Home Itself

Published Nov. 15, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     “Home is where the heart is,” a friend tells me.  We are talking about where home is for each of us, which naturally involves WHAT home is.  I counter his definition with Valley author Gerry Haslam’s favorite description:  “Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

           

     Both of these descriptions implicate people, describing home as a social environment.  There can be no doubt about that aspect.  All I have to do is be around my mother, bless her heart, for five minutes and I’m mentally back in kindergarten.  This aspect of home is what many of us are facing as the holidays approach, with its mixture of blessings and re-livable curses.

           

     But for me, the word “home” always involves a physical environment, with specific climate, topography, vegetation, wildlife, even geology.  This is to say that home - for me - is also geographic, with a historical context that I have in some way participated.  It is a permanent place where people come and go.

           

     And when I go home in my mind, it is to a specific place where I never lived, but visited often.  When the homing instinct bears down on me, I fly back to the “ranch” in western Washington where my Aunt Hazel lived the best years of her life.

           

     It helps that she often said she bought the place for us, her youngest sister’s offspring, so we would know what it was like to farm.  It helped that what little farming she did made her exquisitely happy, but it was more the life she lived there on that place than any one activity.  She loved harvesting the apples from their little orchard and making pies and ‘sauce, as well as watching the deer come down from the forest above to harvest their share.  It was fishing in the creek and frying trout for dinner. It was baling hay and putting up oats for winter, watching cats in the barn catching mice.  And it was photographing all of it that made for peace in her life.

           

     That place is home for me, I realize now, because there is where I learned the basic truths of my life.  That food comes from the land, and shelter as well.  That contentment is achievable and worthy of pursuit.  That I am an outdoor person at root, and curious about the natural world, fascinated enough to learn from books and from my own observations.  That intimacy with a place, a little piece of land, is priceless.

           

     They say you can’t go home again.  I’ve never believed that, though for most of us over 40 the places we once lived are unrecognizable now.  We destroy home for ourselves every time we obliterate bird habitat, push out olive groves, level fields for development.  But if, as I feel now, that home is an intimate relationship between people and place, there certainly is room for us to come home.  May the pending holidays help us stretch in that direction.

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Trudy Wischemann is a native Washingtonian who writes from home in Lindsay.  You can send her visions of your home place c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

 

Leaving Dunsmuir

Published Sept. 13, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     It wasn’t easy leaving Dunsmuir, but it was time.  The crisis in my brother’s life had downgraded to a tropical storm and my own life was calling me back.  Respectful of the distance yet mindful of the responsibilities I’d left behind, I said my goodbyes, packed the car and started home.

     For days now, scraps of Dunsmuir’s scenery have floated through my mind: the historic railroad yard perched on a half-moon disk of floodplain along the upper Sacramento; the late sunrises and early sunsets over steep mountains confining the canyon; the curving main street and laterals contouring town.  The sweet stores and the people running them, working to make a living by creating a community where people can enjoy each other.  I barely had time to tap that fountain.

     One potential benefit of living in Dunsmuir is that the landscape makes you humble.  My sense of self-importance, often overblown, was diminished by the scale of the landscape.  I came to understand the value of mountain-man culture there as a way to keep at bay the constant reminder of human insignificance.  Once you adjust to it, though, there’s a kind of freedom in that, permission to operate in the present without trying to exert too much control over the future.

     Scraps of scenery from the trip home have also run through my mind.  The descent through dense forest to Lake Shasta, nearly full again, ended quickly, followed by a brief run through foothill oaks to Redding.  From there to Red Bluff on I-5, the beautiful views of the river valley were intermingled with hills of grass- and oak-covered volcanic rock.  I took Hwy 99, still two-lane, through Los Molinos, where small farms predominate and Lassen’s plateaus extend in the distance, to Chico, where the dominance of  historically large farms is interlaced with newer sustainable efforts to produce food.  Tree fruit orchards took over around Yuba City, followed by miles of rice fields waiting for harvest.  From Sacramento through Modesto, the urgency of traffic congestion clogged the view, but from Turlock onward, the old familiarity of 99 was comforting.

     Being in Dunsmuir made me homesick for Lindsay and Exeter.  My first few days here, however, have been complicated by mental exhaustion and the clear evidence of domestic neglect I left behind mentally as well as physically.  Home is where you make it, and my home in Lindsay is in serious need of reconstruction.

     But I think I’ve come to recognize a kind of homelessness in myself as well.  My family used to take Sunday drives to go “househunting,” an activity that got serious when my mother got pregnant.  It seemed my father was always looking for a nice place to live, even after he settled in Sebastopol, certainly as close to heaven as it gets on this planet.  My eyes were searching the landscape for potential homesteads all the way up and all the way back, and that made it harder when I pulled into my driveway.

     Some of Dunsmuir’s beauty is that it is a place to call home.  Lindsay and Exeter have that beauty, too, but it’s not until you apply that name to an address that you can learn all the work – and sometimes the hardship - that goes with it.  May we, by enjoying each other, remind ourselves of the beauty as well.

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Trudy Wischemann is a semi-retired nomad who writes.  You can send her your longings for home c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

 

Standing Tall

To be published Dec. 7, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     “The Corps of Engineers just denied the permit half an hour ago” said my step-mother triumphantly in Sunday’s phone call.  She knew I’d welcome that news even though our conversations haven’t traversed the Standing Rock Sioux’s territory or the corporate pipeline that threatens it. 

           

     The bravery of those people camping out at the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri Rivers in defense of their rights to their lands has had me standing taller lately.  However, to think that our government could respond appropriately at this moment of great need – in fact, the Corps of Engineers, which is not known for its interest in public input – has re-instated my belief in this system.  Suddenly I feel glad to be Uncle Sam’s daughter.

           

     It’s all about land, when it comes right down to it, how land matters ‘way more than we think.  The Standing Rock Sioux know how much land matters, as do most Native American tribes.  Despite treaties and lands reserved for their exclusive use, their history is peppered with losses of control over resources and their quality of life to the kind of thinking behind the Dakota Access Pipeline.  

           

    It’s watching others stand up for land that’s straightened my backbone, like Dave Archambault, the Standing Rock tribal chairman, who was interviewed Friday on the PBS News Hour.  Responding to the pipeline CEO’s statement that the tribe was worried about nothing, he said “If the safeguards are all there, why not put it (back to the original route) north of Bismark?”

           

     “He (the CEO) will say that it can’t go there because of the population of the community, the environmental impacts, the sacred sites that are there, the wetlands that it has to cross. These are all the same concerns that we have. It’s just that we’re a lot fewer (in population.)  And so, if there is no worry, if the safeguards are there, then relocate it to that location. That’s OK.”

               

     As he said this, his face showed nothing: no anger, no glee at beating that kind of logic at its own game, no snide-bordering-on-vindictive disgust like my face would have shown had I pulled that off.  He was remarkable, sitting there in the News Hour studio in his light blue, button-down collar shirt, no jacket, no tie, no eagle feathers in his hair or silver jewelry draped around his neck.  He was just a man speaking truth to power who had come to Washington to discuss his peoples’ concerns with the federal government, which Sunday’s news confirmed was worth the effort.

           

     The news earlier in the week that several thousand veterans would be joining the tribes at their encampment, intending to make a human wall between the land protectors and the proto-military police forces who had drenched the protestors with water cannons the week before, had confirmed the national importance of this seemingly tiny decision.  Have we not had enough of our culture’s and our government’s ignorant, arrogant demeaning treatment of native people?  The veterans’ actions say that we have.

           

     I feel that the efforts of the Standing Rock tribe and other Americans, Native and natural-born citizens both, have been a great gift to those of us who feel compelled to question the erosive aspects of “development.”  “We have every right to protest this pipeline,” Archambault said.  “We have indigenous lands, we have ancestral lands, we have treaty lands. The pipeline is 500 feet from our reservation border.… (I)t’s unfortunate that this nation continues to treat our tribe and tribal nations around this country in this manner.”

           

     Monday morning I logged on to the PBS News Hour website to follow up the Corps’ announcement.  There, in an article by Jenni Monet, was a photo of a 97-year-old woman standing in a gymnasium on the Cheyenne River Sioux reservation Saturday, waiting to greet the veterans arriving in support.  First Lt. Marcela LeBeau of the Lakota tribe had served in the U.S. Army as a nurse between 1944 and 1947.  Dressed in a plum-colored, dress-length Ultrasuede raincoat, her powder-blue snow parka lying on a folding table behind her, her silver hair piled high on her head, Lt. LeBeau stood tall as she waited for the volunteer troops with a placid, peaceful smile on her face, a smile only slightly wider than the Mona Lisa’s.  Did she know then that this effort was going to work?  Or did she only know that it was the right thing to do, regardless?

    When governments and corporations do not respect the laws of the land or the people who live there, we all have every right to protest.  In fact, I believe we have an obligation.  Standing tall at Standing Rock, the veterans of wars both foreign and domestic have shown us how to reclaim our democracy. May we stand tall with them in support and spirit.

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Trudy Wischemann researches issues of land ethics, land use and land tenure from her home in Lindsay.  For more information on the Standing Rock efforts, go to www.pbsnewshour.org.  To contribute funds to these efforts, visit http://www.rop.org/rural-oregon-stands-standing-rock/. Thanks to rural minister/songwriter John Pitney for this recommendation.  See also Waddie Mitchell's lyrics to Juni Fisher's song "Still Here," described in this blog Feb. 11, 2015.

 

 

 

 

It's the People

Published Oct. 26, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

This is the fifth 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.

            Twenty-three years ago, in the first days of my residence in Lindsay, my life was interrupted by a clogged sewer line.  It was four-thirty on a Friday afternoon; the next morning I was due to speak at a conference in Los Angeles and needed a shower before leaving at the very least.  I grabbed the Yellow Pages and called a plumber who came from Ivanhoe.

            We talked as we searched my new property for the non-existent clean-out valve.  Nervous, I babbled a little about my presentation the next day on this weird study that no one here in the Valley seemed to know about two nearby towns, Arvin and Dinuba.  Studied in the forties, the two towns then appeared so different from each other that any ordinary observer would have thought Arvin was smaller and poorer than Dinuba, though they were the same size in population, with the same dollar-value in farm products from their land bases.  

            Just as I was about to mention the study’s conclusions, that the different size of farms surrounding each town caused the radical differences between them, my new plumber friend says “It’s the people.  It’s the people in those towns that make the difference.  It’s the people.”

            In another time and place, I might have argued, or at least worked to show how farm size determines what people are able to accomplish.  But I heard the truth of his words in the conviction with which he said them, and they lodged in my heart.  Friday night at the Reedley Peace Center we heard from a man who has invested his entire academic career on that truth.

            Isao Fujimoto is a huge consciousness inhabiting a small body, with less to pack around than most of us, perhaps thanks to the high caloric requirements of his ceaseless mind.  I once heard him described as a hummingbird, which fits.  Only a few more silver hairs showed among his typically Japanese black ones than when I knew him in Davis, though I detected a slight frailty in his walk now from eight decades on the planet.  Still, he stood and talked for more than an hour, then answered questions until we could think of no more.

            He began his talk with the painful contradiction we live with here, that our region has the highest rates of poverty amidst the greatest agricultural abundance nationwide.  Isao then gently unfolded another, less obvious contradiction: although each wave of ethnic immigrants is put through the wringer here, welcomed only as a source of cheap farm labor and scorned until they disappear into the acculturation process, our great agricultural diversity has been built on and spurred by this ethnic/cultural diversity.  Fujimoto sees cultural diversity as a resource, as important as land and water.  He sees it as the third leg in our pyramid of abundance.

            The importance of cultural diversity became easier to see as he unfolded stories of cooperative efforts and organizations in this state, which arose to meet immigrants’ survival needs as well as to overcome constrictions placed on them by the existing power structure.  Isao learned these things first-hand in childhood, as the oldest of 13 in a farming family prohibited by state law from owning land, later as occupants of an internment camp during WWII.  His personal story makes his passion and perspective a little easier to understand, but what’s most important is that it did not keep him from seeing other groups’ distress or the structural forces behind those facts of life.  It opened him.

            Isao’s contribution has been to take that deep understanding of the importance of cultural difference and to encourage others to own it.  He advocates and enables people to join together to work for the changes we need in this society, whether that be farmers markets and food co-ops to re-unite those who work to grow our food with those who eat it, or innovators developing appropriate technology for sustainable living.  He understands that co-operative effort itself is the solution to the problems spurred by our industrial society, which holds individual effort as paramount.  He knows that getting people to work together for their own benefit and the good of all is the most radical act, one that he paid for dearly, career-wise, early on.  Now, however, his genius for helping others learn to help themselves (helping us all in the long run) is finally being recognized.

            We live in this terrible contradiction:  we produce huge agricultural abundance, but it comes with a high-poverty price tag.  The industrial structure at the root of that unhappy relationship dominates more farm land annually, seemingly unstoppable.  But people can do something about that.  It’s the people, folks; it’s us.  We’re the people.

            Next week I’ll be the speaker, describing my history with the previous speakers and how that’s led me to be a farmer of men, trying to plant seeds for that effort.  Join us.

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Trudy Wischemann is a fourth generation failed family farmer who writes.  You can send her your hopes for a more sustainable future c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.  Thanks to Fred Smeds for submitting his piece “Why Farm” for our forthcoming book, A Little Piece of Land.

The Big Picture

Published October 19, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


This is the fourth report from the Reedley Peace Center’s Speakers Series “In the Struggle.”  Interested readers can learn more about the series by visiting www.reedleypeacecenter.org.

            In a piece I wrote for the Bee last month, I started with the fire at the Suntreat packinghouse in Lindsay, describing the loss of jobs and income for the community.  I speculated on the problems for rebuilding that plant due to the changes in crops and land ownership occurring on the land surrounding our town.  And I lamented the problems I’ve had since I came here getting city leaders to realize there’s a connection between the problems our farmers face and the economic difficulties inside the city limits.  

            Dean MacCannell was the fourth speaker featured at the Reedley Peace Center’s forum. Dean was full professor of Applied Behavioral Sciences at UCD when I moved to Davis to work with him in 1985.  For almost 10 years he had been conducting statistical studies on the relationship between farm structure and rural community development using techniques called “macrosocial accounting” developed at Cornell.  I hoped his knowledge and support would help me finish the more qualitative study I had begun at UCB under Paul Taylor’s influence.

            In different ways we both were updating Walter Goldschmidt’s seminal study of farmland ownership and community development in his comparison of two towns, Arvin in Kern County and Dinuba, here in Tulare.  That study documented the positive socio-economic contributions of smaller, owner-operated farms to the quality of rural communities, as well as the negative impacts of large-scale, absentee farm operations.  Goldschmidt published his study in late 1946, followed in 1947 by the publication of his book As You Sow, which described his first study in Wasco as well as two brief chapters on Arvin and Dinuba (although the towns were not identified by name.)  

            The book was republished in 1978 under the title As You Sow:  Three Studies in the Social Consequences of Agribusiness.  It contains the full Arvin-Dinuba study as well as a chapter describing the political history of the studies, which was marked by suppression in the early years, repudiation in later years.  That story included the success of the large growers in killing the plan for a follow-up study of many communities in the San Joaquin Valley, which would have removed all doubt about the negative consequences of large-scale, absentee-owned farming operations on the development of rural towns.

            MacCannell began that study shortly after he arrived at UCD in 1975.  Telling that story in Reedley, he described the academic hindrances to that research, as well as some of the miracles that helped him avoid being stopped.  He described some of the difficulties building a data base that incorporated farm size and structure variables with social, economic and political data, and his efforts to ensure the scientific validity of the research.  

            The stories people appreciated most were about his encounters with Westlands growers.  His UC superiors had advised MacCannell that these folks had intense interest in suppressing the evidence he’d uncovered, and went to some length to shut him up.  He also mentioned the “one bad thing” he did in his entire career, which was to release a study he conducted on Westlands to the National Farmers Union, which helped preserve the acreage limitation provisions in a battle to eliminate them in 1982.   But in one of my favorite anecdotes, he told of his first field trip into the Valley when he realized that anyone could see the differences between small-farm and large-farm towns with their own eyes.

            MacCannell’s conclusions from an academic career spent swimming upstream and sharing his results with audiences mostly unfriendly to the notion of public policy supporting the small farm were these:  The science is done.  Goldschmidt’s Hypothesis has been proven correct, and those who contend otherwise are simply waging war on the truth to keep their own interests intact.  “It’s time to organize,” he said, even knowing the limitations of previous efforts to organize when we had many more small family farms than we have now.

            This Friday we’ll hear about organizing from one of the premier academic practitioners of that art:  Isao Fujimoto, also retired from UCD’s Applied Behavioral Sciences, beloved friend and advocate for the power of diversity.  Please join us at 6:30 for the potluck in the First Mennonite Church’s fellowship hall, followed at 7 pm by Isao’s empowering presentation.

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Trudy Wischemann is a researcher-in-residence who writes from her outpost in Lindsay.  You can send her your reflections on small town life c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Report from Reedley

Published Sept. 28, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


For the next few weeks I will be reporting on a speakers’ series called “In the Struggle” being held at the Reedley Peace Center, a program of the First Mennonite Church.  The idea for the series came from the Cornell dissertation of Dan O’Connell, who served as Sequoia Riverlands Trusts’ conservation easement officer in Visalia.  He transferred to a similar position with American Farmland Trust, working out of Fresno where he also helped start Food Commons, a non-profit linking small producers with local consumers.  Dan’s dissertation portrays the contributions of a handful of California college professors who, despite the resistance of their academic institutions, lack of research funds, and political opposition, documented the need for a more sustainable agricultural system in this state. The series goes beyond academic contributions and includes some of those workers in that field today.
 

     We drove to Reedley on the first cool Friday night of fall, through the clouds of dust from walnut harvesting, past vineyards with stacks of brown paper sheaves at the ends of the rows, ready to make raisins from grapes.  The evening light reflected lightly off water in furrows between rows of trees getting their last drink, through the fine mist of sprinklers running, the produce of our lands looking secure despite the drought.

           

     The peacefulness of the scenery contrasted with the subject of the presentation we were headed to hear: the struggle over the past 80 years to make sense out of the great contradiction we live with in this Valley, that we are the most agriculturally productive region of the world with the nation’s highest rates of poverty.  In many places, among many people in this precious valley of ours, just speaking that contradiction will either clear the room or provoke hostility. Yet we live with its consequences daily, whether we consciously recognize it or not.

           

     The first speaker in this series was from Cornell University, Dr. Scott Peters who served on Dan’s dissertation committee.  His field is history, with expertise in the public mandates of the land grant colleges, which range from Ithaca, NY where he teaches to the west coast locations of UC Berkeley and Davis.  We learned a great deal about the development of these institutions and the men (largely) who shaped them.  His understanding about the evolution of education in this country was mind-opening.

           

     But it was his understanding of the different types of history that helped me most.  Historical narratives, he called them, the storylines that lead our thinking, the storylines that shape our lives as individuals and communities.  He began with his own story, a son of two people who grew up on small farms.  That’s a critical thread we hear in many lives: how many generations you have to go back to get to the ancestors who farmed.  Many in this valley don’t have to go back.  I have friends who farm on small portions of land.  Our best Valley writers can still taste the peaches they raise or feel the handle of the hoe their grandfather used to run furrows and chop weeds.

           

     According to Dr. Peters, the first kind of history we write is the heroic one, the one where only good comes from human efforts.  We came, we ploughed, we dug, we built.  See what we accomplished.

           

     The second kind (he called the counter narrative) responds to the omissions in the first.  Yes, we came, and we took, we trampled, we depleted, we abused, and then we reinforced the pattern so that it takes an act of Congress (or God)  to change.  See what damages we have wrought in our fervor to build.

           

     The third kind Dr. Peters named as “prophetic,” and it is the one I identify as my own part of this history-making.  What could it have been like if we’d done it differently, and what can that imagination tell us about how to proceed? 

           

     In my own history in this struggle, following Paul Taylor’s indomitable lead, carrying his baton, the question is this.  What if we had enforced the acreage limitation of federal reclamation law on the Central Valley Project, not to mention the Kings-Kern Army Corp dams and the State Water Project?  What if we could now find some way to revoke the power we’ve given those large landowners far too long by delivering them water courtesy of the pubic treasury and the rightful, common claim we all hold to that resource?

           

     Join us for these discussions at the Reedley Peace Center.  Visit www.reedleypeacecenter.org and click on “Calendar” for the speakers schedule and descriptions or call (559) 994-4297.

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural advocate who writes.  You can contact her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

The Right to Labor

Published Sept. 7, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     High clouds dim the heat and light this Labor Day morning as I sit down to write, a good day for reflection.  I am celebrating this holiday by exerting my right to labor, even though it is unpaid.  Writing is what I do.

     Many people are celebrating this day by exerting their right to not labor.  On my brief jaunt between Exeter and Lindsay this morning I saw bicyclists coming down off Rocky Hill, exhilarated by their exertions.  Others will celebrate this right to not work by going shopping, cashing in on the Labor Day sales, which have wiped out the right to not work for hundreds of thousands of retail employees who might rather be up at the lake with their friends or attending backyard barbecues.  Thanks to our cultural tendency to celebrate too much, hundreds of thousands of service employees like nurses, EMT’s, rangers and police must also clock in.  Some will even get paid extra for it.

     On my quick trip this morning I saw many others exerting their right to work:  a farmer sitting in his pickup while running furrows in an old orange grove; a farmworker towing a spray rig through rows of citrus; an irrigator on a Kawasaki checking valves in baby mandarins.  A man I know is out near Ivanhoe installing a Blue-Tooth in a harvesting rig for a large walnut grower whose family has been working all weekend getting ready for the shakers.  Walnut growers all over our region are doing the same, their families and employees working overtime.  In farming the days are determined by the progress of the crops, not the calendar.  It’s part of the beauty of farming, if occasionally also part of the grief.

     But mostly my mind is contemplating the larger issue of the right to labor at all.  I started this weekend being interviewed on KFCF’s radio program “Down on the Farm” with Tom Willey.  Tom is an organic farmer in Madera who’s been laboring to feed folks decent food for 40 years, as well as generating programs that promote the small farmer and sustainable agriculture.  For the interview I was joined by Dan O’Connell, a Ph.D. from Cornell who’s worked up farmland conservation easements for Sequoia Riverlands Trust and American Farmland Trust for years and helped start Fresno’s Food Commons.  Dan has organized a speakers series on sustainable ag this fall at the Reedley Peace Center, and the speakers include some of the most important academics and community organizers who have contributed to questions of social justice and environmental quality in our food system for the last 80 years.  The interview with these two men tied up many threads and was mind-enhancing. 

     Then, reading Mark Arax’s phenomenal essay “Phantoms in the fields” in yesterday’s Fresno Bee, the important link between land and the right to labor became clear.  Mark’s story went beyond journalism, portraying the portion of the food system we inhabit locally in our neighborhoods as well as our fields, our politics as well as our plantings. What I saw in his verbal painting was how the right to labor, to earn a living, is determined by the ownership of land.  It is a terrible irony that right now, as some celebrate last week’s legislation increasing the number of hours of overtime pay farm laborers can now receive, their jobs are being eliminated by farmers’ shifts in crops from raisins to almonds, which is, essentially, a decision to mechanize.  No crop is free of this shift, not even olives. Both in the fields and the packinghouses, the landowners’ race is on to replace men and women with machines.

     Perhaps if we understood the “flood” of immigrants from Mexico and points south as being driven by dispossession from land on which people have labored for centuries, people coming here to exert their right to labor somehow, some way, we might seek different solutions.  Until then, building a wall is just an idea for Humpty Trumpty to sit on and make himself feel king-like.  Keep watch for the inevitable.

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural researcher who writes.  Thanks to Perla Soria for her educated interest in these issues.  Send your labor rights ideas c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Eulogy Values

Published June 1, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     David Brooks, a columnist for the New York Times and a conservative commentator on PBS’s News Hour on Friday nights, gave a wonderful presentation in Fresno on May 10^th.  He was promoting his new book called “The Road to Character” which identifies two different value systems.  One he calls “resume” values (i.e., values that define professional success in this society,) and the other, “eulogy” values:  the things people say about you after you are dead and define you as a good person.

           

     “The argument in the book,” he told Fresno Bee reporter Tim Sheehan, “is that we spend a lot of time, especially in our educational system, on (developing) the resume virtues and not enough time on the eulogy (virtues) – are you a good person? – even though we know those are more important.”  He believes that “We’ve become a country that’s just really pleased with itself,” having become “a more narcissistic culture,” “over-politicized and under-moralized,” over the past half century.

           

     With the current level of political debate at the national level, it’s just a darned good time to be thinking about these distinctions.  The gap between these two values systems is where we find ourselves caught in this country.  When Donald Trump confided at the microphone that he was kinda hoping for the housing mortgage bubble to burst ‘way back in 2008, and then defended  himself when Democrats seized on that little revelation with “Hey, what am I supposed to do? I’m a businessman!” – he was trying to straddle that gap.  The fact that he normally stands with both feet on the businessman side apparently is still lost on his supporters.

           

     Or not. There are those who still believe that whatever is good for business is good for the country, that whatever trickles down is better than nothing, I guess.

           

     I believe in trickle up, which is always harder to defend, especially when resume values hold sway or are touted as the only ones that matter.  If we didn’t have to keep writing eulogies, we might forget the other system entirely.  But thankfully we do.  

           

     David Brooks may have been caught in that values gap recently when he wrote a story for the New York Times (republished May 19^th in the Bee) on the philanthropic contributions to the small Westside community of Lost Hills by land and water tycoons Lynda and Stewart Resnick of Paramount fame.  The Resnicks, both noticeably aging in the 2013 photo of them attending a community forum in that town, may be developing their own set of eulogy values for their bucket list.  (It should be noted that what they’re giving is just a drop in the bucket, so to speak: an infinitesimal percentage of their net worth.)  Brooks’ literary portrait of those contributions was sweet.  I hope it encourages the Resnicks to double or even triple their efforts.  

           

     But there is no way to offset the damage done to Lost Hills and myriad other Central Valley towns by the structure of political power and economic control created when one entity owns too much land.  You cannot offset the jobs lost in packinghouses from the plant closures and mechanization by Paramount (oops, sorry: Wonderful, Inc.)  You cannot offset the farming opportunities lost in citrus or nuts like pistachios and almonds; you can’t bring back the small pomegranate farmers they decimated several years ago when they thawed the frozen juice they’d been hoarding.  You can’t bring back the downtowns they destroyed when they sold off those communities’ water to southern California or pumped down the aquifers.  No amount of financial aid can offset the socio-political and economic damages inflicted by giant landholdings on communities. 

           

     The Resnics do not now, and probably never will wear Haloes, no matter how many dollars they drop on Lost Hills or how many other communities they attempt to rescue.  Like Donald Trump, they have one foot on each side of the resume/eulogy values gap, and when push comes to shove or some opportunity raises its snaky head, we’ll find them with both feet on the resume values side, not even blinking.

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Trudy Wischemann is editing a book of writings on Agriculture and the Common Good with Tulare Lake Basin geographer Bill Preston.  Thanks to Michele Hester and Mark Arax for their comments this week.  You can send your thoughts on rural philanthropy c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

Land Theology

Published Sept. 23, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

“Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth!  Isaiah 5:8

     Last week I wrote about land tenure and its importance, not just in the book I’m working on but also in our individual lives and in our communities.  What I didn’t fully understand when I began this book project, however, was that concerns over land tenure go all the way back to biblical times, particularly concentrated, absentee land ownership.

     Before Jesus, before Isaiah and Jeremiah, concentration of control over the best, most productive agricultural holy lands by a few individuals created impoverished conditions for the rural peasants and the mass of urban dwellers.  That’s what made those prophets cry out.  They were crying out not just against the injustices created, but also for the covenant broken, the one the Israelites made with God before they crossed the River Jordan to occupy the Promised Land.   These are the roots of what has come to be known as “land theology.”

     Up to a point, I may be excused for my ignorance 25 years ago.  My parents were suspicious of bible thumpers, and that carried over to the text itself.  Up to a point, you who have read the Bible all of your lives may also be excused, because most theologians over the last 2000 years have also missed that message.  In that scholarly vacuum, I guess our preachers may also be excused.  After all, in the early centuries of Christianity, the Church itself was a large landholder and the source of permission for European explorers to seize the land of natives in the New World, creating landlessness and injustices we still have not lived down. 

    In 1977 an Old Testament scholar named Walter Brueggemann published a book called The Land: Place as Gift, Promise and Challenge in Biblical Faith.  In it he laid the foundation for what would become “land theology.”  My Methodist preacher friend John Pitney picked up that ball and carried it to the Forum on Church and Land in Fresno, where I first heard the message in 1992.  Another Old Testament scholar, Marvin Chaney, presented his research there on the land tenure conditions in 8^th Century BC Palestine, providing a framework for us to compare with California’s state of large-scale, industrialized agriculture.  I left that event physically, emotionally and intellectually transformed, i.e., converted.

     But I think what made that conversion possible was a moment 14 years before, in the office of a retired Berkeley economics professor, Paul Taylor.  I was there to learn about federal reclamation law from him, and to help his efforts in any way I, as an untutored 28-year-old, could.  He’d been invited by Cornell historian Paul Wallace Gates to publish his collection of law journal articles on California water and the 160-acre limitation.  His task that day was to start to write the introduction to this volume of works that spanned more than 20 years, a culmination of his passion and his scholarship.  I was there to help type.

     He got a few sheets of yellow unlined paper, got his pen, and began to think.  Then he looked up at his bookshelf which spanned the entire wall, floor to ceiling, and said “Where’s my Bible?”  At Berkeley I’d never heard an academic ask that question, and had no idea why he wanted it, but joined him in the search until he realized it was at home.

     The next day he returned to the office with Isaiah 5:8 written on a 2x2 yellow Post-it.  I typed it at the top of the page, followed by two other quotes he’d chosen, a passage from the 1902 Reclamation Act and a sentence from the U.S. Supreme Court in 1958.  His eyes asked for my approval, but I still didn’t understand what it meant, particularly Isaiah.  He looked at me kindly then and said “Laying house to house, field to field – that’s when people buy up all the land.”  That was my real introduction to land theology, there in the UCB Department of Economics at the knee of a gentle genius from Iowa.

     And now I carry the torch myself.  The truth will not only set you free:  it can set you on fire.  Run the course.

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural advocate who writes and sings.  You can send her your flaming visions c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Property Rights and Community Wrongs

Published Sept. 16, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

            “Search for a congenial relation between man and land has gone on throughout recorded time, for that relation largely shapes the relation between man and man.”  Paul Schuster Taylor, 1979

 

     “What’s your book about?” people ask when I tell them I’m working on one.  I usually say “agriculture and the common good,” sometimes adding a few items lodged under that umbrella like “small farms,” “water,” and “sustainability.”  But the thread running through it all is land tenure.

     “Land tenure” is not a term most people use, although it applies to every single one of us.  It means the system that determines peoples’ access to land, which is the source of all wealth as well as subsistence, and the subcategories of relationships determined by that system.

            In this country, the system of private property determines individuals’ access to land except where government control has interceded (like school grounds or Yosemite National Park, for instance.)  The subcategories in our system are “landed,” “tenant,” and “landless” or “homeless.”  The concept of private property is so important to our entire socio-political-economic system that we take it for granted, almost god-given.  To criticize private property here, even if the intent is to help, is like burning the flag.  

            What’s good about private property (i.e., individual ownership,) particularly when we’re talking about land, however, isn’t always good for the community. One of the worst things for any given community is when some of its land (or most, or all, as in "company towns,") is owned by people who do not live within it, often referred to as “absentee ownership.”  What’s wrong about it is that decisions for the land’s use by the absentee owner are made in a vacuum of knowledge about the community’s needs and beyond the community’s ability to influence those decisions, to encourage or coerce the owner to care about the effects of those decisions on people within the community or the community as a whole.

            Last week’s paper carried a wonderful example of the importance of land tenure in a beautifully written letter to the editor by Chris and Sally Brewer regarding the closure of Exeter’s True Value Hardware.  The letter pointed to a cause the previous week’s news article had skimmed over lightly:  the landowner’s decision to raise the rent 40%, with two weeks’ notice.  It’s the kind of action landowners take when they want to remove the tenant and do not have cause to evict. 

            The Brewers then went on to suggest a motive - to get a tax write-off for having an empty building - and to flush out the implications of that for the community (lost sales tax revenues, the impacts on other businesses of having a large empty building downtown) as well as for the business owners themselves (lost source of income and community identity.)  They then went on to express the hope that “the building owner who started this self-centered and thoughtless action realizes the extent and harm his actions have caused good people and a good community.”

            That last sentence might have some impact if the current owners are local.  The Brewers’ letter did not name or identify the location of the current owners, only that the former owners (who also had owned the hardware business housed there) sold the building several years ago.  This is simply to say that I do not know if the current owners are absentee, or simply acting like it.  My experiences here in Lindsay document that local owners can be as oblivious to the community’s welfare as absentee owners can.

            But it’s a question we should ask.  Who will look out for the needs of the community when the landowners of its spaces live too far away to know or care?

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Trudy Wischemann is a community development researcher who writes.  You can send your empty building nightmares to her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247

 

           

Still Here

Published in edited form Feb. 11, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Juni Fisher will be in town this weekend, singing her heart out to us on Valentine’s Day at the Lindsay Community Theater.  I’m grateful I’m still here to hear her, and grateful she’s still willing to come home and share her gift with her people.


     She makes my heart sing with her songs about people and horses, about intimacy between these two species that has few words, but a huge vocabulary in body language.  I suspect that we humans would all communicate better if we comprehended the importance of touch and gestures.


     But last year she brought us a different song folded in between the horse-people songs like a foxtail woven into a saddle blanket or a slicker tied on behind the seat.  It’s on her album Listen … to the horse (2013), titled “Still There.”  It’s all about Western attitudes to land and how they affect our behavior toward each other.


     Here’s how the song got born.  Waddie Mitchell, the cowboy poet from Nevada, called Juni one day to read her a poem he’d just written.  “When he finished, I had to sit down.  It was that stunning,” she wrote in the liner notes.  “The melody came easily, because he had written the words in such a perfectly lyrical way.  I love when that happens.”  I love that it happened, and think the Great Spirit had a hand in its birth.  This song is telling us about some adjustments we need to make in our lives here and now.

            “The Iroquois and Blackfoot, the Seminole and Crow/

            Were there as we discounted where they live and what they know,” the song

opens, then continues: 

           “Staked claim to plain and mountain range/

            Spread weeds of ways to suit and change /

            The pallet and the pantry full of all we would not share /

           We did not care / That they’d been there."

     We know this story, this black shadow of our history in this place.  The song reminds us that we keep it in the shadows, where it does its black work.   Rising to the light on the back of a song helps.  Let us say Amen to that history, and begin to work with its meaning.

     But the bridge of the song brings us to the present. 

        “They’re still there / And for all the selfish choices that we made /

         They paid a debt they never should have paid” it starts boldly, then ends

       “Who are we to think that we could have their souls? /

        They’re in the places where the grass grows through their bones /

       Their spirits ride the air / And they’re still there.”

     I was telling our new pastor, Mark Smith, about this song.  Mark serves both the Lindsay and Exeter Methodist Churches, which is wonderful because he grew up in Tulare County amidst our land-people relations.  He’d just mentioned that one of his grandfathers was part Yaqui, and that the family still knows the story of his land loss as the Americans took over California.  It struck me that the grass may be growing through his grandfather’s bones, but the part of Mark that is part Yaqui is still here, like the parts in his parents, siblings and all their children.  Still here.

     And while we are sitting in the theater Saturday night having our hearts challenged and mended all at the same time, another experiment in being still here will be going on at Quaker Oaks Farm just north of Farmersville.  Darlene and Lalo Franco, with other members of the Wukchumni tribe who have been meeting on that land for almost 3 decades, will be helping to host a camp-out for youth (of all ages.)  They hope to share the meaning of that land with the newcomers, to pass on what it means to be attached, to know yourself as part of a place.  Still here.

     They’re still here.  We’re still here.  Maybe we can learn more about what that means.  Thank you, Juni, for delivering the message so beautifully, and for still being part of this place.  Thank you, Darlene and Lalo, for telling your story.  May we all have major heart breakouts this weekend.

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Trudy Wischemann is a land advocate who writes and sings.  You can send her your family land stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.