live and some modern gadgets are not getting the satisfaction out of life that their great-grandparents had because they’ve been displaced from culture, their family history, land, and meaningful (most than just getting paid) work.
And I know that contempt for manual labor–the assumption that progress means getting rid of it, and the people who do it–is stupid and short-sighted. My husband, almost 70 (next month) is hand-building the fence around our place, section by section. He’s not in great health. It’s taking him years. But the satisfaction he takes in that–that we both take in the check dams and gabions we built to slow and stop erosion–that we’ve taken in restoring native vegetation, building the rain barns to collect and store rainwater–is worth the sore muscles, the sunburn, the bruises and scrapes and the close encounters with wildlife of the deadly kind (western diamondback rattlesnakes in a proddy mood.) There’s been no income from it and lot of outgo–it’s not big enough for us to keep cattle on, in this climate–but just making it better, taking it from overgrazed, eroded, rapidly degrading land to the state it’s in today–has made our lives better, enriched them beyond any dollar amount. We both feel connected to our farming forebears and the crafts of the past even though we’re not on the same land, or doing exactly the same thing.
Yes, I’m going to say it again. Read the book.
And another view of our land shortly after all the rain–this is the dry woods swale, fed by a seep from a rocky hump to the right of the image. Everything that looks green here–that was bare, compacted dirt when we bought the place.
Comment by AnnN — June 6, 2015 @ 4:58 am
I’m about halfway through Rebanks’ book, reading in small chunks and mulling it over (this is my last weekend of working 7 days/week). The resonances (but not exact parallels) with various “at risk” youth over here is striking, but he had the advantage of a long lived deep community that gave him roots.
It is a powerful use of his education.
Comment by Jonathan Schor — June 6, 2015 @ 6:11 am
Sounds fascinating.
Comment by Linda — June 6, 2015 @ 8:25 am
Thanks for connecting us through twitter to James Rebanks … I too loved the book. Up here in VT we have our own challenges with tourists who sometimes see us as a place ripe for “modernization.” And there are many versions of that depending on whether one is a skier, a golfer, a hunter, snowmobiler, motor boater, power shopper, etc. And too many of them involve taking land out of farming and building businesses many folks want to get away from when they leave the city or suburbs. Yes, it brings in money, without which many families would not survive, but it is also a distraction from things which can add value to life.
I wish we had more people earning their livings taking care of people and their environment rather than profiting people who don’t care for the health of the whole.
Thank goodness we have Bernie here!
Comment by Genko — June 6, 2015 @ 4:27 pm
Ordered. Sounds fascinating. We’ve also commented around here about the fact that so many people no longer know how to cook, how to make their own clothes, how to raise food, etc. Along with that fear that at some point it will become important to know how to do these things again. Never mind how satisfying they are to do in themselves, how these kinds of activities connect us to our lives.
Comment by elizabeth — June 9, 2015 @ 8:33 am
There’s a great new article in NATURE about African vegetables that are rich in nutrition and adapted to African soils & climates–but require cooking techniques & combinations almost lost to “modernization.”
http://tinyurl.com/qdfszm4
I remember reading articles 10, 20, 30 years ago here and there about “heritage” varieties of familiar vegetables and the need to preserve food plants from “traditional” societies. It’s already too late for some–I saw a program on TV that mentioned how climate change is already wiping out high-altitude potato strains in the Andes.
A big problem is that self-sustaining community gardening/farming practices do not offer any profit potential to large multi-national agricultural corporations. You have to get the locals convinced that they must switch to planting your seeds, using your fertilizer, and your machinery, and then other machines to transport the new crops to markets where the population has been “educated” to prefer your kind of food.
Comment by elizabeth — June 9, 2015 @ 8:35 am
And mind you, I like being able to have good apples much of the year…something we didn’t have when I was a kid, because we had apples (and only one variety, not very good) for a few months a year, and one other variety for one month in mid-winter. But I could live without as much variety as we’ve got, and for many things would prefer more local varieties.
Comment by Daniel Glover — June 9, 2015 @ 6:38 pm
I find this a good counter point to the big write up about the social engineering that is supposed to occur with the Google car. One, lane for driving, one lane for drop off; high-density living with high expenses for those outside the grid.
Made me think of the Han in Philip Francis Nowlan’s original seminal serialized Buck Rogers stories–300 years early.
In this case we have met the enemy, and the enemy is us.
Comment by Jazzlet — June 10, 2015 @ 7:31 am
My experience of being brought up in a popular tourist venue was very different as Oxford is also of course a very old university city and tourists are coming for that history. Although it did point up the diffence between short time tourists, students who expected to spend at least three years at the university or the polytechnic (as it then was) and the locals attitudes to the city. I remember a student friend being appalled at the local working class accent coming out of the mouth of a beautiful shop girl and the discssion that we had about the real Oxford accent.
I was taught to ‘cook and sew and make flowers grow’ as well as to knit and I am very grateful that I was. I have had the pleasure of teaching others and seeing their joy in making something themselves even though they could have bought it cheaper. The ‘technology will do it all for us’ brigade do not understand the well researched benefits of these skills, especially not those connected to being out side. But far worse they dont have any plan for the people who will never be able to afford the technology, who will be left behind. What do they think will happen to all those people?
Comment by elizabeth — June 10, 2015 @ 8:12 am
Jazzlet: Some of the futurist-fans have convinced themselves that if only the tech goes far enough, everyone who is willing to work (!) will be able to afford it and poverty will vanish in a cloud of pixels. They point to the leapfrogging of communications technology in Africa and India, where cellphones are common and landlines never got built. I think they’re wrong; I think people are being left behind just as fast as–if not faster than–before, and left behind without the traditional survival skills (and the plants, animals, land) that existed before. I read a fascinating article in NATURE about the push to preserve and use traditional vegetables and fruits in Africa…where one of the problems is that those who knew how to prepare those foods are dying off–their expertise is being lost. The vegetables (once someone studied them) have many advantages–better nutrition and better adaptation to the local soils & climate. Some of the people doing the research now are aware that “improving” traditional crops to make them fit northern hemisphere notions of good farming practice (monoculture, use of fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation) may destroy some of what makes them valuable for subsistence farming: they grow without fertilizers, pesticides, or irrigation. But the push from international experts, used to food plants from elsewhere, is powerful–big international ag companies want another market for their expertise. And they don’t really care who starves. When I was a kid in South Texas, there were still old women (mostly) who knew the uses of native plants; the little “colonias” of the farm workers always had some of those plants around. But none of that was taught in schools; I knew about it third-hand, from classmates who told me about the curanderas (and brujas) but did not themselves know which plants or the preparation because they were second-or-more generation in town and their grandmothers and great-grandmothers didn’t speak any English and had little patience with too many questions even in Spanish. I know some of the edible native plants–by no means all. I experimented (to my mother’s horror, and I was lucky because some of the natives are highly toxic.)
Comment by elizabeth — June 10, 2015 @ 8:23 am
What concerns me is that discussion of the connection security for the self-driving car has fallen off, even after it became obvious that GPS navigation systems could be hacked. It’s not just terrorism–it’s the inevitable teeny-tiny flaw that no one saw ahead of time. Or the solar flare knocking out a satellite temporarily. While it works, the automatic car disconnected from the human brain is more efficient, will be safer. But what about when it doesn’t? No built system is perfect. There are always flaws–you try to eliminate them but time after time human designs have been shown to have flaws (the DC-3 may be the last one that didn’t, and it wasn’t so much a design flaw as a limitation of tech at that time. But having sat through an engine fire and dead-stick landing in a DC-3, I respect the quality of its design.)
I read a lot of disaster reports because disasters make compelling stories, and so often it’s a mix of immediate human error (the person at the controls right then) and previous human error/misdeeds (as when a bridge fails because the contractor didn’t use the specified material because it cost more, or the designer failed to account for the coefficient of expansion of a particular glass exposed to a particular temperature gradient and the glass shatters.)
Comment by patrick — June 12, 2015 @ 5:45 pm
Self driving cars both worry me and relieve a worry. I share your concern about hacking, security, and privacy. Also with our widespread reliance on GPS which could be knocked out by solar flares/meteor storms/hostile action.
And at least one self driving concept car had no steering wheel, with four seats facing either other. Arggh, no way to override problems.
On the plus side, a self driving car would allow those who are aging to stay independent for years longer. That person who can stay independent in my own home instead of being forced into shared care by loss of driving skill could well be me in 20 years.
These are complex issues with subtle interactions.
Seems ripe for SF exploration. 🙂
Comment by Ginny W. — June 13, 2015 @ 10:26 am
Over and over again technology has proven that it is impossible to design the machine to respond to the unexpected. But it is possible to train people to depend on the machine so they never learn to respond to a situation, or to repair the machine.
People were not really created for independence. Children depend on adults for care and teaching. Adults depend on each other in complex ways. Elderly people grow more dependent as part of the aging process, although this process is often as uneven as the growing competence of young adults. I would rather see us devote brain power to building strong communities than self-driving automobiles. Not that anyone has asked me.
We are in Colorado now, and there is alot of interest in sustainable local food production for the simple reason that we are 60 miles from anywhere else in a mountain valley. Food costs are higher because shipping is expensive. Also there is alot of land, although not much water.
Comment by Elena — June 21, 2015 @ 6:01 pm
On topic to the blog in general, but off-topic to any of the posts.
I saw this article, http://www.bbc.com/news/business-32977012 which reminded me of the story told to Paksenarrion about the Elf growing the harp from a tree.
Comment by elizabeth — June 21, 2015 @ 7:28 pm
Fascinating. It certainly seems feasible, using different trees in different climates. Thank you for the link.
Comment by Genko — July 16, 2015 @ 3:23 pm
Just got this book and am about a third of the way through it. It’s great, and I really enjoy the way he’s talking about the way of life and how incomprehensible it is to those who come in to the area. It would be wonderful if we could all communicate well with each other, but it doesn’t seem to happen much.
Comment by Daniel Glover — July 19, 2015 @ 1:08 pm
This just got a glowing review in the local paper.
Comment by Fred — August 28, 2015 @ 7:18 pm
I just finished the book a few days ago – the local library had 71 requests in front of mine.
Although I’m not a farmer, we have some in our family, and boy! does this ring true.
Rebanks is good at communicating something which is fundamentally difficult to get across.
I’d highly recommend this book. It deserves the glowing praise it’s gotten.
–Fred