As my last post described, I have been in the midst of an intense time at work. For over two months, I've struggled (with help) to finish the building phase of the soybean mill, complete commissioning production, and more recently, take on the first soybean harvest in Iraq. The challenges have been numerous and overwhelming in each of these projects. I have been forced back in time and into myself, specifically to reflect on the concept of work. Not just work as labor capital, or an economic exchange, but work as it relates to the soul, the body, natural processes and cycles.
I began working when I was quite young, hauling hay at age eleven, and eventually running my own landscaping business by the time I graduated from high school. Odd jobs were never lacking. Building decks, cleaning horse stalls, and random construction projects often took priority over school work. I liked having money to pay for gas, play billiards, go to tractor-pulls, and buy tobacco--all the "rebellious" things a rural Tennessee kid desires. Besides the money, I remember manual labor feeling much more satisfying than sitting in a classroom. After all, we had class to learn about things I might never pursue or use, things that were suppose to provide me opportunity down the road. And those opportunities would then turn into money, stuff, prestige, and if I was lucky, power. (They didn't say it this way, but it was the subliminal message.)
I don't despise education at all. For those that know me, I am now passionate about learning and increasing opportunity as I increase in knowledge. However, the precepts taught in high school are out of step; success is defined in the wrong terms and thus the path to get there is misconstrued. Our society has taught us that work can only be valued by the money which is derived in exchange for it. I think this notion is fundamentally false, based purely on economic theory and reasoning. Indeed, we can place a dollar value on work, and doing so can grant insight into the economic dealings which dictate much of our lives. Economics is a valuable discipline, but cannot stand on its own. We value things this way, perhaps at the most basic level, because we are absolutely convinced that money will bring about happiness and make our dreams come true.
Two interconnected issues arise from this premise. The first is that increasingly, we are undervaluing things and people around us due to our inadequate system of valuation. Biodiversity is shrinking because we cannot assume something's value just for the fact that it exists. Seniors have no value because they are no longer able to provide what they once could to push the economy forward. According to the economy and the economist, they are invalids. Yet, I imagine if we spent time delving into their life experiences and knowledge we might find an incredible store of wisdom; it is likely less related to making money and being successful, and more related to the quality of life one is living. If we cannot find an immediate use, or project an income from something, we dismiss it as having no value, and therefore, it is neglected, unworthy of attention and protection. We leave no room for mystery and possibility, which is a dastardly mistake considering our limited knowledge and inability to reason into the future.
The second issue relates more to the human aspect of work. We no longer seek to do that which provides us a higher quality of life based on our necessities. Rather, we do the things we hate because they pay more; because we believe it will provide us with a larger quantity of our wants. The ecosystems that thrive in the world, those that present more opportunity and hold more life, are not composed of what a single organism has built and colonized. Those natural communities that thrive are built on and within a complex system of nearly infinite, minute interactions that require each being to play its role, to live within the discipline of its own evolution and creation. It takes only a glimpse into our cities and countryside to see that we have denigrated both humans and our environment to the dollar sign. The breadbasket of a America is covered in less than seven major crops. We use approximately 382 million acres for crop production; 282 million of which are planted in corn, soybeans, hay, wheat, cotton, sorghum, and rice. Compare this many acres to a 1 acre garden with more than 25 different foodstuffs, enough to feed a family of five and still sell to the market. I would much rather spend my day working in the garden than on a combine in the middle of a 5,000 acre corn plot. Diversity brings life.
In an environmental sense, our cities are in much the same shape as the 5,000 acre farm. We work hard to create human diversity in cites; for this, I am grateful. Cities can be magnificent places, where culture, art, and community thrive. Human civilization and a civil society require these elements, but all to often, cities are void of our dependence on the natural world, the processes and cycles that drive food production and dictate the availability of resources. All things found in the city are derived from an original source. We pride ourselves in creating new things, but forget that whatever we create necessitates the extraction and manipulation of an existing, natural material. The decisions driving our expansion and extraction, our use of natural resources, our exploitation of invaluable raw materials are made from high rise office buildings. Farming methods, crop production, and the physical world are devalued by the abstract, dis-associative system of money valuation.
For us to thrive, we must consider the natural context of diversity. We must be aware of our influence on the things around us, and perhaps more importantly, of the influence those things have on us. I am not so naive as to think that we should dissolve our cities, nor that everyone should live on a farm. But, I do hope that our cities consider alternative options for growth and planning, such as green-roofing, roof-top and community gardening, planting trees, and creating green-space. Our philosophies of quantity and abstract valuation are bleeding into the world. We are maligning human-environment systems of interaction which have lasted for several millennia. Developing cities and nations are following our footsteps, and often take drastically detrimental footsteps in trying to "catch up" and "keep up". River systems are destroyed for the rock and soil at their edges. Entire populations of fish and aquatic life die due to lack of erosion control. Flooding is more probable and destructive than ever before due to our inability to reason ahead and plan for our impact on the hydrologic cycle. We justify it with the jobs created, the money made, and the ease with which we can move around doing the work we don't want to do, for money that won't bring about the ends we want.
Work can be for money, but also a way to explore our unique fit into the complex and mysterious workings of the world, our eco-system. Instead of working solely (and often miserably) for money, the so-called means to our end, which is thought to be human happiness, we should move toward a different philosophy of work--that work is the discipline and joy of today. The discipline is in reminding oneself that reaching the end would only bring about further doubt, insecurity, and some other nonsensical pursuit. The joy of work is in knowing that you are made, evolved and created, to fit into the complexities of the natural world. There is joy in recognizing our smallness, and also our uniqueness in this shrinking but still diverse Earth. For those who work from this philosophy, work is the means and the end.
