KAREN GOTTSTEIN Page 6 RAIN September/October 1985 John Deere and the Bereavement Counselor: Turning Community Into Desert The following article has been reprinted by permission of the E.F. Schumacher Society. It is one ofa series of Schumacher Lectures available in booklet form for $3 each from: E.F. Schumacher Society, Box 76A, RD 3, Great Barrington, MA 01230. by John McKnight Only eleven years ago, E.F. Schumacher startled western societies with a revolutionary economic analysis that found “Small Is Beautiful." His book concluded with these words: The guidance we need ... cannot be found in science or technology, the value of which utterly depends on the ends they serve; but it can still be found in the traditional wisdom of mankind. Because traditional wisdom is passed on through stories rather than studies, it seems appropriate that this lecture should take the form of a story. Making Deserts The story begins as the European pioneers crossed the Alleghenies and started to settle the Midwest. The land they found was covered with forests. With incredible effort they felled the trees, pulled the stumps, and planted their crops in the rich loamy soil. When they finally reached the western edge of the place we now call Indiana, the forest stopped and ahead lay a thousand miles of the great grass prairie. The Europeans were puzzled by this new environment. Some even called it the "Great Desert." It seemed uninhabitable. The earth was often very wet and it was covered with centuries of tangled and matted grasses. With their cast iron plows, the settlers found that the prairie sod could not be cut and the wet earth stuck to their plowshares. Even a team of the best oxen bogged down after a few yards of tugging. The iron plow was a useless tool to farm the prairie soil. The pioneers were stymied for nearly two decades. Their western march was halted and they filled in the eastern regions of the Midwest. In 1837, a blacksmith in the town of Grand Detour, Illinois, invented a new tool. His name was John Deere and the tool was a plow made of steel. It was sharp enough to cut through matted grasses and smooth enough to cast off the mud. It was a simple tool, the "sod buster" that opened the great prairies to agricultural development. Sauk County, Wisconsin is part of that prairie where I have a home. It is named after the Sauk Indians. In 1673, Father Marquette was the first European to lay his eyes upon their land. He found a village laid out in a regular pattern on a plain beside the Wisconsin River. He called the place Prairie du Sac. The village was surrounded by fields that had provided maize, beans, and squash for the Sauk people for generations reaching back into unrecorded time. When the European settlers arrived at the Sauk prairie
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