Last night I had the privilege of participating in a good discussion about “food issues” with a number of men. That discussion was wide-ranging, so there will be no attempt to reproduce it here. But it did jog me in a couple of areas, and you are about to read the results of that.
First, it is not possible to talk about food production without assuming something about the production of eaters. One of my concerns about what (I think) underlies concerns about sustainability is that at the end of the day somebody is going to suggest that we should stop having kids. If I lived back in the day on my nice little sustainable farm, and had the same number of kids and grandkids that I have now, what would that mean? Say that we wanted to live as our agrarian ancestors had done, close to the land, laughter around a rough-hewn dinner table, and green beans to die for. That’s all good, but say in the early days I was supporting myself and the fam on 100 acres. I have three kids and they each have five kids. Divvying everything up so that they can support themselves too means that by the time I am putting on my waders to cross over the Jordan, we have nineteen families with just over five acres each. In other words, the main pressure on sustainability is not caused by a nearby burgeoning city, but is rather caused by the attractiveness of a particular farm wife.
One of the striking things that I notice when reading histories and biographies is how the population scales have drastically changed. At the time of the Reformation, some of the most influential towns in Europe had populations that were just a fraction of population of the small town where I now live. When human populations grow (or explode), one of the things they do is forage. If you object to the costs of foraging, then the only thing you can do is call upon people to limit the number of children they have.
Second, and related to this, is the universal human tendency that people have to cluster in cities. Another universal human tendency has been to envy the lot of those who don’t cluster there, those who get to live in the pristine countryside. But the game is requires that you not to envy them so much that you might actually do something about it. Part of the romanticism about farmers is related to this — we respect them as part of their intangible pay, so that food continues to show up in the city, where we intend to live out our days.
We must never forget that the story arc provided in Scripture is an arc that begins with a Garden and ends with a Garden City. This allows for agrarian values (and I would argue requires them), but does not allow for agrarianism, if you follow the distinction. To want everyone to live close to the land is to want a human race that God, for some reason, decided not to create. But when the cumbersome size of the citified human race gets too much for certain “theories,” that swollen human race is laid out on the Procrustean bed of the theory, and is sized to match. At one end of the bed is the ferocious agrarianism of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge; at the other end we have the more enticing blandishments of porn, pills and condoms. But the common thread is this — we could get ourselves a sweet little agrarian utopia going here, if it weren’t for all these darn people.
But actual people matter more than theories do. When the gospel liberates a people, it sets them free to love one another more than they love their theories, and it also sets them free to get into problem solving. A free people are much more of a resource than they are a drain — because they solve problems for people instead of treating people as though they were the problem. “You, yes, you there, with your carbon footprint . . . you, you . . . breather!”
I have sometimes toyed with the idea of starting a local political party with three planks in the platform: 1. Release aquifer water so we can water our lawns ad libitum; 2. Eliminate the property tax; 3. Shoot the wolves. But whenever I make any comments about the aquifer, noting casually that the planet we live on is mostly water, the responders invariably point out to me, the slow one, that the oceans are salt water. But salt water is nothing but fresh water ore, and I bring this up to reinforce my point about people being a resource. I have absolutely no doubt that when the price of fresh water gets to a certain point (assuming a free market), some industrious lad is going to invent a cheap desalinator using materials that he found in his dad’s shop in the garage, and he will go from being a smart boy to being a rich boy.
So here is the litmus test. If the theory depends for its success on all these irritating people shutting up, going away, or refusing to breed, then perhaps the theory is the thing that is not sustainable. P.J. O’ Rourke summed up this problematic attitude aptly — “Too much of you, just the right amount of me.”