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Monday, February 1, 2010

What I underlined: Berry, The Unsettling of America, Ch 6 edition:

Chapter 6: The Use of Energy
(just assume these are all quotes, unless otherwise noted)

In speaking of the use of energy, then, we are speaking of an issue of religion, whether we like it or not.

Religion, in the root sense of the word, is what binds us back to the source of life. ... The lives that feed us have to be killed before they enter our mouths; we can only use the fossil fuels by burning them up.

The human pattern of cyclic use is exemplified in the small Oriental peasant farms described in F. H. King's Farmers of Forty Centuries, in which all organic residues, plant and animal and human, are returned to the soil, thus keeping intact the natural cycle of "birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay" that Sir Albert Howard identified as the "Wheel of Life."

Technology joins us to energy, to life.

Lives, skills, and tools were culturally indivisible.

The question at issue, then, is not of distinction but of balance.

The energy that comes from living things is produced by combining the four elements of medieval science: earth, air, fire (sunlight), and water. This is current energy. ... It is not available in long-term supplies; in any form in which it can be preserved, as in humus, in the flesh of living animals, in cans or freezers or grain elevators, it still perishes fairly quickly in comparison, say , to coal or plutonium. It lasts over long term only in the living cycle of birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay. The technology appropriate to the use of this energy, therefore, preserves its cycles. It is a technology that never escapes into its own logic but remains bound in analogy to natural law.
The energy that is made available, and consumed, by machines is typically energy that can be accumulated in stockpiles or reservoirs. Energy from wind and water obviously does not fit this category, but it suggests the possibility of bigger and better storage batteries, which one must assume will sooner or later be produced. ... This mechanically derived energy is supposed to have set people free from work and other difficulties once considered native to the human condition. whether or not it has done so in any meaningful sense is questionable ... We now have a purely mechanical technology that is very nearly a law unto itself.

Mechanical technology is based on quantities of materials and fuels that are finite. If the prophets of science foresee "limitless abundance" and "infinite resources," one must assume that they are speaking figuratively, meaning simply that they cannot comprehend how much there may be. In that sense, they are right; there are sources of energy that, given the necessary machinery, are inexhaustible as far as we can see.

we are trustworthy only so far as we can see. The length of our vision is our moral boundary. ... It is already certain that our planet alone-- not to mention potential sources in space-- can provide us with more energy and materials than we can use safely or well.

It is typical of the mentality of our age that we cannot conceive of infinity except as an enormous quantity. We cannot conceive of it as orderly process, as pattern or cycle, as shapeliness. We conceive of it as inconceivable quantity-- that is, as the immeasurable. ... If we think, for instance, of infinite energy as immeasurable fuel. We are committed in the same thought to its destruction, for fuel must be destroyed to be used.

But who will control the use of that energy? How and for what purposes will it be used? How much can be used without overthrowing ecological or social or political balance? Nobody knows.
The energy that is made available to us by living things, on the other hand, is made available not as an inconceivable quantity, but as a conceivable pattern And for the mastery of this pattern-- that is, the ability to see its absolute importance and to preserve it in use-- one does not need a PH.D. or a laboratory or a computer. One can master it in this sense, in fact, without having any analytic or scientific understanding of it at all. It was mastered, better than our scientific experts have mastered it, by "primitive" peasants and tribesmen thousands of years before modern science.

The moral order by which we use machine-derived energy is comparatively simple. Whatever uses this sort of energy works simply as a conduit that carries it beyond use: the energy goes in as "fuel" and comes out as "waste".

The moral order appropriate to the use of biological energy, on the other hand, requires the addition of a third term: production, consumption, and return. It is the principle of return that complicates matters, for it requires responsibility, care, of a different and higher order than that required by production and consumption alone, and it calls for methods and economies of a different kind. In an energy economy appropriate to the use of biological energy, all bodies, plant and animal and human, are joined in a kind of energy community. ... They die into each other's life, live into each other's death. They do not consume in the sense of using up. They do not produce waste. What they take in they change, but they change it always into a form necessary for its use by a living body of another kind. And this exchange goes on and on, round and round, the Wheel of Life rising out of the soil, descending into it, through the bodies of creatures.

The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.

It is alive itself. It is a grave, too, of course. ... Within this powerful economy, it seems that death occurs only for the good of life. And having followed the cycle around, we see that we have not only a description of the fundamental biological process, but also a metaphor of great beauty and power.

Because soil is alive, various, intricate, and because its processes yield more readily to imitation than to analysis, more readily to care than to coercion, agriculture can never be an exact science. There is an inescapable kinship between farming and are, for farming depends as much on character, devotion, imagination, and the sense of structure, as on knowledge. It is a practical art.
But it is also a practical religion, a practice of religion, a rite. By farming we enact our fundamental connection with energy and matter, light and darkness. In the cycles of farming, which carry the elemental energy again and again through the seasons and the bodies of living things, we recognize the only infinitude within reach of the imagination.

Cultivation is at the root of the sense both of culture and of cult. The ideas of tillage and worship are thus joined in culture. And these words all come from an Indo-European root meaning both "to revolve" and "to dwell". To live, survive on the earth, to care for the soil, and to worship, all are bound at the root to the idea of a cycle.

food is therefore a cultural product

agriculture is not only not a concern of culture, but not even a concern of science, for they have abandoned interest in teh health of the farming communities on the one and in the health of the land on the other. They appear to have concluded that agriculture is purely a commercial concern; its purpose is to provide as much feel as quickly and cheaply and with as few man-hours as possible and to be a market for machines and chemicals.

it seems to me that the way was prepared when the specialized shapers or makers of agricultural thought simplified their understanding of energy and began to treat current, living, biological energy as if it were a store of energy extractable by machinery. At that point the living part of the technology began to be overpowered by the mechanical. ... growth apart from life... Let loose from any moral standard or limit, the machine was also let loose in another way: it replaced the Wheel of Life as the governing cultural metaphor. Life came to be seen as a road, to be traveled as fast as possible, never to return. Or, to put it another way, the Wheel of Life became an industrial metaphor; rather than turning in place, revolving in order to dwell, it began to roll in the "highway or progress" toward an ever-receding horizon.


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