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Feast And Famine

This girl is old enough to understand that she is dying. But she is not old enough to matter. This girl is probably already dead. A newspaper photograph of famine is like the light of stars extinguished many years ago.

The Economy Of Eden

“I have learned how to grow healthy crops,” wrote Sir Albert Howard in his 1940 book An Agricultural Testament, “without the slightest help from mycologists, entomologists, bacteriologists, agricultural chemists, statisticians, spraying machines, insecticides, germicides, and all the other expensive paraphernalia of the modern experiment station.”

Grave Love

Bill Pody was our love guru. He drank twelve Pepsis a day, smoked three packs of Marlboros, and occasionally ate — usually a cheeseburger. He was forty-one. He lived in a lime green trailer next to a short, concrete silo. From my farm we could see the silo presiding over Pody’s hill.

Environmentalism And The Mystique Of Whiteness

An Interview With Carl Anthony

I agree that, no matter what the noise level, each person is entitled to hear his or her own inner voice. That’s an important first step to hearing the voices of others, as well as the cry of the earth. But the ability to respond intelligently, creatively, and compassionately to the claims of different human communities is undermined by the false sense of privilege that comes from thinking of oneself as “white.” Wanting to hear the voice of the earth, the notion that nature is crying out in pain, has a limited potential for reaching and touching many people who are living much more prosaic lifestyles than those who think about these matters only in an intellectual and philosophical way. People of color often view alarmist predictions about the collapse of the ecosystem as the latest stratagem by the elite to maintain political and economic control.

The Contrary Farmer

The truth is that farming at its worst is no more physically punishing than operating a restaurant, brokering commodities on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, or training for the Olympics.

Day Of Rest

This July Sunday is hotter than any I have ever felt in Wyoming. It has been dry for weeks. The sun hangs limply in the sky, but for all its limpness, it blazes. The clouds are thin and high. The temperature is over a hundred.

The Neugents

In the tobacco country of rural North Carolina, David M. Spear has photographed a family of plain-living people, and the beauty of his vision is startling. An old woman preparing to shampoo loosens her long, white hair; it floats, diaphanous, over a bowl of water. A man lying in bed gazes out a grimy window, his weathered, pensive face illuminated by sunlight.

The Meek

“A tough row to hoe” is not a casual metaphor if you’ve actually done it. Unless you’ve picked cotton. My mother picked cotton as a child. For her, hoeing a garden was leisure compared to pulling the heavy sacks and slicing her hands to ribbons on the sharp, dry husks of the cotton boles.

Selected Poems

Great Man Going

In the unfamiliar role of prey, we’ve come to recognize our own demise in the destruction of the environment. In the lifelessness we’ve projected on all other matter, we’ve come to see our own lifelessness.