Cultivating an Ecological Conscience: Essays from a Farmer Philosopher

Editor’s Introduction

In the mid-1970s, Fred Kirschenmann told a class of graduating seniors that education is like a baseball mitt. You might think mitts are to protect your hand and education is to help you get a good job, he said, but the true purpose of baseball mitts is to extend your reach so you can catch balls you would otherwise miss. Likewise, education helps you extend your imagination to catch opportunities otherwise beyond your grasp (see Kirschenmann’s essay in this volume, “What’s an Education For?”). Three decades later, Kirschenmann continues unveiling basic principles to help us grasp the challenges we face. In the 1970s, energy shortages, hunger, poverty, and pollution appeared to be humankind’s main problems. It seemed we could solve them if we just deployed the right technologies. We now know these crises were early warnings of the human-induced, planetary-scale degradation of all life. Fundamentally, our predicament can be traced to the gradual shift in our self-image from being part of nature to being separate from and conquerors of the natural world. According to Kirschenmann, our fascination with technologies now distracts us from recognizing two important human shortcomings: our belief that we can solve problems without nature, and our habit of ignoring the consequences of our technologies in the complex natural world. This volume of selected works spans his career, a career marked above all by a concern for ecological priorities and a conviction that people can and will make a difference if they understand the relevant issues and pertinent choices. Kirschenmann’s themes are grounded in his experience on his North Dakota farm, where he grappled with the sometimes harsh rhythms of nature and inherited his father’s legacy of independent thinking and deep appreciation for the value of healthy soil. 1 Editor’s Introduction Cultivating an Ecological Conscience 2 Kirschenmann sometimes spoke of an early memory in which he and his father were in the car returning from church services. In their church, parishioners had the practice of standing up and talking openly about their faith. On the way home, his father railed about the hypocrisy and false piety of the people spouting off in church when he knew they could not be trusted on Monday morning in the business world. From that early lesson, Fred Kirschenmann began his career of exploring ethical choices, challenging authority and doctrines, and poking holes in bad policies, poor logic, and official practice. Like the other two pillars of agrarian philosophy of his generation, Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson, Kirschenmann has been one of the most respected critics of the industrial food and farming paradigm of the late twentieth century. Along with Berry and Jackson, Kirschenmann has looked to the wisdom of Aldo Leopold and Sir Albert Howard for inspiration and guidance. Another, less-known influence was Liberty Hyde Bailey, who also guided Leopold’s thinking. A common thread in the works of these writers is their awareness of the deleterious effects of the industrial system, not only on how we grow food but also on human consciousness. Industrialism, powered by fossil fuels and reductionist scientific methods, has enabled us to think we have mastered nature and can take from it what we need and excrete back into it without consequences. All three of these agrarian leaders have emphasized systems thinking and the importance of caring for the soil, land, and community. Like Jackson, Kirschenmann embraces technologies when he thinks they can enhance the regenerative capacities of ecosystems; Berry, on the other hand, has been much more suspicious of technology. Jackson has perhaps been less sanguine than Kirschenmann about humanity’s ability to embrace planetary survival as a primary concern. Berry’s gifts have been his prodigious literary output and his deep philosophical exploration of agrarianism. Jackson has reconceptualized midwestern agriculture, applying science to create a perennial polyculture system that mimics the prairie—a completely original paradigm for farming. Kirschenmann’s gift has been his relentless organizing and public speaking. In 1986, he was invited to testify before a congressional committee about the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Low-Input Sustainable Agriculture program, a forerunner of the current Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education grant program. Since giving that im- 3 Editor’s Introduction passioned talk, Kirschenmann’s calendar has been filled with requests by groups across the country to talk about organic and sustainable agriculture. More than twenty years later, he...