On Heather's response to Doug Fine, and Doug Fine, and Rhetoric, and Social Justice

I just put down Farewell, My Subaru, and I think I'm still trying to digest it. There was a lot I liked about the book, and in the end, a lot I didn't--or at least, a lot I'm still ambivalent about.

As everyone has pointed out, Doug Fine is a funny, engaging writer. His hyperbole and his willingness to be the butt of all his own jokes, to be self-deprecating and yet sometimes self-aggrandizing in his ever shifting self-portrait--all of this is endearing, and made for a quick, light-hearted read. (I really enjoyed Laurel's characterization of him as a man who's just really [really] bad at following directions.)

I am glad that he gave time to the contradictions--both personal and political--that plagued his Funky Butte Ranch project. It would be impossible to go green without facing a good deal of these ethical and practical quandaries. I have to admit, when I first read Heather's email/response to the book, I hadn't yet cracked the pages, and her post left me a little bit indignant. Okay, smarting, in some ways. I felt that she should have been more charitable both to Doug Fine's project/experiment, as well as to all the other experimenters out there. People who haven't been born with agricultural knowledge, know-how, or even familial inclination to gardening for generations, but who somehow get it into their heads that they want to go "off the grid" and then give it a try. I wrote in a letter to Heather that I didn't send, "While to an extent I can empathize with your sadness over the fact that the body knowledge* you and others like you who have lived off and worked on and been part of the land out of necessity, not choice, is dying as you and others like you leave the land, one way or another, what I can't imagine is your anger at those who want to try (even to experiment) to live in that way. So they try, fail, wimp out, and move on?" The point here was, so what? At least they tried, and they didn't do any harm. But, now, I realize, trying and not sticking to it can mean more harm than good. Were Doug Fine not so committed to his project, he might have tried to divert the rivers, change the land around his ranch to suit his own needs, build a golf course, or otherwise ignore the fact that, as Heather has many-a-time pointed out, living so "green" just isn't that easy.

It's great that Fine stuck to it, but he was prepared to be reflexive, to confront and live with contradictions, and most importantly, to spend cash. Plus, he has a book that brings cash to his ranch even if his organic produce does not. He can, in one way or another, afford to stick to it. Not everyone can, and then what harm is wrought by people who move into communities, make waves, change local dynamics, and then don't stick it out the way they planned to? What kinds of disruptions cause tears in fragile social fabric by know-nothings who don't do their research about the kind of life they're taking on?

I don't have answers to these questions; I can only say that after reading Fine's book, which takes a light-hearted view of his struggles, even as he describes his bloody hands in detail, I felt more sympathetic to Heather's emotional rendering of the book as sad, rather than optimistic.

For my own part, I had a real problem with the "pop-up video" style of the book. The tidbits of information scattered throughout each chapter in grey boxes I found distracting, rhetorically ineffective, and not adequately sourced. We talked about ethos in class--for me, these blurbs took away Fine's ethos, both as memoirist and as journalist. I both wanted the story to flow better and the "facts" to be better supported; this may be why I liked the Afterword best.

And finally, a word on dollars and sense. For all of Fine's intoning that we should all get more politically active, show up at council meetings, vote for green candidates, and hassle our local stores about what they're doing to go green, he also advocates that we vote with our money. In other words, where you spend your dollars is a vote for a particular marketplace, and the more of us that vote for local, organic products, the more that the markets will shift in this direction. Furthermore, the less your purchases will be drenched in oil and blackened by coal. To an extent, I buy this argument. Yes, it is important that we make more conscientious choices about where we spend our money, especially when we consider the foods we buy.

But we can't forget that there are a lot of people (perhaps not consumers/readers of this book) who don't have the opportunity to vote with their money. This is where the social justice part of the post comes in. It is, and it must be acknowledged that it is, a luxury to vote "Organic!" and "Local!" and "Pesticide/Hormone/Guilt Free!" It is a luxury that even much of the lower-middle class doesn't feel able to afford. As Christine said in class, poverty is debilitating. We must not forget that in inner cities, things called food deserts exist, where even a big box grocery store isn't available for many citizens; we mustn't forget that for those who rely on food pantries or soup kitchens, there is no way to vote for sustainable, more healthy (for people and planet) agricultural practices. And it's not like people working two or three or more jobs to feed their families have a lot of time to show up at council meetings. Or a lot of clout when they get there. It's one thing to berate the middle class and the wealthy into making personal investments into greening their lives (and patting themselves on the back and being a little less guilty about our wars for oil), but it's equally important that environmental sustainability also be moved toward social sustainability and social justice. For those of us with enough expendable income to make "responsible" food choices, we are lucky enough to be able to vote the way we want to with our dollars.

For everyone else, we need to work toward ensuring that the dollar isn't the only way democratic decisions are made.

How? Don't know. No idea. Just throwing it out there because it needs to be out there.

*body knowledge is a phrase Heather used that I love--beautiful and apt, it captures something that many of us are missing.