Growing the Renaissance: Our Nature, a Triptych, #2

Table of Contents

Reflections of Growing

Hardesty

Planting the Urban Forest

People, Creatures, Things, and Creations

Communion

Renaissance and Reconciliation

Regeneration

Reflections of Growing

Two years ago, I started writing Growing. It was six months of reflection of my entire life through the eyes of a state employee recovering from 2008 for five years. I still needed time to heal. When I wrote the book, I literally could have been fired for writing it. If anyone above me decided they didn’t like what I had to say, they could fire me immediately and reminded me often. After being laid-off on December 23, 2008, with absolutely no notice as my employer closed their doors, the fear was familiar.

I kept my thoughts off-record (if not to myself) until Ferguson. It challenged me. As Dad always said I, never had a thought I didn’t verbalize. After Ferguson, racism, hate, abuse, and ignorance were suddenly flowing freely as misogyny from the state capital, especially our building and most places out-state, besides Kansas City and Saint Louis. I’ll never forget the surreal dichotomy of spending the entire week at the State Fair while Ferguson and so many hearts were burning.

After that, I had to start speaking my mind, and it almost cost me my job. Luckily the Governor’s office, my Director, and a couple of good friends had my back when I needed it. After four years of not being allowed to have an opinion, too many others required me to have one. I finally realized that I needed me back too, and so did my family. The situation tempered my tone in the book. Still, as I look back, Growing was an accurate assessment of my understanding of the forest around me and represents a point in time for me, the economy, society, and our food system.

When I worked in the mountains, one of the main ecological challenges I faced was the invasion of the Wooly Adelgid, an invasive species attacking Canadian Hemlocks and wiping out centuries-old habitats throughout the Appalachians. We were working in mountain streams, where twenty to eighty percent of the winter forest canopy died in a matter of five years. We were planning and managing the succession of native species to replace them.

The goal was to minimize the damage to the rest of the forest ecosystem and create sustainable and regenerative ecosystems going forward. The loss of the Hemlocks could be as damaging as the loss of the Chestnuts if not handled correctly. The key to this work was to read the forest first, learn how it grew, what it grew from, how it had evolved, why it developed that way, the resulting ecological infrastructure, and life forces that could allow the forest to heal and grow if put in motion.

At the end of growing, my understanding of the forest and economy was far from complete, but it was an accurate reading of the trees, shrubs, flowers, history, and the damage from human intruders. I knew how we had gotten where we were. I still didn’t understand the soil, bacteria, fungus, insects, animals, water-life, or how they had evolved. I did appreciate their fundamental interactions and could see some broken links and healthy ones. My job with the State was like a cross between a hummingbird dancing from flower to flower and an owl stoically living among trees. I could occasionally land, but I would sit there wide awake, constantly bouncing between the micro and the macro.

I thought about everything and talked about it as I drove around the state, even if I was alone. I never had a thought I didn’t verbalize. Hopefully, I was helping people and pollinating their ideas along the way. I could get down to the ground every once in a while, and when I did, it was always a meaningful experience. For the most part, I had to keep my eyes on the trees so I didn’t crash into one. I had to be alert for predators trying to take me out constantly. I rarely got to land. When I could land, I moved from flower to flower, pollinating along the way and taking in as much energy from the flowers as I could. The people I helped gave me fuel to keep moving, just like the flowers fuel the hummingbird that rarely gets to land, in a world where sometimes you were forbidden to have a soul.

I never got to stay in one place long enough to learn my ecosystem or my place in it. I was always busy analyzing the situation and trying to help others. The work mattered and made a difference. Regardless, the politicians always ensured the program or message of the day came before the mission of serving the people who elected them. The corporations who owned them set that message. The deciders want it that way. That is how they keep their place, you in yours, and the voters in theirs.

I was also learning the same things happening in the economy were happening in me, my family, and my home. Growing was the first time I had verbalized this, even if only in print, but I was yet to reconcile it. The wilderness called me to find a place to work this out, but I also realized the wilderness is where I already lived. I loved the people working with me, but reality outside the halls of government was far from the view from within. I lived in two worlds; in the capital and the state.  

I was living in an institution, not an ecosystem. The mission was to continue and grow the system and institutions in place, not to regenerate or grow the economy and ecosystem as a whole. The perpetuation of the program was far more important than growing the species. As a result, the people the programs are for, and that implement them are often lost and lose faith in each other.

There are noble public servants in the institutional system, and I cherish their time with me. They are some of the most genuinely good people I have ever met. However, to find a sense of reward in that vocation, the happiest people are often forced to live two lives, one at work to have a sense of accomplishment and one at home to find reward. I have just never been able to do that, separate my family from vocation. I have always needed work we could all appreciate. The ends can’t justify the means. They have to be justifiable in themselves or are wrong.

We were some of the few that could find reward in the work the State gave us. My wife and I both could help people grow in areas of passion. Neither of us had standard 8 to 5 jobs. Often we worked with the same people, but we rarely got to do it together, as a family. I always had to travel, and we had to stay in our respective institutions, academe, and government. To find reward in our work, we would sacrifice it at home.

Along with the noble servants who do the work, there are those whose job is to play the game, the politicians. In the institutional system, trivial things become a crisis out of necessity because positions have been created in government to deal with them, real or not. Today’s politics (not governance) requires a crisis. Therefore jobs are made to ensure them. These are the political appointees. These layers of directors the politicians get to appoint after receiving power have the sole mission of making sure the crisis (message as they call it) is front and center. Since the politicians that appointed them ran on that crisis, mutually assured destruction is the only reality they seem to know.

There was always a crisis. That ensured that family never really came first and that you would never get to live that second life. We both had to find gratitude in our work, and both had to work because the pay was low and play was not an option.  Missouri is notorious for having the country’s lowest-paid state employees and the highest-paid legislators per hour. With the most lenient ethics laws in the country for politicians, the divides are more significant between appointees (the locals called them tourists) and the career public servants who make the system work. As a result, we rarely got time at home at the same time. This made it harder and harder to live as a family and ensured you really couldn’t get ahead. We had come back from the abyss of 2008, like so many others, but still couldn’t reach the life we had before the crash.

People across the working class are feeling this, not just government employees. The burdens are kept in place by the economic interests of the corporate bourgeoisie and the politicians they own. The working-class farmers, craftsmen, artisans, educators, and service workers can no longer afford a living wage and decent quality of life. Quality homes, education, food, services, and the time to enjoy them are only expected by and for the very privileged upper classes, an almost entirely white upper class.

When I wrote Growing, I was still working for the Department of Agriculture, in a department and industry that is 98 percent white. The views of the world were minimal, and the status of the elite was sacred and never to be questioned. After all, these brilliant people have created an industry subsidized by over 50 percent that throws away 50 percent of what it produces. Agriculture replaced its culture of stewardship with a glorification of production and consumption. If you question the strategies of the industry that are bankrupting farmers, the industry will say you are attacking farmers. Corporations and politicians keep the crisis, farmers, and consumers in their place.

While the industry is very monochromatic, not everyone is wearing the same colored glasses. More and more viewpoints are changing in cultures and places that aren’t changing because more and more people are getting poor, regardless of their color or lack thereof. Poverty in America is becoming a common denominator and unifying force across racial, political, religious, and ideological lines. Some unify in eradicating it, and some at the far fringe believe it a necessary and natural balance that affords them more. Everyone is feeling it, even if only through someone else they love. In Nature, there is no class warfare, no red-lining, stand your ground laws, or borders with walls. In Nature, everyone is part of the cycle, and no one is over the natural order or anyone else. Even predators are dependent upon their prey and must be respectful of this balance or lose their food source. Nature has laws far more powerful than the written laws of man and the egos that create them.

Fanon’s bourgeoisie in Wretched of the Earth has given up on control and influence through employment, like the corporate barons in today's society. Employees are too pesky, and contractors are easier to screw.  The largest employers in the world are temporary labor providers. The bourgeoisie has continued their influence through investment, lack of it, and hidden their family names behind corporations and portfolios. With no personal identity associated with the influence, they have shed all responsibility for the human costs of their greed. The politicians tax the poor to pay for it and pay no price at the polls.

As a result, more citizens are falling or voluntarily pulling out of the colonial economic system. We call it the Western economy to imply some sort of moral or racial superiority. After decades of oppression, many have fallen, been pushed to the bottom, or removed from the traditional workforce. More often than not, it is communities of color who pay the price. After decades of abandonment and decay, the soil is forming in these neighborhoods, and a new economy is starting to grow from the ground up. Since 2008, all of the jobs gained, more than lost during the recession, have been created by small, artisan, and cottage businesses, often immigrant and minority-owned. At the same time, large corporations have continued to shed jobs as a whole.

While some say not enough has been done to help the poor, and it hasn’t, there are many people, predominately white, who haven’t yet realized they are now poor. They wonder where everything went they had when we were kids and wonder why the government isn’t doing anything, or worse, why they attack them. They were not born into poverty. They were born into a working class that no longer exists, as their parents grew up at the end of the industrial age.

Their parents weren’t wealthy, but if they worked hard, could own a lovely house, have quality schools for their children, live in safe neighborhoods, and retire at 65. They could even send their kids away to college and take vacations to our national parks. The working-class was middle class, as long as you were white. In today’s world, the working class is now the working poor, the poor and unemployed are now called indigent, and all while the rich get richer and fewer.

Since the election of Obama, the politicians and the political dynamics in the United Stated have created a period of stagnancy that has kept the deciders (primarily male, pale, stale, and wealthy) from screwing things up even more. Gridlock has prevented the ruling class from completely tilling the ground level of our economy. As I write this chapter (June 2018), the departure of Obama is at hand. The election hasn’t occurred yet, but we know who the candidates are.

With one candidate being a bigot and the other being a woman, the haters (both classist and racist) now feel empowered to oppress openly and on the record. As a result, new segregation is setting in, based more around income than color, not because more people of color are moving up, but because more white people are becoming poor. Still segregated by institutionalized racism, urban historically black communities are becoming more diversified as poverty grows among all races. Poverty is becoming a common denominator for everyone.

Luxuries are uncommon in rural communities, and working hard has always been viewed as a prideful existence. It is the price one pays to live in the abundance of America. There may not be a different restaurant for every meal, but there are incredible sunsets and stars in the sky every night. There may not be a mega-theatre to pick from a dozen movies, but there are dozens of streams to walk in on a hot summer day and banks to relax on while catching fish fresher than any found in the city. There may not be a market on every corner (nor is there in every town anymore), but everyone has enough earth and enough care to grow a tomato, and if space, some sweet corn in the summer.

Even this is changing, though. The soil on the farms has been plundered. Giant farms till under smaller farms, and the streams are silted and clogged with algae from fertilizer and soil eroding from fields. Children are leaving, and the schools are crumbling. Heroin, nursing homes, and healthcare are the fastest-growing industries.

This is not a white, black, immigrant, urban or rural issue. It is a human issue and what happens when we fail to respect the laws of Nature and our obligation to people as creatures of Nature. Humans are not immune to the intrinsic balance of Nature, regardless of our perceived superiority as a species or anyone who thinks they are superior as a race. According to the University of Missouri Hunger Atlas, 75 percent of all families in Missouri have incomes that would qualify them for food stamps (even though only 12 percent use them). Missouri is also 85 percent white. Poverty concentrates in neighborhoods of color in the cities. It is even more widespread in traditionally white rural America.   

Elections have mattered. As urban and rural divides politics, statehouses, and Washington D.C. grow, the growing populations and diversity in urban areas find and keep some protection in state-wide elected offices and the Presidency, where the urban cores are big enough to swing the elections. The statehouses and Congress are generally more rural, white, and conservative. As a result, little benefits underserved communities, urban or rural. More harms and oppresses them, such as voter ID laws, the rollback of unemployment, right to work laws, gerrymandering, and attacks on public education. Luckily, more socially conscious forces have been able to rule by veto. Vetos may contribute to gridlock but have provided stability for families and businesses, enough to start growing again from the bottom up.

Some conservatives may fear a taco truck on every corner. Those same people would have no problem if it were a Taco Bell, owned by PepsiCo, and padding their 401K’s. To those who have always benefited from white colonial privilege, it is scary to see Black, Latino, Asian, and African-owned businesses growing faster and creating more working-class jobs for their families than historically white industries, businesses, and communities. In our most impoverished communities, especially immigrant ones, people seem to be growing new soil, and a new economy is emerging from the forest floor.

In Growing, much was made of the consolidation in agriculture and that most farms can no longer support multiple generations on the farm. Aging out is not just an agriculture issue and occurs economy-wide. We have seen this in manufacturing as a whole. Mechanization and outsourcing all but eliminated the concept of a union or work family.

Box stores, hotels, and chain restaurants keep their employees in part-time positions to avoid healthcare and benefits. Since there is no family in the business, there is no sense of responsibility to their employees. The executives may talk about the need for family time, but they rarely pay their employees enough to have it. Many employees go to a second job after work, scramble for healthcare, find food in a desert, and deal with substandard housing. At the same time, they often spend more on transportation they can’t afford because they have to commute at least an hour to get a high enough paying job. There are no good-paying jobs in poor neighborhoods.

Much to the chagrin of the ruling class, many of these communities are starting to grow their own jobs and economies from the ground up. We have been fertilizing the big trees in the corporate forest for decades, with direct and indirect subsidies, tax breaks that leave them paying nothing, and providing social services for their employees, so corporations don’t have to pay them enough to survive. After decades of over-fertilization, the root system of the colonial economy is starting to fail. The wealth in the economy has consolidated into so few trees that they can no longer shade out growth from the forest floor below.

When you fertilize and water a tree too often, the roots stop growing because they don’t need to go deeper into the soil to find food and water. The food is coming from above instead of being mined from below and converted into energy. The old trees in today’s economy get bigger. The government feeds them with handouts and exemptions, funded