This is the
sixth report from Reedley, where we are holding a speakers series on people,
land and water in the San Joaquin Valley.
Called “In the Struggle,” it features individuals who have contributed
to the human ecology of this place in the face of its dehumanization from the
industrialization of agriculture.
Wendell Berry, one of this nation’s
treasures in the realm of sustainable farming and living, has a book called Another Turn of the Crank. I thought of him as I prepared for my turn at
the microphone in our Reedley speakers series.
His writing career took the stage just as I entered the field, a new
recruit, and just as Paul Taylor prepared to exit.
My assignment Friday night was to
talk about Paul and the field he carved out for so many of us. I still remember Paul walking into his office
one day with Wendell Berry’s first major work in his hands, The Unsettling of America: Culture and
Agriculture. Published in 1977,
that book started a new national conversation about what is wrong with our
industrialized form of agriculture. It
gave my tenacious mentor great hope as his pace slowed, the end of his turn at
the crank in sight.
I used many four-letter words there
in the First Mennonite fellowship hall:
land, town, farm, hope and love.
I probably even used “hate,” though I try to keep that word at bay. A couple of one-syllable five-letter words
were also key: “faith,” with its partner
“grace.” Faith and grace have been major
components of my work over the last twenty years, though I had to learn them on
my own, since my mentors and colleagues rarely identify those factors in their
writing. Yet I see them at work in
Villarejo’s stories, and MacCannell’s and Fujimoto’s, and perhaps all the
stories.
Where I first learned about faith in
this work was in a project I joined near the end of my time at Davis called the
Forum on Church and Land. It was
sponsored by the Western Small Church and Rural Life Center based in Filer,
Idaho. The Forum was a Methodist
undertaking headed by a minister from Corvallis, Oregon named John Pitney. John is a dairy kid who grew up to become a
stay-at-home father, using his seminary training to take him into the dark
space between most churches and what was going on in our rural areas in the
1980’s. He developed workshops, bible
studies and a body of songs to address the devastation no one noticed – except
those suffering from bank foreclosures and losing their farms.
John had organized these forums in
other states, but right about the time of the 1990 freeze, he was called to
bring these ideas to the Central Valley.
Someone gave him my name because I was working on a project called
“Agriculture and the Common Good” at the time, and he gently roped me into the
planning process for holding a forum here.
We called the event “Who is my Neighbor? Agriculture, the Common Good, and the Role of the Church in Truthtelling
and Reconciliation.” It was held in
Fresno in Feb. 1992, and though I was agnostic when we started, during the
forum I had a conversion experience.
Friday night, standing at the
microphone in Reedley telling this story to the members of the Peace Center,
which includes many Mennonite farmers who are interested in this subject of agriculture
and the common good, I could see that the
church still has a role to play in mending the breaches in neighborliness
created by our industrial agriculture system.
I began by telling my story about research at Berkeley and Davis, which turned
toward public education when I moved to Tulare County more than twenty years
ago. Then I described some tools I
thought we might use to carry on this legacy of social concern. One of these tools is the book of writings
I’ve been editing with Tulare geographer Bill Preston, a professor at CalPoly
SLO. It’s titled A Little Piece of Land:
Writings on Agriculture and the Common Good in California. The book contains articles from social
scientists, journalists, historians and philosophers, and includes a goodly
dose of poems and short stories describing the importance of rural life to individual
humans and communities, as well our national well-being.
I see a role for art in creating the
awareness we need to tackle this subject, and an working toward creating a
non-profit organization, New LEAF (Land Educational Arts Forum) to help support
artistic endeavors in this work. John
Pitney’s songs, contained on three albums and four CD’s, offer a similar
promise to encourage churches to take on this role (see www.johnpitney.org.) And I think holding another Forum on Church
and Land would be a way to introduce people into the effort.
One of my favorite Pitney songs is
based on a Wendell Berry poem called “To Know the Dark.” It goes like this:
“To go in the dark with a light is to know
the light.
To know the
dark, go dark. Go without sight.
And find that
the dark, too, blooms and sings.
And is travelled
by dark feet and dark wings.”
The next speaker in the series will
be Dr. Sarah Ramirez, the director of Tulare County FoodLink, speaking on “Good
Food Changes Lives.” She will speak Nov.
11th. Go to www.reedleypeacecenter.org for
more information.
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Trudy
Wischemann is a recovering researcher who writes in Lindsay. You can send her your stories on land, town,
farm and faith c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment
below. Thanks to Dan O’Connell for recognizing
the baton.
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