biologist friend at another major university, who is concerned about species extinction, recently revealed to me his prejudice against rural places and rural people. During an exchange of family gossip, I mentioned that our son was a student in Lawrence, at the UniverUniversity professors, though righteously appalled when species disappear, pay little attention to farmers driven from their lands or to the loss of cultural information this represents. Jill Dooley-Michell is an artist who lives and works in St. Paul. Clinton St. Quarterly—Winter, 1988-89 31 sity of Kansas. He said he was sorry my son was in Lawrence. I said that he liked it there, to which my friend replied, “Well, I guess it is better than Salina,” which is where I live and where my son grew up. What I suspect was at work in the mind of this professor was a combination of cultural snobbery at and boredom with what he considered the unglamorous Kansas landscape. Salina, Kansas, is a town of forty thousand people, most of them of rural origin, descendents of those who possessed information about the farms and ranches on which they had been raised and from which they eked out a living. They may have done stupid things on those places, and many were probably poor at their work, which made them lose their farms. But most of them were driven from the land by the industrialization of agriculture. Their experience exemplifies a law at work in the world, a law of human ecology: high energy destroys information. High energy (such as fossil fuel or nuclear energy) contributes to the arrogance of university professors who, though righteously appalled when species disappear, pay little attention to farmers driven from their lands or to the loss of cultural information this represents. This cultural information, which was hard won through sweat, tears, injuries, and death, will have to be won back in the same manner, and not just for the land, but for the urban culture too. Though cultural information can evolve faster than biological information, once lost it will be difficult to regain. Reestablishment will be gutwrenching and the land will experience further abuse. The eyes-to-acres ratio will have been even more distorted, and I fear that the industrial model for agriculture may be regarded as even more necessary in the last years before the collapse. Wes Jackson is the author of New Roots for Agriculture and co-director of the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. Information Implosion is a chapter out of Altars of Unhewn Stone by Wes Jackson and published by North Point Press of Berkeley, California. Designer and illustrator Gail Swanlund is a regular contributor to the CSQ.
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