I wonder, too. I’m burned out and I think I’m looking forward to taking refuge in nature for awhile …. any place except the place where people are getting upset over Dijon mustard ….

I too have struggled with the disparity – chasm, even – between my visceral understanding and acknowledgement of what Wendell and Wes (Jackson) refer to as being/becoming native to a place, and the stark reality that I’m an outsider in my adopted region of Kentucky, and may always be so.

But even Wendell travelled far and wide and lived in and loved many different places. That he had a family home, a territory with his surname attached, to return to, was surely a boon. We all can’t be so lucky, and I will ever insist that the lack of specific birth connection to a place is no reason not to work toward becoming native to it, and loving it like the sliver of creation entrusted to our care that any physical property is. It is my life’s ambition to do just that, on my patch of forest and reclaimed pastures, north of Green River Lake in Taylor County and just a stone’s throw from the old man who was born there and sold it, luckily, to me.

And while I shall be a sustainable farmer eventually, I am not yet – I’m still a sustainable city mouse just like you, and we need more of us; more townfolk who will consciously live well where they are, respecting the resources it takes to sustain a group of people living close together, and who will also consciously refrain from wanting both the comforts and conveniences of city life and the luxury of “country living” at the cost of the countryside itself.

The farmland around my hometown in Colorado, Fort Collins, has been gobbled up by such aspirations. It makes me sick to visit there and see the acres of walled estates out in the middle of nowhere, sucking water out of the aquifers for immaculate landscaping, covering up what once was the fertile homesteads of my neighbors and friends.

There’s grace, but sadness too. I think of Willy Nelson and Julio Iglesias, singing “To all the girls I’ve loved before…”. It is a sad – if a little smarmy – song, full of loss just beneath the surface. What happened to “all the girls”?

I feel that loss myself sometimes: “to all the places I’ve loved before…”. But it would be far sadder if there were no love — “loves” — to sing about.

Jude: “Do birth & heritage take precedence over values of sustainability?” That is the question! And of course I don’t know the answer. I assume Berry would lament we even have the choice to begin with.

I personally think we — I, anyway — should idealize the Kentucky farm a little less, detached as it so often is from Kentucky *farming*, where all the depth, history and hard work comes. That ideal, as you may know, had a lot to do with the dawn of the sprawling ‘burbs, when all us city folk decided to move out “in the country.” Nothing could be less sustainable, in my book, than city folk in the country: letting good land go to pot and driving thirty miles to Walgreens.

I’ve finally recognized – my parents can’t be blamed — that I’m a sustainable city mouse. “Town mouse,” anyway. So these days I’ve taken on the less idealized, but I think equally important, task of living sustainably right where I am. Let me see first whether I can grow some tomatoes in the backyard, and then I’ll start looking at the John Deere catalog.

Can you love more than one place? Sure you can…At different points in your life, you may find different places move to the forefront, at other times they will fall back in the hierarchy of your healing places, based upon your need of their particular type of specialty healing.

Thought provoking post…

You’re right, of course — “Growth” is too tainted a word. Which is a shame, because “growth” (or “development”, for that matter) really should have been reserved all along for your “affordable, appropriate technology; food sovereignty; micro-finance.” Not for sugarcoated euphemisms about McEconomies of scale.

Never mind that most economic growth in the undeveloped world isn’t the kind of commerce that builds communities and families by enabling them to gain the skills/tools/appropriate technologies/affordable financing they need to stand on their own w/o gov or ngo support – never mind that. On paper it looks like dollars to every skinny African and food in the mouths of an unrelenting tidal wave of hungry children. But it is not that. It is, in fact, a forced dependency that brings great profit to the corporations and middle-men, who smugly smile at themselves in the mirror before retiring for the night, sure of their future on the topside in exchange for all the “good” and “progress” they’ve engineered for the world’s poor … for a princely sum.

I’m right here looking at it. These people need employment and self-sufficiency, not serfdom, which is what the present initiatives for growth offer them. They scratch a living from rocks, from dry, hot earth, from trash-eating goats; they drink contaminated water, rely on USAID grain and handouts, burn the native shrubs for charcoal to cook on smoky fires on the ground surrounded by trash, and spend half their annual income to buy the government-sponsored narcotic, khat, which keeps them serene and smiling amidst the horror that is Djibouti. Bettering their lot wouldn’t take a lot of investment, nor would it make any corporations rich. All these tough, rugged, resilient people need is support, mentorship, and instruction in modern disease prevention (and birth control); they don’t need a McDonalds on the corner or a Honda civic in every driveway. But even THEY don’t know that, because what they’re told is, growth is good = Western consumer culture = happiness.

Affordable, appropriate technology; food sovereignty; micro-finance. Those are the elements of development I believe are needed here. But there’s no profit in them. So it can’t be called growth. What a shame.

Ethiopia feeds its people (barely) with world aid donations, but sells its productive farmland to Saudi princes to raise rice and wheat on for their own coffers. How stupid is that?