more readings to sort it all out for.myself. I ·am sorry that these sections are not ones that could easily be included here. The ideas are too new and involved to be comfortably ex- - cerpted in paragraph form. Perhaps in a future issue we can reprint the whole section. At any rate, here are some gems that will give you a sense of the power and thoughtfulness of this book. -LdeM • * The concept of country, homeland, dwelling place, becomes simplified as "the environment"-that is, what surrounds us. Once we see our place, our part of the world, as surrounding us, we have already·made a profound division between it and ourselves. We have given up the understanding-dropped it . out of our language and so out of our thought-that we and our country create one another, depend on one another, are literally part of one another; that our land passes in and out of O\lr bodies just as our.bodies pass in and out of our land; that as we and our land are part of one another, so all who are living as neighbors here, human and plant and animal, are part of one another, and so cannot possibly fl,;mrish alone; that, and therefore, our culture must be our response to our place. Our culture and our place are images of each other and inseparable from each other, and so neither can be better than the other. * · . . . as 3: people, we must learn again to think of human energy, our energy, not as something to be saved, but as something to be used and enjoyed in use. We must understand that our strength is, first of all, strength of body, and that this strength cannot thrive except in useful, decent, satisfying, comely work. There is no such thi~g as potential bodily en.ergy. By saving it-as our ideals of labor-saving and luxury b~d us to do-we simply waste it, and waste much else alpng with it. • * Let me outline as briefly as I can what seem to me the characteristics of these opposite kinds of mind. I conceive a stripminer to be a model exploiter, and as a model nurturer I take the old-fashioned idea ·or ideal of a farmer. The exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The exploiter'!i goal is money; profit; the nurtu·rer's goal is health-his land's health, his own, his family's, his community's, his country's. Whereas the exploiter asks of a piece of land only how much and how quickly it can be made to produce, the nurturer asks a question that is much more complex and difficult: What is its carrying capacity? (That is, how much can be taken from it without diminishing it? What can it pr6duce dependably for an indefinite time?) The exploiter wishes to earn as much as possible by as.little work as possible; the nurturer expects, certainly, to have a decent living from his work, but his characteristic' wish is to work as well as possible. The competenc~ of the exploiter is in organization; that of the nurturer is in. order-;i human order, that is, that accommodates itself both to other order and to mystery. The exploiter typically serves an institution or or-· ganization; the nu,rturer serves land, household, community, rlace. The exploiter thinks in terms of numbers, quantities, "hard facts;" the nurturer in terms of character, condition, quality, kind. * We have always had to have "a good reason" for doing away with small operators, and in modern times ' • the good reason has often been sanitation, for which there is apparently no small or cheap technology. Future· historians wiYI no doubt remark upon the inevitable association, with us, between sanitation and filthy lucre. And it is one of the miracles of science and hygiene that the germs that used to be in our food have been _replaced by poisons.. December 1977 RAIN Page 1-5 THE GOOD NEWS _____....._ The Small Farm Energy Project Center for Rural Affairs • P.O. Box 736 . Hartington, NE 68739 The Small Farm Energy 'Project is demonstrating the potentials and economics of energy conservation for small farms. Renew- - able energy innovations and energy-saving farming practices are being adopted by 25 test farms wiJh ,the assistance of cost sharing and technical support, and the results compared to 25 normal farms. Solar grain drying and space heating,.wind electricity and water pumping, insulation, methane, minimum tillage, windbreaks, organic farming and crop rotations and many 9ther practices are being applied. Their excellent free •newsletter covers both national agricultural energy research and their own project. Sponsored by the Center for Rural Affairs, with Roger Bloubaum lending his usual wisdom and energy. The Federation of Southern Cooperatives,.Epes, Alabama, has just received a planning grant from Community Services Administration to run a similar project applied to the more labor intensive and variable agriculture of the Southwest. -TB Plans for solar grain drying on existing grain bins are available for $1 from William Peterson (an excellent resource in this arep! ), College of Agri.culture, South Dakota State University, 'Brooking$, SD 57006. Solar Grain • Drying, Progress and Potentials, USDA Agricultural hzformation Bulletin N9. 401. Free from Office of Communications, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Washington, DC 20250. . . Highly recommended, with charts,'photographs and designs for a variety of systems, some economics. More energy is now used drying corn than growing it. - Small Farm Energy Proj€·ct Newsletter, No. 7. Rural & Remote Areas Wind Energy Research Program Opportunity Notice (PON), issued Nov. 2, 1977, for details write: PON-Nov. 2, 1977 L. A. Liljedahl, Project Mgr. Rural Wind Energy Research ,Beltsville Agricultural Research Center USDA-Agricultural Research Service Beltsville, MD 2 07 0 5 . This lists 7 separate farm windpower research studies that the USDA intends to solicit between Nov. 1977 and Jan. 1978. Write f9r a copy to see if you might want to do any work for them. -LJ Community Energy ·Network 122, Anabel Taylor Hall Ithaca, NY 14853 Active for the last 3-1/2 years on energy con~ervation and renewable energy sources, this group also has an NSF project, •"Rural Domestic Energy Self-Sufficiency," which will interest those who follow the "Small Farms Energy Project," the USDA-ARS research on wind energy for rural and remote areas, above, and read Tilth. Send a SASE for info. - LJ "Self-Sufficient Living" Course Jim Day, Interdisciplinary Studies College of Agriculture , University o.f Idaho Moscow, ID 83843 For th~ past few monnhs sever11 people at UL have been together m this course, and if you're in western Idaho or eastern Washington, they're an information,centcr that you might tap on such topics as alternative technology for small~scale farming, renewable energy sources, and structures/shelter. They'd appreciate learning about a,t. films, periodicals and books. - LJ 1 •
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