News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
We've had a lot of rain here this week, and the creeks and rivers are quite high. In other words, the opening day of trout season won't yield many fish.
- In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about hands, surveillance, and church.
- I try to make sense of why radioactive fracking waste is routinely disposed of in local landfills that aren't equipped to contain such toxins: "Rather than seeking the elusive mirage of purity, we ought to undertake the contested work of breaking the body of creation respectfully and responsibly. As Justin Nobel demonstrates, the oil industry too often does this work ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, and destructively, and as the customers of this industry, we have an obligation to demand better."
- Jon Schaff reviews Jonathan Haidt's new book The Anxious Generation and commends it highly: "After reading Haidt’s book I am now convinced that any school that puts a device into the hands of students is committing educational malpractice. Whether it is phones, tablets, or laptops, they are almost certainly doing more harm than good."
- Robert Corban calls Brooks Lamb's new book Love for the Land: Lessons from Farmers Who Persist in Place "a raw, beautiful, and inspiring exploration of the power and the potential of the relationship between people and the land in the face of consolidation, suburbanization, discrimination, and the other trends that continue to threaten it across the U.S."
- Steven Schnarr weighs different types of risk and tries to imagine how to live well amid inevitable dangers: "If you want to reduce your exposure to toxic chemicals, what else can you do except move to the jungle and expose yourself to an entirely new set of risks? How am I supposed to measure known risk against unknown risk? And is avoidance of certain types of risk only going to create more risk in other areas of life?"
When we were in Charlottesville a couple of weeks ago, we visited Monticello and toured the house and gardens. I wanted to deepen my understanding of the strange, brilliant, frustrating Thomas Jefferson, so I picked up Thomas Kidd's Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh. Kidd does a good job tracing Jefferson's life, relationships, and thought, and I enjoyed the biography. I had somehow never heard of the "Mammoth Cheese" episode that Kidd recounts. Apparently during Jefferson's presidency, the community of Cheshire, MA pooled the milk from their 900 cows and created a 1,235 pound cheese. The abolitionist Baptist preacher who organized the effort proudly told Jefferson that "it was made entirely from the labor of free-born dairy farmers and their wives and daughters—no slave labor included." The accompanying poem is a classic--oh for the return of such tasty political rhetoric:
Most excellent--far fam'd and far fetch'd CHEESE!
Superior far in smell, taste, weight, and size,
To any ever form'd 'neath foreign skies,
And highly honour'd--thou wert made to please,
The man belov'd by all--but stop a trice,
Before he's praised--I too must have a slice.. . .
To others leaving wealth, and place and pow'r,
I'll to my home and to my HARRIS hie,
Our wants are few--those industry supply;
All that we want or wish for in life's hour,
Heaven still will grant us--they are only these,
Poetry--Health--Peace--Virtue--Bread and Cheese.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro