The
fence reaches twenty feet in the air here, the eight inch square posts rising
solid out of the gray concrete sixteen feet up, to the four foot plate steel at
the top. Two hundred yards up the line from where I stand the massive rusting
hulk of the wall ends, back to a low vehicle barrier and finally to the tawdry
twist of barbed wire that strings up and over the hill between embedded
t-posts, marking the line. The Line, la linea, the United States-Mexico border.
I see the scrawl instantaneously, at the highest point of the fence, upside
down from my angle. "Diego fue aqui" it reads. Diego was here. In one
instant the steel is torn down, rendered utterly obsolete and foolish,
revealing in a moment the literal absurdity of walling off one country from
another to halt forces much more than the wind of a late summer storm against
the wall. A wall scaled by an immigrant or a smuggler, regardless his name
there to mock the wall.
The wall in all its infinite wisdom
to stem the flow of needs and wants. The solution to the problem of nineteen
foot ladders. I stand at the base of that wall, standing on the deeply eroding
border road at the very end of the Huachuca Mountains, standing on National
Park land, not wondering at all why it was washing away. It was obvious. I was
wondering who in their right mind thought a road straight up the hill, plowed
down to accommodate the heavy machinery necessary for the wall's construction,
who would think it could sustain against the rains of August? Who in their
right mind would think that a taller wall would stop the flow of drugs, or
people, or water?
The economics of the wall ignore the
economics of the soil releasing individual grains into the flow of falling
rain, it ignores the persistent ethos of erosion. It ignores the complexities
of animal migration and pays no attention to the dynamic of fire as it moves
across the grassland, swirling as it does. The economics of the wall are
emblematic of the ignorance of our economics, of our continuing failure to see
that economics means nothing when compared to the sustenance and resilience of
our ecologies. Our modern idiom of economics supports an intellectual structure
for an ideology of utter devastation. The principles of economics continue to
believe only the intellectual models that provide support for its continuing
dominance as a way of organizing the world. Our failing ecological
infrastructure is but an externality.
A beginning economics teacher offers
only the simplest models to his students, arguing they need only evaluate the
simplicities of straight lines and linear relationships. Try to ignore the
externalities, try to ignore the complex interactions of the atmosphere and our
exhaust pipes. Try to ignore the disparity of our cultures and chalk it all up
to the beautiful market, the ever beautiful market. The ever expanding App
Store, the online bazaar, the rising gas prices, the rich buying our elections;
these you must see as natural expressions of the market, the market that makes
the wisest of decisions. The market driving the car toward that cliff up ahead.
Wendell Berry spoke in his recent
Jefferson Lecture of our need of affection for places and the land.
"Without this informed, practical, and practiced affection, the nation and
its economy will conquer and destroy the country." This affection he
forcefully linked to Leopold's Land Ethic to tie us to a larger whole, to
broaden our vision beyond the walls we have built, to see the effects of the market
on the land, to see the externalities and in so doing become a whole people. A
people of this place and of this continent. This was the vision of Leopold in
writing, "a system of conservation based solely on economic self-interest
is hopelessly lopsided."
Our hopelessly economic relationship
to the land provides for a higher valuation of national security over
ecological security. It engenders the philosophy of design driven by straight
lines, like the scar that grows with each passing day as the rain falls and
rocks release their hold and make their way down that fantastically linear
slope. Our hopelessly economic relationship fails to see a Mexican farmer being
able to stay on their land and grow corn of their culture and provide food
security for their communities and border security against the scary hordes of
farmworkers intent on stealing the back breaking work of harvesting our cheap
food. These are the symptoms of economics. These are the symptoms of an
ideology of utter devastation, a system constructed on the rational exhaustion
of each and all resources in its quest for the perfect curve, the linear model
of humans wanting profit.
There is no profit in the flower of
a plant. Except when it supports the life of a pollinator and stabilizes the soil
and supports the mycorrhizal life between its roots. No profit in the flower
when pollinated it transforms sunlight into fruit and a flycatcher snatches a
fly hovering too long near a beautiful bloom and the farmworker reaches down
through the haze of industrial pesticides and picks the food we eat. It is
profit when the middle man steps in, when the market takes hold of the precious
corn, packages it in flashy oil masquerading as plastic, and we suddenly have
food in our brief encounter with the sterile hum of the florescent light of
endless shelves and our courtesy card that tracks our purchase, and there we
have our cheap land ethic.
This unwillingness to see that it
takes thought to produce better food, that food doesn't come from the
supermarket, it is the same unwillingness that drives the growing scar cutting
deeper beside the border wall. It is a scar of our own making and it is a scar
on our own side. As though our own self-revulsion of knowing we know better, of
knowing that wall is not the way to engage the world. The simplicity of an
economic way of life is in its ability to convince us to ignore all the
elements that actually matter in the construction of the model. The ever
interchangeable producer and the ever interchangeable consumer as measured
against each other to a vanishing point.
The theory of economics is
predicated on the rational exhaustion of all possible resources. It is our
undoing as a species. Unless there is an ethical restraint, an understanding of
the importance found in beauty, joy, wonder, and especially affection for the
natural world beyond economics, then Homo
sapiens sapiens will not prove so wise wise after all. It is in the
manifestation of the land ethic, in the understanding that we must make human
culture responsive to the needs of the land in order to survive. The late
author of the brilliant novel Ecotopia, Ernest Callenbach, had a way of putting
our dilemma into words. "Taking care of each other is one practical step
at a time, most of them requiring help from at least one other person; survival
is a team sport."
I would add that we need desperately
the help of the pollinator and the soil microbe. We need the absorptive
capacity of every bit of organic material in our soils. We need the radical
diversity of our human family as much as we need the radical diversity of our
agricultural seed collections in order to grow all the food we are going to
need in the places we are going to need it. We need the complex diversity that
is the flora and fauna of our home ranges, and we need the attitude of mind
that it is all essential. Like the tinkerer of Leopold, who keeps meticulous
track of all the parts, we must pay attention to the diminishing world around
us while simultaneously coaxing it back to its previous stability, resilience,
and diversity.
Reaching back to needs and wants and
we are back to economics at root. Economics says there are no needs beyond air
and water. There is no room for the life or the soul of the soil. Back to
economy, as Wendell Berry explains as "the making of the human household
upon the earth: the arts of adapting kindly the many human households to the
earth's many ecosystems and human neighborhoods." We are back to staring
again at the wall. Staring again to the simple words there upon the crest of
the multimillion dollar rusting core of our relationship to the land.
"Diego fue aqui", Diego was here. We see an arm snaking up and over
the wall, struggling to hold on with one hand and scrawl with the other. A
simple act of breaking down the wall. A simple act of reminder, as Berry would
have it. "We do not have to live as if we are alone."
