My Kind of Holiday (These Days)

  

 

It was the 4^th of July, with perfect weather. The president visited Traverse City and Antrim County, bought cherry pies at King Orchards and had chocolate chip ice cream in a waffle cone at Moomer’s. In Northport, after dark, there were fireworks, which some people loved and some hated. We Americans are human beings, after all, and is there anything humans ever agree on?

 

My bookstore is closed on Sundays and Mondays this year, as it was last, and July 4-5 were no exception. I stayed home. “It’s the height of the season!” the Artist exclaimed in astonishment when he asked my holiday plans. But nearing the close of my third decade in business, progressing through my eighth decade of life, I find days off essential to my wellbeing. I do some housework, mow some grass, fix meals, but I also play with my dog and lie around in the shade with a good book – as if (except for the mowing) I’ve rented a cottage and am on vacation for an hour here and there.

 

It is still early morning. The mist is on the marshes. The day is stark and stiff as a linen shroud. But it will soften; it will warm. At this hour, this still early hour, I think I am the field, I am the barn, I am the trees; mine are the flocks of birds, and this young hare who leaps, at the last moment when I step almost on him….

 

-      Virginia Woolf, The Waves

 

A friend mentioned this novel of Woolf’s to me when explaining decisions he made about the structure of his own book, and by sheer coincidence, the very next day, I found an old library copy in the annual Leelanau Township FOL book sale. My copy (this is irrelevant but interesting, I think) was withdrawn from circulation after its time in the University of London Extra-Mural Library, and it was the seventh printing (1953) of a book originally published in 1931, i.e., between the wars, as I always think of that period in Western history.

 

In The Waves are six characters who “speak,” although what we are given within pairs of quotation marks is not words uttered by one character to one another but rather that character’s private thoughts and impressions. The first scene opens with the six as children, each in turn telling what they see and hear in the country house world around them. As they age in the course of the novel (and we are given both their changes and their constancies, always through these interior speeches), somehow – this is Woolf’s genius – they take shape in our imaginations, and we recognize each of them and their relationships to one another and see them in their passing lives, singly and together.

 

Between sections of these inner thoughts, feelings, and impressions of the world, always progressing through the course of the characters’ lives as they age, are sections describing an ocean from sunrise to night, so that one day of the ocean and its waves parallels the passing decades of particular human lifetimes. An example from early in the book:

 

The sun rose higher. Blue waves, green waves swept a quick fan over the beach, circling the spike of sea-holly and leaving shallow pools of light here and there on the sand. A faint black rim was left behind them. The rocks which had been misty and soft hardened and were marked with red clefts. 

 

All through the book, particular colors and sounds and shapes are named, so that the author’s fictional world is real and immediate in its details of sensation. Yet, immersed in it as I was, I was at the same time even more than usually aware of my own immediate surroundings – light through the basswood and black walnut leaves, shouts of color from my flowering boardwalk plantings, the dog lying nearby in the grass or pawing at the water in his wading pool to cool his paws, a bird swooping down through the branches, a wasp buzzing. And so, although I was lost in my book, I was not lost to the world around me. Following Susan and Bernard, Neville and Jinny, Rhoda and Louis through their days and years, I was all the more anchored in each moment of my own life. 

It was sheer magic and a wonderful holiday. 

We went for ice cream again on Monday. Cherry amaretto in a waffle cone for me, butter pecan in a regular cone for the Artist. I saved the last bite of cone for Peasy, as I always used to do for Sarah. And then he repaid me by table-surfing after dinner and eating a whole stick of butter. First time for that naughty behavior! Time out!

 

But another friend is dying, and that is dreadful. The Artist and I each make sure the other buckles the seatbelt. “Don’t do that. You’re too tired right now. You need to rest.” Anyway, however much we do, wherever we look we see more that needs to be done, but last night we threw up our hands and said, “Who cares?” It won’t all get done, and that’s that.

This morning I picked up a book I’d started reading who-knows how long ago, Herman E. Daly’s Steady-State Economics. Picking up the house, clearing surfaces, dusting, the Artist and I were making stacks of things to put away or de-acquisition, and this book was in one of my stacks, but this morning, as I say, I opened it and decide to start reading again at the beginning. Second paragraph of the preface to the first edition begins with a clear statement of the scope of his argument:

 

The antithesis of the steady-state economy is the growth economy, which is still defended by a large majority of economists and politicians. 

 

-      Herman E. Daly, Steady-State Economics, Second Edition with New Essays

 

Further down in that paragraph comes clarification of the author’s method:

 

…Controversy is most enlightening when dealing with the specific views of specific people. Hence I have named names and cited works, rather than argued against an unspecified aggregate “progrowth critic,” who could easily turn into a straw man. It would be easy to lump divergent progrowth arguments into one conglomerate and then expose this composite position to criticism and to ridicule the inconsistencies that naturally result when different positions are merged and treated as if the merger had been the product of a single mind. Leaving individuals anonymous usually passes for scholarly abhorrence of polemics. More often, the merciful anonymity granted toward one’s soon-to-be vanquished adversary is nothing but a lazy preference for debating mute straw men rather than real people. Therefore, I hope that my disagreements with specific spokesmen of economic orthodoxy will not be thought of as ad hominem attacks or as implying any disrespect for the specific individuals cited as standard economics.

 

 

I see by the Post-It notes flowering from page edges that when I last laid this book down I had reached page 103. As the issues seem among the most important for the future of the earth, I’ll get back to you in a while on my progress through all 285 pages.

 

Economics is a lot more than accounting, and anyone claiming interest in politics without interest in politics is, to my mind, simply an idealogue. What are the foreseeable consequences of specific ideas put into practice? That is the crucial question. Because long after we are gone, life will go on for others.

P.S. Books read since last post: 

89. Powell, Lawrence Clark. SOUTHWEST: THREE DEFINITIONS (nonfiction)

90. Doyle, Arthur Conan. THE REFUGEES: A TALE OF TWO CONTINENTS (fiction – abridged student edition)

91. Woolf, Virginia. THE WAVES (fiction)

And So September Continues

Kitchen time!

Labor Day weekend was busy. Sun, rain, company at home, many holiday-makers in Northport, meals and sleep, lots of books going to new homes, with here and there some quiet time for a dog walk or, lower on Sarah’s priority list, a short grooming session. Reading, too, of course, even if it had to happen at 3 a.m. while the rest of the world slept.

American Stranger, a novel by David Plante, came to me as an ARC from Delphinium Books. While it was enjoyable reading, I have to say I expected more. Nancy’s parents fled the Nazis in Berlin but never speak of those days. She grows up believing that her parents’ furniture came with them from Germany and only learns as an adult that they bought it all in New York. But that is the extent of the revelations from their old life. There is a vague reference to “the president” asking people what they can do for their country but no more politics than that. I understand that the novel had to do with Nancy’s life, not the life of the greater United States. Still, it seems odd that the world around her wouldn’t seep into her thoughts now and then. I would have liked to get out of the bedroom more, I guess.

Pause en route

From fiction I turned to another book on economics and am finding that fascinating and very, very important. I’m trying to think back to my days as an office worker at Western Michigan University and topics covered in the interdisciplinary Environmental Studies course: Did those students perhaps read Herman Daly? The first edition of Steady-State Economics came out in 1977, so it’s entirely possible. I’ll have to ask my friend who was the program advisor, but if I knew the name back then I’d forgotten it.

My introduction or re-introduction, whichever it was, to Herman E. Daly in the 21^st century came, as does much of my environmental/scientific news, by way of Acres USA, a magazine that calls itself “The Voice of Eco-Agriculture.” With their Eco-Update and Industrial Ag Watch news sections, I keep abreast of developments that don’t necessarily make NPR or the top newspapers in the country, but another fantastic feature is the interview in every issue. (I’m trying to get the editorial people to pull a few years’ worth of interviews together into a book. I would be thrilled to have that for sale at Dog Ears!) September’s interviewee was Herman Daly himself, and I was so impressed by what he said in the magazine pages that I tracked down a few of his books.

Daly went from being a professor of economics to senior economist in the Environment Department of the World Bank. He co-founded and was associate editor of the journal Ecological Economics. As emeritus professor from the School of Economics, University of Maryland, he currently serves on the executive board of the Center for the Advancement of Steady State Economy. The essays in Steady-State Economics do not form a quick or easy read, but they are clearly written and understandable to any educated person willing to take the time.

Daly holds his opinions strongly and with good reason. In his preface to the second edition ((1991), he notes the omission of serious consideration for any works of “even remotely ‘Malthusian’” economics, including his own, by the majority of American economists who reject such theories and such works without examination. He quotes Daniel Raymond’s rejection of Malthus, Raymond who wrote simply that “the mind instinctively revolts at the conclusions....” Daly goes on:

It might be said in Mr. Raymond’s defense that one is not obliged to accept an unwanted or counterintuitive conclusion just because one cannot immediately find a logical or factual error in the argument leading to it. One might legitimately say, “I need to think about that.”

The thing is that they didn’t bother to think about it or examine it or consider it, and here Daly is stern:

[T]o refute an argument one must find either a factual error in the premises or a logical error in the reasoning. If after an extended time no such error can be found, then, contrary to Mr. Raymond’s view, one must bow to the conclusion of the argument. If the reader is annoyed with me at this point for unnecessarily reminding everyone about the elementary rules of argumentation, then I am glad. But experience has taught me that many people cannot distinguish an argument from a fulmination and are equally convinced (or unmoved) by either, depending only on whether or not the conclusion fits their established mind set.

(Is anyone else reminded here of the Heath and Heath book I brought forward recently? The well-supported contention in Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard that logic is not enough, that people also need a motive to change their minds and behavior? Well, that is an important insight, but for now I only bookmark it and suggest to those who missed the earlier post to check it out.)

The one big, big, big idea underlying steady-state economics is that “the economy” (an abstraction with no clear real-world referent) is not a closed, man-made system but an open system depending on low-entropy inputs from the natural world. Human beings convert raw material matter-energy into more artifacts and more people -- we reproduce ourselves as well as adding to the world’s “stuff” -- and output waste of all kinds. Some of our waste is recyclable, but even recycling takes time, so that even recyclable waste builds up, while a lot of our waste is nothing nature is equipped to recycle at all. The goal of unending economic growth, therefore, nothing more than a recipe by which we will bury ourselves in waste and ecological disaster.

Why have most economists not seen this?

Because they are too enamored of abstract mathematical models to allow the intrusion of the biosphere into their schemes, too committed to what Daly calls (and I love his dark humor) “crackpot rigor,” “scientistic pretension,” and the “blind aping of the mechanistic methods of physics,” at the same time that they ignore the laws of thermodynamics that would alert them to natural limits.

And because no one wants the bad news. “Growth” is seen as positive for two reasons. First, it’s the basis of power for nations; second, it’s an alternative to sharing. Daly puts it pithily: “It offers the prospect of more for all with sacrifice by none....”

Take the question of American agriculture “feeding the world.”

The drive to increase agricultural productivity leads to the replacement of low-yield species by newly developed high-yield species, which results in greater homogeneity of crops, that is, in a reduction in the diversity of the genetic stock and consequently a greater vulnerability to future pest and disease mutants. The increased vulnerability of the monoculture calls for even more protection by pesticides. [GMO seeds modified to be resistant to pesticides have only accelerated this vicious upward spiral.] In addition, more inputs of fertilizer and fresh-water irrigation are required by “green revolutions,” with resulting problems of water pollution and shortage.
 

It isn’t only farmers whose livelihood depends on soil and sun and rain. Everyone on earth is in the lifeboat together. Look at today’s newspaper. Any day's news!

"National Minstrel"

One of the reason I am so proud to sell so many used books is that these ‘artifacts’ (in Daly’s language) are still fulfilling their purpose as human artifacts, still conveying the ideas of their authors, still useful, not waste. And because I know how long books can live, when properly cared for, I feel good about selling new books, too. Here are a few places where I’ve written about questions of and books about resource use, production, “stuff,” books, etc.:

All Stuff Is Not Equal, Part I

All Stuff Is Not Equal, Part II

I Am Not a Luddite

Copyright 1836