There is no rural culture

we are all industrial now

A few days ago a photo was going around Twitter that I don’t want to repost because I don’t feel like continuing to make a “main character” out of someone who didn’t expect so much attention. A guy who lives on a “remote island” of Alaska with “no electricity” posted a picture of his wife scrubbing their laundry in a stream and said she’s been doing this “two years” so they could live their dream of living on this island. Many were outraged that he wasn’t “helping” though of course, who knows, he might have been in the moments when he wasn’t taking the photo, or lambasted him for making her do this backbreaking labor (Alaskan streams are also very cold, which was mentioned in the tweet). But I don’t care about any of that. What annoyed me was the counter-outrage.

If you’re not familiar with Twitter, the basic plot is like this: some random person posts a normal tweet (often with a photo, but sometimes without) that gains enough popularity with their own followers that it eventually leaks out of their usual group of “friends” and into the wider body of Twitter. Once it gets there, some absolutely unhinged group of people finds this very normal activity enraging and so posts “quote tweets” showing the original tweet with their unhinged take on it. From there, other people quote tweet counter-outrage, meta-outrage, and rebuttals. The person who originally tweeted the thing often finds themselves overwhelmed, inundated with unhinged responses. They then usually proceed to escalate, while feigning indifference. In such a way, a single tweet of a normal thing can achieve legendary status, and you can eventually refer to it indirectly. For example, each year on the date that the original “30-50 feral hogs” tweet appeared, someone posts that it’s the “feral hogs anniversary” and those of us who hang out on Twitter know, much to our shame, exactly what they mean. Essentially no one on that site has any coping skills nor real-world life at all, so any mildly annoying tweet is an apocalyptic event.

So, the person who posted the original tweet is “friends” with a lot of the “homesteader” and “ecology” types on Twitter. So, the counter-outrage came from people who talk about Wendell Berry all the time, who talk about living “simple” lives with less “industrial consoomerism” (they spell it that way, I don’t know why), and this one contrarian from New Mexico who tweets about how there is “no frontier” anymore and how “everyone who pretends to be some off-grid homesteader is just as dependent on industrial society as everyone else” and so forth. Sorry to go on and on but I need to set the scene, to connect all this to my larger topic.

In the photo, this (indigenous Alaskan, by the way) lady is shown surrounded by plastic tubs with a plastic bottle of Tide (yeah, she appears to be dumping Tide directly into a pristine Alaskan stream … just … ok) scrubbing some very white clothes. Scrubbing because these are white clothes and they live in a “muddy” place with six kids. Meanwhile, in the unthinking counter-outrage, the ecological homesteader types rushed to defend their “friend” by saying this is what laundry looks like when you’re living “off grid,” more “in touch with nature,” “zero carbon,” etc.

If she was using homemade soap made from moose tallow and lye she scraped out of their fire ashes and laundry baskets made from local reeds or something, then, sure. But all that plastic came from somewhere else; the Tide was almost certainly airlifted to that island. And while their own house may not have electricity, the network that is allowing them to tweet photos from this stream has some electricity and definitely a grid somewhere, whether they claim responsibility for it or not.

Which is all just to say: there is no rural culture. There is only industrial culture now. That lady doesn’t have a washing machine now, but they admitted they’re saving up for one to save her this work, and it will be powered by solar panels they think and those solar panels and the washing machine itself will have been made somewhere else and probably flown (but possibly boated) out to their “remote” island. The main thing that makes a place “rural” now is how far one must drive to Walmart to buy plastic.

This idea is certainly going to seem wrong to a lot of people, and maybe it is, but I’ll try to explain.

In one of my favorite Wendell Berry essays, “The Work of Local Culture”, he describes a bucket that is hanging from a fence that he walks by often. It’s been hanging there a long time and there is a story behind it, but, more importantly, it’s doing an important thing right now. It is gradually collecting layers of debris — nut shells, dead insects, feathers, leaves — from the forest around it, and that debris is gradually turning into soil. Berry describes watching this process over the years, as the bucket continues to accumulate more debris and, thus, soil.

This is essentially what makes a culture: the various human pursuits leave artifacts, both social and physical, that accumulate over time and act as the nutrient layer from which more culture (“soil”) is produced. Historically, the fact that humans tended to stay mostly within their own culture, whether it was bound to a place or was nomadic, meant that the cultural products of one culture kept accumulating to itself, which, over time, led to truly unique cultures — like soils that reflect, in their composition, the ancient sea creatures and vegetation that lived there, the mountains that eroded in this particular place, the various uses to which the land has been put, whether by nature or by man.

So, for example, the great explosion of American musical arts that came out of the South, as well as the food, social mores, dialects, and literature, reflect certain ways human activities built up. It was a very rich soil, built up over a long time from the debris of colonialism (the French influence, the Spanish, the English, the Scots-Irish); of slavery; of “front porch” republicanism; of the particular brand of Protestantism, different from that in New England. New Mexico, at its best, has an entirely different flavor from the South, due to the layers of cultural debris it has accumulated; I love them both, in their distinctness.

The important thing is that things be allowed to accumulate; that is what makes soil and what makes a culture. If you are constantly extracting from your soil and not adding more material to turn into soil, it becomes depleted; eventually it can become entirely depleted and have no more nutrients to offer. It will erode away, in water and wind, and exist no more. And that is essentially what is happening to rural culture, the rural cultures that once were. Some no doubt had very rich soil indeed over the years and so are taking longer to deplete, but others have already died.

Rural culture is tied to the land in ways urban society is not; urban culture is about the human-built environment, for both good and ill, and the density of human dwellings, but rural culture is about the land and our uses of it. It was once strictly agrarian, but certainly in the fossil fuel age, mining and other extractive industries have to be included as part of having a culture centered around using the land. And nowadays, tourism is also a land-based extractive industry; people want to go to the national parks or what have you, and so infrastructure must be built to bring in those tourist dollars.

In a strictly agrarian rural culture, some food, fiber, and other agricultural products will be exported out of the countryside and into the cities; that relationship can turn exploitative, such as when laws (including taxes) make it impossible for rural folks to feed and sustain themselves, even though they are growing the bulk of the food, but it need not be. What makes the difference is how much is extracted from the countryside and what is sent back in return. It’s easy to see that when it leads to rural famine, as it has many times over the centuries, it is exploitative. We don’t call it exploitation when the urban centers extract all the resources from a place and send back only bureaucracy, debt, and plastic, as is the case in the modern US. Very few people starve for calories in America, but many people are starved for culture. The soil that was once here is gone.

Life in agrarian cultures once centered around the planting and harvest. Traditional festivals to celebrate a particular agriculture product, such as cherries in our area, and the fall harvest are common parts of rural culture. The dates when such festivals are held will necessarily change from year to year, because the dates of the harvests vary depending on the weather.

In modern times, though, the cherry festival must take place on a date decided at least a year in advance, because of the tourist trade. It is possible to attend the cherry festival here and not see a single fresh cherry and, if you ask, find that the cherry lemonade or cherry baked goods are being made, yes, with local cherries but from last year’s harvest, because this year’s harvest isn’t in yet. The cherry festival is not serving the rural culture it was once a part of; now it is serving the needs of tourists and the Chamber of Commerce. We hope that while you are in town for the scheduled cherry festival, you will stop at the local Dairy Queen and gas station.

The farmers markets in many small towns are now also oriented to bringing in tourists; the fondest hope for a small town market is to bring in a lot of tourist trade. The crafts vendors can’t really make a living otherwise, because they tend to specialize in one type of craft, and local people who see them every week probably are not in a position to buy the same type of craft every week, or anything close to that. So, the farmers markets in small towns often try to position themselves along the highway, better to be seen by passing tourists, than by explicitly centering themselves on the needs of their local community.

Small farmers “can’t compete” with the kind of scale of the big farms in California and Arizona, so they need the outlet of the farmers market or a CSA or other direct marketing opportunities, but at the same time they also shop at Walmart for bananas and out-of-season lettuce and expend advertising money trying to bring in tourists. Off-grid homesteaders on remote islands have plastic bottles of Tide and Twitter accounts.

Everything is oriented outward, toward the world outside of the town in which the activities are happening; all the money ends up leaving this town, into the same set of corporate bank accounts as if they lived the most urban lifestyle. Small towns are now centrifuges, flinging their children, their natural resources, and their money out of the town itself and into the larger world, where all are happily absorbed into the bigger economy and culture. It may be true, as Simon Sarris has said, that cities are where culture goes to flicker and die (I think he is right, by the way), but the resources the small towns can throw into the cities are not limitless. They may be heaving their last gasps now.

I have lived in small towns in a lot of different places. In Alaska, there were ample foraging opportunities, wild berries of very high quality, and no one (except me and my son) took them; why would you when there’s a Safeway right there? In Idaho, when the interstate came to the small town, it killed off the local general store and basically all the local economy, because it was cheaper to drive 45 miles to go to Walmart than to shop locally. The New Mexico town where I went to high school was an interesting case, because it was a little more isolated by difficult roads than most small towns are these days; we still had regular community dances and rodeo events and things like that, but still most people headed “into town” every couple of weeks to get groceries. Arkansas — well, Arkansas is special, since it’s the home of Walmart itself. And this town? Most people here have access to enough land to grow most of their own vegetables, and we’re surrounded by farm land, and most people still get their food at Walmart or Costco.

The lives we lead are essentially urban, making most of their income from serving, in one way or another, the larger society rather than themselves and their neighbors. Fewer people make their living directly off extractive industries such as agriculture and mining (machines have replaced human labor) and more live off the exact same kinds of jobs as people in urban places: teaching at the local schools (though many of our teachers do not live locally, or so I am told) and working in various bureaucracies and wings of government administration, spending much of their life commuting to and from work.

Nothing accumulates in the rural “bucket” now; no new soil is forming, so to speak. I don’t believe it is simply the inexorable march of progress when so much of it directly descends from policy decisions such as the Farm Bill and the regulatory structures that encourages centralization and consolidation of banks and businesses. I know I am not the only person who feels the loss keenly, but I think many people are not even in a position to have noticed it; erosion is slow and mostly it happens quietly, while you’re not paying attention. It’s like trying to notice the gradually diminishing birdsong as the birds die off. How does one bring the silence itself into focus?