One of their leading spokesmen has long been Kentucky farmer/poet Wendell Berry. Berry believes passionately that big-city busy-ness is death to the soul, and that we need to thrive is a much slower and more earth-bound way of living. Berry is always writing things like this:
We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.
Yet most people of this type drive trucks and tractors and use chain saws and generally take advantage of whatever about modernity makes their own lives easier. Some of them seem not to realize that a chainsaw requires a gigantic upstream infrastructure of iron mines, copper mines, train tracks, highways, oil wells, refineries, chemical plants, steel mills, assembly lines, and so on. Some, as I said; one thing about the people I am describing is that they are diverse in their backgrounds and opinions. They include Biblical fundamentalists, lesbian organic farmers, libertarian engineers, survivalists, aging ex-hippies, and truck-driving good ole boys.
Now a new name has come forward as their public face, at least on the conservative side: Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie.
The self-styled “greenest member” of Congress is a Republican from rural Kentucky. He lives in an off-the-grid home he built himself, using timbers cut and rock quarried from his family cattle farm. He pipes in water from a nearby pond, and powers the home with solar panels and a battery from a wrecked Tesla that he salvaged and retrofitted.
But while he lives on, and even makes part of his living from, the land, very few people would call him an environmentalist. The car he drives back and forth from Washington has a license plate advertising his support for coal. He likes to lean on his experience as a robotics engineer to argue against precipitously switching over to renewable energy, claiming that rapid changes could crash America’s power grids. And he once mocked John Kerry, who has a degree in political science, in a congressional hearing on climate threats: “I think it’s somewhat appropriate that someone with a pseudoscience degree,” he said, “is here pushing pseudoscience.” (NY Times)
Massie has some of the opinions we associate with wild-eyed Republicans, for example he introduced a bill to eliminate the Department of Education. But in other ways he comes across quite differently:
Outside the public eye, he has been quietly advancing what for a Republican politician are an unusual set of stances: evincing deep opposition to the national security state, resistance to the influence wielded by corporations and interest groups over our policymaking, and a sense that Americans need a better, more sustainable relationship to the land. It is a politics almost always built around the idea of scaling back, making systems smaller, simpler and more local. That’s an odd kind of politics for a Republican, or any major elected official, but it suddenly seems to have appeal even beyond the G.O.P.’s narrow base, and it has already made Mr. Massie the closest thing the party has to a cult hero lawmaker.
Many Americans from big urban areas find this mix of opinions baffling, but this and much weirder combinations are common across the hinterland. What unites many of these disparate ideas is a belief that the way we have been doing it is good, and what you outsiders says about it is wrong. Massie supports coal, because his neighbors have been mining it for generations, and because big-city liberals keep saying it is bad. He lives "off the grid" with his own solar array partly because "independence" has long been the ideal of many rural folks, and partly because he enjoys the idea of using his technical knowledge and self-reliant grit to out-ecologize Washington liberals. In an interview, Massie once said,
If Thomas Jefferson could have had solar panels at Monticello, he’d have had solar panels. The less you have to go to the store and buy, the less dependent you are on Walmart — it’s not just that you’re greener, but you’re more independent. . . . Independent, green, sustainable, frugal — those overlap.
A big rift opens between people like Massie and mainstream environmentalism over the issue of climate change. Mainstream environmentalists now mostly think that a pending climate crisis renders almost every other issue irrelevent. So they support, for example, new cobalt and lithium mines, despite the destruction they inevitably cause. Others have taken the position that traditional farming will have to disappear and be replaced with hyrdroponic farms and vat-grown meat, because farming just produces too much CO2. Which makes people like Massie howl. The answer to the destruction wrought by giant international systems of profit and control cannot be, they believe, more giant international systems of profit and control. It cannot be nuclear power plants and geothermal wells drilled five miles deep, paid for with financial gimmicks and stock speculation. No, the answer must be local, frugal, indepent, and green in a literal sense, about plants rooted in the soil. It must be about loving your place, not engineering your planet.
A big part of my heart is drawn to this kind of thinking, but my brain can't go there. I think that to get out of the mess we are in we need more technology, deployed on a massive scale. We do not live in a village, but in a global system that operates on a gigantic scale. Living frugally and close to the earth may be a great path for people who can do it, but I fear it won't mean much on a planetary scale.
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