In a world as bizarre as ours has become, we sometimes have a difficulty finding reasons for hope. That’s why I’m glad that we have a Neighborhood Economics event kicking off this week. About 200 folks will be working together, helping new economies emerge in the places where we each live—economies meant to serve everyone, not just the folks in the top 2%.
Seeing that work unfold in the rooms where we gather always gives me hope.
With our event coming up in Galveston, and with the death of Wendell Berry last week, I began to think about the journey I’ve been on over the last two decades, trying to make sense of how we get to a place to deeply care for the earth and the people who live on this planet around us. How do we care, and how can that care make a difference?
Many years ago, I was invited to the headquarters of the Episcopal Diocese of California to talk about an issue involving a neighborhood in San Francisco that was relatively close to where I served. We weren’t immediately adjacent, but in city terms it pretty close.
During World War II there had been a shipyard in that area, and the soil had become contaminated. Now that a bit of development was going on, that contamination was getting stirred up and spreading toxins. The conditions were already dangerous to the people who lived in the neighborhood, and now it was going to get worse.
The bishop had decided that we needed to be part of a campaign to do this remediation in order to serve the planet and people who lived in that neighborhood. Did I mention that this was one of the poorer neighborhoods in San Francisco?
That meeting took place around the time that Kevin and I had started conversations that would point our lives in a new direction: impact investing, and eventually SOCAP. So I was intrigued by this idea. There was a neighborhood in need, and I wanted to help.
Still, I left that meeting thinking there was only one way to get a groundswell of support for these neighbors in the city I loved, and that was if somehow the people up on higher ground twenty or so blocks away could be convinced that the toxins were going to drift up to their homes in Noe Valley too. It was pretty depressing to me that I had so little hope, but that’s where I was.
A few years later, SOCAP had helped catalyze the movement of people investing to solve social problems, and I saw another, perhaps even more depressing, way to see the area cleaned up. I knew that if investors could be convinced they could make some money cleaning it up, they could jump on board.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought about that challenge, especially my complete despondency about getting anyone to care about this piece of land and the people who lived on it without the threat of personal harm or the lure of financial gain.
Twenty years later, the work still isn’t finished. Various factions are still fighting about it. They are closer. But my cynical mind and the facts on the ground suggest that we’ve only gotten here because there was money to be made—probably more money if the work is not done well. The remediation is not taking place primarily for the benefit of the people who live there.
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The agrarian writer and environmental activist Wendell Berry died last week, and it gave me cause to reread the text of his Jefferson Lecture in 2012. In “It All Turns on Affection,” Berry eloquently delves into what it takes, and why it’s so important, to build an economy of the soil, of place. He focuses our attention on what deeply matters.
The central idea of the essay emerges from E.M. Forster’s 1910 novel, Howards End. Berry says, and I very broadly paraphrase, that by the time of the novel’s publication, Forster was aware of the implications of “rural decay.” The novel speaks to the fear that towns and cities were eclipsing rural areas. Forster believed that it might be a long time before the pendulum swung back to care for the land.
Berry knows that good care and good use of the land is vitally important. In his Jefferson Lecture, he bemoans the truth that most all of us are much more likely to be land exploiters than land conservationists, to be boomers “who pillage and run” rather than stickers who “settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.”
And on so many levels I certainly plead guilty. I didn’t stick in my spot (Itawamba County, Mississippi) to tend to that plot of ground granted to me by my parents, where the Harden family had lived for at least five generations. For that matter, none of my father’s siblings or their children are still in Itawamba County either. Other than my sister fifteen miles west in Tupelo, we have all scattered.
Berry’s concern was with the soil. As farms were bought up and industrialized, there were fewer and fewer people concerning themselves with care for the land. Even farmers themselves, Berry says, “are now too likely to be merely the land’s exploiters.”
Even though this land exploitation is morally wrong, Berry didn’t accept that “morality, even religious morality, is an adequate motive for good care of the land-community.” Instead, he said, “The primary motive for good care and good use is always going to be affection, because affection involves us entirely.”
I believe the same was true in San Francisco. It was morally wrong not to care for the people of the Hunter’s Point and Bayview neighborhoods, but morality itself is not an adequate motive for good care, even when it comes to our fellow human beings.
Berry is right: Our care for the land, and even our care for each other, all turns on affection.
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While Berry is primarily talking as a farmer who is concerned for the land, it has become clearer and clearer to me that in our relationships with our neighbors next door or around the world will not be regulated by morality. Even Jesus didn’t say, “You are obligated to take care of your neighbors.” Instead, he said, “Love your neighbors.” And he further said that our neighbors were anyone who needed our help, even if they were strangers or from far away.
This idea is SO hard for us to get. It’s even harder to live.
Of course we want to take care of our own families. Of course we want to make sure we are not personally exposed to toxins in our soil. Of course we want to make sure we have a good job, and enough money to take care of ourselves well. But how do we do this with and for our neighbors?
When I start thinking about the challenge, I admit I get completely overwhelmed. I get frustrated with myself, and with all of us who are simply continuing to live our lives without any change. We leave unchecked the perennial problems of lack of opportunity, poverty, income disparity, and all that arises from these ills. The problems are so huge, and there is so little that any one person can do about it.
But every time we have a meeting of Neighborhood Economics—as we are about to have in Galveston next week—I get to meet more people who have engaged with this task of caring for and creating a new economy that works for more and more people. Not because they SHOULD do it, but because they begin to see the human cost to their neighbors if we don’t make big changes.
Berry says in his lecture:
We seem to have known and feared the possibility of irreparable damage. But beginning in science and engineering, and continuing, by imitation, into other disciplines, we have progressed to the belief that humans are intelligent enough, or soon will be, to transcend all limits and to forestall or correct all bad results of the misuse of intelligence. Upon this belief rests the further belief that we can have “economic growth” without limit.
Economy in its original … sense refers to household management. By extension, it refers to the husbanding of all the goods by which we live. An authentic economy, if we had one, would define and make, on the terms of thrift and affection, our connections to nature and to one another.
What is popularly called the economy, Berry asserts, is also making those same sorts of connections but by “pillage and indifference.” He makes his final prescription bluntly: “Without this informed, practical, and practiced affection, the nation and its economy will conquer and destroy the country.”
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We live in a time when that last sentence is just too prescient. For people of my generation, we have experienced in our lifetimes so many small and large steps forward in the areas of race and gender equality that it has been easy to imagine with Martin Luther King, Jr., the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice. But in this last decade, so much of what we were hoping for has been dismantled, not just through indifference, but through active pillaging. It has been way too easy to lose hope.
As Wendell Berry said, we need an informed, practical, and practiced affection to bring us into check.
For me, that’s where Neighborhood Economics comes into play. Each time we gather, I find myself in rooms full of people who are practicing affection, actively loving their neighbors, and encouraging one another to find more and more ways to turn that love into action. In those conversations, it is so much easier for me to leave my skepticism and fear behind and join with people who are constantly dreaming and scheming of ways to ensure—at the very least— that local economies can authentically work for everyone.
My friend Roger Hutchison reminded me just today that hope is not the absence of fear. Sometimes hope is simply choosing to love, even when we are afraid.
At Neighborhood Economics I can see new and more “authentic economies” being built, and I can feel the affection that Berry speaks about where we can learn to truly nurture and care for each other. Being in the room with people who are repairing the economy where they live is one of those places where it is clear that people are choosing love. As a result, those conference rooms and banquet halls and intros over coffee begin to overflow with hope.
And that’s why we keep doing Neighborhood Economics: Bringing together people who refuse to stop hoping. And refuse to stop loving.
It all turns on affection. Thank you, Wendell Berry. And thank you to the hundreds of folks who have attended Neighborhood Economics through the years and are continuing not just to hope but to practice. Together, we are building authentic economies in our real or adopted hometowns—economies that work for everyone.
We can’t wait to welcome you to Galveston, where the conversations continue.