News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
On Monday we drove over to Ohio to experience the eclipse. It was great to be on the outskirts of a small town festival and to see many local communities taking the opportunity to come together and celebrate the truly incredible event.
- In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about refuge, levitation, and hospitality.
- Nathan Beacom reviews Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the American Heartland and finds its portrayal of rural America rather mixed: "The book is at its best when it embraces a more generous spirit. If one wishes to learn about traveling grain harvesters and to follow a literary description of the landscape, one will find it here. . . . But it should be taken for what it is, one person’s perspective of a few months with a harvesting crew, and not as a portrait of rural America as such."
- Paul James Macrae recalls the history of debates around how Americans should remember the Civil War and points to some more and less commendable approaches:"In Lost Cause debates, President Biden should be wary of casting the first stone: his own history demonstrates the complicated relationship the country has with its deadliest war and the men who led it."
- Russell Arben Fox reads Wendell Berry's Need to Be Whole alongside Ian Angus's The War Against the Commons and finds a similar narrative: "economic competition introduces class distinctions, which in turn introduce a contempt for the economically poor or legally enslaved who are obliged to engage in manual labor on the land, and thus results in a degradation of all landed work as well as the land itself."
- Steven Knepper expresses gratitude for a strange bit of Socratic graffiti: "In a funk no more, I was prepared to meet the smile of my daughters with a genuine smile of my own as they came out of practice. The graffiti was gadfly, but also gift."
- David Bannon considers the wisdom of Job: "'Adonai has compassion,' sang the psalmist, 'for he understands how we are made, he remembers that we are dust.' Perhaps in our dust of grief, we see clearly for the first time."
I worked through George Monbiot's Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet with my environmental ethics class. The first chapter, on soil biology, is fascinating. But things rapidly go downhill from there, though Monbiot did spark some excellent class discussions. It was good to follow Monbiot with some Chris Smaje and trace the key points of their debate, but one interesting aside near the end of Monbiot's book reveals more than he intends, I think. He positions himself as the maligned expert, presenting facts and solutions that are unfairly criticized by ignorant rubes, and in doing so, he compares himself to Ibsen's character Dr. Stockmann, who is by no means the straightforward hero of Ibsen's play:
The experience of environmental campaigners has so far been bitter. We appeal to humanity's fabled survival instinct, and find it missing. We assemble the evidence, explain the problem, propose a solution, and are received like Dr. Stockmann in Henrik Ibsen's play An Enemy of the People: with anger, denial, and obloquy.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro