![\"HerdyShepherd-book-2\"](\"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/HerdyShepherd-book-2.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nI strongly recommend James Rebanks’ The Shepherd’s Life.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em>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.\u00a0 Better.\u00a0\u00a0 You can find lots of reviews now, and his status on the bestseller lists (way higher than I’ve ever been, and deservedly so).\u00a0 He’s not just reminiscing about his life as\u00a0 a shepherd…he’s presenting an alternative life view to that most of us are familiar with.\u00a0 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\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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)\u00a0 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.\u00a0 His “day job” was a hardware store; he worked on his land in the evenings and early mornings.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Men and women who were thought disposable, whose stories were never told because they weren’t the right kind of people.\u00a0 Eventually a brighter future would make them unnecessary.<\/p>\n 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)\u00a0 and generation to generation, with a strong push to move people towards more consumerism, more “progress,” more modern and post-modern attitudes.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 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.”<\/p>\n Almost but not quite.\u00a0 I knit socks.\u00a0 I can make good bread.\u00a0\u00a0 I have killed and helped process my own meat (not always, but more that a few times.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 At one time, living in a city on a small lot, we raised about 35% of our calories.\u00a0 But what about the other way of thinking?\u00a0\u00a0 I read an article in The New Yorker<\/em> on the trip, about Marc Andreesen.\u00a0\u00a0 “Tomorrow’s Advance Man,” by Tad Friend,\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It’s the antithesis of Rebanks’ understanding of and respect for sustainable traditions and mindful “progress.”<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 Andreesen never talks about his parents–it’s over, he’s not there anymore, good riddance, is the tone.\u00a0\u00a0 He is the man alone, the self-made man who needs no background, only his forward thinking mind.\u00a0\u00a0 He might have sprung full-grown from a flask of genetic material.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Read his book.\u00a0 Read it again.\u00a0 I won’t tell you more of the story–it’s his life and his story to tell, and he tells it well.\u00a0\u00a0 Compare it to the article in The New Yorker<\/em> 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.\u00a0\u00a0 Do I hate technology?\u00a0 Of course not.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 I email manuscripts to my publishers;\u00a0 I have (now) a hybrid car; I hope to get solar panels up on the barn some year soon.\u00a0 Etc. Etc.\u00a0 But.\u00a0 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,\u00a0 their family history, land, and meaningful (most than just getting paid) work.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0\u00a0 My husband, almost 70 (next month)\u00a0 is hand-building the fence around our place, section by section.\u00a0 He’s not in great health.\u00a0 It’s taking him years.\u00a0 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.)\u00a0\u00a0 There’s been no income from it and\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Yes, I’m going to say it again.\u00a0 Read the book.<\/p>\n