An Overview of this Series of Whole Field Essays

Scroll down for a TL;DR of the whole series.

The goal of this series is to think through a set of related ideas, namely:

1. The work we do together is important, especially as it relates to land use and building cultures of care.
2. We often muck it up by making bad decisions — especially at the institutional level, which amplifies our power for better or worse.
3. We don’t make bad decisions because we’re bad people, or because we’re stupid. We do it because we’re constrained by culture, which is a pervasive set of assumptions about how things work.
4. Those assumptions are meant to stay invisible, which is why it’s so hard to break out of them. In a sense, we make bad decisions because we’re ignorant — we’re not aware of the way we’re being shaped by the stories in our head.
5. There are ways, though, to bring these assumptions into the light and interrogate them. More importantly, there are rubrics of how to behave when you’re functioning out of ignorance.
6. We can use these tools to create new ways of working together.
7. But the old assumptions will always still be there, hiding in plain sight and coming up with devious new ways to muck things up. Ignorance is not something you banish — it’s something you learn to live with.

Of course, I’m just realizing that this is what this series is about. I had to think and write my way to this point. Here’s what you’ve missed if you’re just joining in.

Part 1 of this series—Holding the Center: Building an Institute for Art and Ecology—unpacked the problems of philanthropy and non-profit work, and proposed a model I’ve been calling a “place-based institution” (though I conflated it in that essay with a “land-based project” because we’re building a network of those. More on this later). It also offered some advice for developing an overarching ethos and thinking about your project in context of the larger culture.

Part 2 —Toward the 10,000 Stories: A Manifesto—presents a particular focus on how stories shape our way of being in the world, and how the modern story of progress and the industrial economy is erasing those stories, and their tellers.

Part 3—The Honorable Harvest and the Work of Small Farmers—is about an experience at the Northern Michigan Small Farm Conference that contrasted two kinds of learning, with a particular focus on the work of Mary Donner, the writing of Robin Kimmerer and Gary Snyder, and the farming being done and taught at Danu Hof Farm, which ties back to the way the stories we tell ourselves impacts the way we act in the world.

Part 4—Three Women Observe the Magnetic Field that Gathers all of our Betrayals—is about the work of Teri Van Hall, Ruth Tyson, and Caitlin Strokosch in observing and describing the “magnetic field” of institutional and systemic opression.

Part 5—So Many Small Things—will lead back into some ideas for how we can work with institutions to inoculate them—and maybe even begin to treat—these insidious stories.

I also wrote a brief discursion into metamodernism, which informs a lot of these ideas, and which is pretty fun to think about as it’s playing out in the culture right now.

TL;DR (1000 words): There’s a kind of work that I love, and that I would love to see more of, that can be summarized as a land-based community center. The overarching term for these is “Land-Based Projects,” which is a big bucket that holds projects that:

1. Take place on the land
2. Are integrated into the surrounding ecological and social environment
3. Are run by the local community, in the form of smallholdings, farms, non-profits, small businesses, etc.
4. Often encompass more than a single project or service

There’s a smaller bucket too, called “Place-Based Institutions.” This term is an honorific that we aspire to, defined as a Land-Based Project that rejects mainstream ideas of success. The definition so far is thus:

A non-profit that goes beyond the standard mission of a church, nature center, food hub, art center, community center, etc. to engage with questions about how to build resilience, and how to organize a community transition away from the industrial economy and toward a de-growth, ecologically-centered culture. Organizations of this kind act in resistance to the monoculture mythology of progress, a myth founded in capitalism, white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy, and the industrial economy. Often, PBIs act in a space of prefiguring — creating memories of the future — restoring the 10,000 cultures which regenerate right-relationship with place and people.

See, non-profits are modeled after corporations, and exist as legal and financial structures that support a corporate-centered economy. The fact that most of us don’t think about that at all is one example of how our cultural norms are so tied to Capitalism that we accept many of these arrangements as utterly unremarkable.

Let’s make these arrangements more visible. Let’s talk about the ideas that inhabit our culture and ferment inside our heads. These ideas are expressed as stories, and in part have free reign because of a concerted effort to erase the competing stories. Put another way, the modern way of being exists in large part because of ongoing genocide of place-based cultures, including many indigenous people.

The space between these two paragraphs is filled with a long, violent, and shameful history of that ongoing project, which this essay can’t begin to do justice to. Forgive, then, the short step to hopefulness, which is to say these stories live on, in the landscape, and will rise out of the soil like petrichor once we have the ears to hear them. Gary Snyder offers this instructional testament:

To restore the land one must live and work in a place. To work in a place is to work with others. People who work together in a place become a community, and a community, in time, grows a culture. To work on behalf of the wild is to restore culture.

These are the 10,000 stories. They are at once the antidote to the industrial mindset, and require us to challenge that mindset to find them. I believe that Place-Based Institutions can help.

Some evidence for this view came during the Northern Michigan Small Farm Conference — particularly as framed by Mary Donner, a farmer and the Executive Director of Ziibimijwang, a regenerative farming and food security project for the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians. Mary’s deft facilitation of a conversation circle at the conference began with a call to include more Anishinaabe voices in the work to restore ecologically sound agriculture. She then invited us to reflect on these words from Robin Wall Kimmerer from Braiding Sweetgrass:

Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them.

Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life. Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer.

Never take the first. Never take the last. Take only what you need.

Take only that which is given.

Never take more than half. Leave some for others. Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.

Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken. Share.

Give thanks for what you have been given.

Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken.

Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever.

And my favorite paragraph of all these essays, an example of how to prefigure the regenerative, relational future:

My favorite moments were during an extended tour of the Danu Hof Farm porcine medicine cabinet, talking shop about sick pigs, when Caitlin (one of the Danu Hof farmers), nursing her own infant, would look knowingly at the other women in the group when talking about the challenges of birth, suckling, and weaning, and they would nod or grimace or laugh in this shared experience — a circle of understanding and concern which clearly included the mama sows in the barn. Caitlin and Larry made it clear that the health and happiness of their pigs was a value they held well above economic return. Caitlin has learned to care for these animals through careful veterinary study, patient observation, and, most meaningfully, an empathy created by the shared experience of childbirth.

But then, a corrective — Teri VanHall’s notes remind us how most of our institutions still act from that corporate center, even when trying to do work on behalf of people and the living world. Often, these institutions market themselves well and have learned to speak with slick sophistication, which attracts people and dollars to their cause, only for those people to become burnt out or traumatized by the reality of the experience behind the curtain.

Ruth Tyson, who penned an open letter to the Union of Concerned Scientists, heaps key details that support this contention. Her analysis helps us see the ways that white supremacy and patriarchy infuse the everyday workplace in countless horrifyingly mundane ways.

Then, Caitlin Strokosh shared some experiences at restaurants — dim light, tiny print, loud echoing spaces — that very clearly said to her “you don’t belong here” These moments of being thrust out of our sense of belonging in the world are the result of countless mundane decisions, made by decent people who are operating according to a set of instructions that suck. Those instructions come from the story in their head, and the decisions they make are amplified by the power of the institutions they are operating in, and shaped by the systems those institutions are accountable to.

Again, the hope at hand is that you can replace the practices, and in doing so begin to illuminate, and interrogate the stories that drive the old and new practices, inoculating against them, and creating or re-learning 10,000 new stories that center care for each other and the living world. Or as Caitlin says, referring to the choice of a coffee maker of all things, “How much beautiful belongingness is embedded in these mundane choices.”

on to part five—the final chapter