Today we’re picking up on the idea of creating sustainable sanctuary in this remarkable year of 2020. And given that an incredibly important election here in the USA looms just days from now, I thought I’d try to give some historical context to the idea of pursuing a regenerative enclave here in America.
Not too long ago a breadbasket of untapped natural resources lay before our ancestors. Our forefathers realized the seemingly endless opportunities lurking in our “vast, empty continent,” and they gathered visions of how a new nation’s prosperity could be assured. Among those leaders, Thomas Jefferson endorsed an agrarian ideal where the rhythms of nature are tamed just enough to cultivate an agricultural bounty while leaving places of relative wilderness amid the forests in between. Others like Alexander Hamilton saw prosperity in industry and technological advancements, envisioning great urban centers where ever-increasing efficiencies of labor could produce a North American manufacturing bounty to rival those in Europe. A push and pull of nature and technology was begun.
For many decades, the idea that you could be building and farming on weekdays while out hunting and fishing on weekends was the bread and butter of a sustainable American life. Indeed, much of our Independent Yankee history reflects a work ethic that harvested the resources of manifest destiny for capital gain while exploring and reveling in their beauty to cultivate a pioneering and uniquely American spirit. Even for those not pursuing an agrarian ideal, this often translated as a personal, contented repose with nature. In an untamed continent, the wonders of nature lurked around virtually every corner.
Only in recent decades has the unsustainable truth revealed itself. Only in recent times have we realized that there are limited tickets to an American harvest, and that nature cannot indulge more and more and more before serving notice that we must change our relationship.
Many feel that reckoning first appeared in the mid 20th century when the rotten infrastructure of world wars and the hyper production of a post-war boom left us with filthy air and industrial-scale wastelands. Throw in new problems like nuclear waste and clearly change was due. Landmark environmental laws of the early 1970s seemed to pivot our national consciousness towards valuing sustainable and shared planetary good health. But the engines of capitalism are unceasing. With very few Americans now actively engaged as farmers, it’s fair to say that manufacturing and technology have won out. The self-sustaining independence that Jefferson dreamed of has been mostly lost, and the great majority of us rely on large, communal infrastructures to sustain us.
Amidst that narrative, the virtues of a healthy planet are increasingly lost in the drive for a technologically adapted, comfortable independence. Who cares if the skies are clear in Ohio if I have to work too hard in Nebraska to sustain them? Many instead seek only to create an enclave of their own private comfort, away from the global manipulations and dangers of a stressed world.
And so we’ve come full circle. How can I get my ticket to the American harvest? Where are the sustainable homesteads of our forefathers? Make no mistake, they are lurking; but they will not be found via the approaches of old. New tools are available, and with them so is a new American sustainability.
DJ