My concern here is the serious reduction of people on the land who can pass on to future generations the skills, the traditions, the passions, and the values they will need to farm well in the way we will need to in the future. The farm of today relies on great amounts of fossil fuels in the form of chemicals, fertilizer, and gasoline-run machinery. But economies and ecology dictate that in the future, farms must employ the energy coming from sunlight and natural biological processes. First this energy is trapped by plants, then it is harvested by humans. Today we are dependent upon old, or fossil, energy, extracted vertically through mine shafts, strip mines, and wells. Although sunlight energy has a low density per square foot, its supply is ensured. But it requires high cultural information to harvest and store it safely for-future human use. he culture believes that we are in the midst of an information explosion because of the status granted the knowledge accumulated through formal scientific methods. In contrast, knowledge accumulated through tradition, daily experience, and stories, mostly in an informal setting, has little status. We have taken this “folk knowledge” for granted, I suspect, for however complex it might be, it was not all that complicated to internalize. What we acquired by second nature was woven in with the rural setting, the daily work, the local values and moral code. It is more the legacy of the dead than of the living. The more respected body of knowledge, learned through formal discovery in classrooms and textbooks, is of a different order. More discipline is involved both in the discovery and in learning about the discovery. And though most of this information is not all that complex, it is more complicated for us to learn and internalize. Maybe this is the reason we assign greater value to such knowledge than to that which we picked up through tradition. There has been an explosion of formal knowledge, but what was necessary to make it accumulate so fast led to the destruction of much of the other older, less formal knowledge. Spread across the land surface , of the planet, tuned to local environ- ' ments, with potential to renew the earth and run on sunlight,(biological species and individual organisms are special creations for the spaces they inhabit. The loss of such diversity from the landscape is very serious. Like my professor friend, I worry about this loss of genetic stock, for it is a loss of the most important form of information on the planet. But the loss of cultural diversity across the land surface is also serious. I suspect that we pay this disappearing diversity such little respect because of the illusion that knowledge overall is more plentiful: What my professor friend and most of his allies have not grasped is that the war against the tropic's is the same war that is being waged against farmers and rural culture here in the U.S. Part of that war against rural culture can be seen in the negative attitudes of our larger culture toward rural places and rural people. They run as deep as the worst forms of racism. A reviewer of the film Country said that Jessica Lang was too beautiful to be a faI'm woman. A reviewer of a recent book by Wendell Berry said that although Berry was a farmer, he was “an intelligent farmer.” People who would be outraged if they heard a black called “nigger,” or a woman a “little girl,” make such statements about farmers and see nothing wrong with them. 30 Clinton St. Quarterly— Winter, 1988-89
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