. . . many forms of modern labor are accepted without resentment though they are evidently brutalizing.          

—John Crowe Ransom

Rock Island, IL. One way to prevent Adam from eating the forbidden fruit is to cut down the tree it hangs from. That seems to be the strategy adopted by the invasive species pictured above, commonly known as the One-Armed Yellow-Breasted Eucalyptus Muncher, which has pretty much solved the problem of evil: evil is its only good.

And who among us, after viewing the demo below, will argue that “efficiency” doesn’t accelerate depletion?

To summarize: this hardy pest first bear-hugs a tree (but here ends the affection), cuts it down, strips off its bark and “useless” branches, then slices and dices the long trunk into usable “capital.” At the last it discards the really useless part of the “resource”–the part that at least has the benefit of looking like a Christmas tree (minus the lights, the star, and sweet baby Jesus lying beneath it, wondering exactly what the hell has happened to the world he loved and died for)–and then moves on to repeat the same dull round again.

All this in just a few seconds. And why not make quick work of wiping out a forest? That leaves more time for watching Forrest Gump again.

What to say … what to say.

We could begin by imagining the future of this machine. The prevailing sentiment seems to have this Prime Indicator of Progress retrofitted with a little tiny matching red-and-yellow wind turbine spinning merrily around on top of the cab. If there’s no wind, a Super-Solar panel will help keep the Muncher chomping away, because sunlight can get where wind can’t–and science is just a few breakthroughs away from being able to create the same amount of torque with contemporary sunlight that it created with ancient sunlight. The end of oil doesn’t have to mean the end of oil power. Only a crank Front Porcher could possibly think that this marvel of applied science is going to end up far from the madding crowd, its rusting motionless cab the palatial home of some red-eyed conspiratorial defector from the NRA.

Well that’s the view from deep inside the rectal-cranial inversion, where the motto is Better Living through Rapacity. But the view from the Front Porch suggests that there’s going to be a little less concentrated power in the world we’re moving toward, that such critters as the one pictured above are going to be extinct, that the “lifestyle” they made possible is done for. The massive decks attached to the backs of the great isolated vinyl-clad suburban-American dream houses we can’t seem to wake up in are about to go the way of the Ross Perot. We’re seeing the last of their kind.

But we’re also witnessing the destruction of something beautiful and complex at the hands of something ugly and simple. When a living inscrutable ecosystem has been reduced in both language and consciousness to dead capital about to be moved and made “alive” by a brutalized form of joyless isolated labor, a labor seriously threatened by scarcity of refined (i.e., simplified) energy, then we may be sure that we too have been concomitantly reduced, that we have succeeded at long last in making nature in our own debased image. In reducing nature, in simplifying and diminishing it, we reduce, simplify, and diminish ourselves, over and over again, until one day we look out and lo! a tiny uncomplicated world conjured by, and perfectly suited to, our tiny uncomplicated minds. Meanwhile, the fact that we live by and from nature, that its limits are our limits, doesn’t change. Ever a threat to nature, we are therefore ever a threat to ourselves. Never mind the sword. Whoso lives by the land dies by the land. Goodnight, forest. Goodnight, John Boy.

(It is worth remembering Emerson on nature: “she pardons no mistakes.” Likewise, Wendell Berry: “nature does not tolerate or excuse our abuses”; she “is necessarily party to all our enterprises” and “imposes conditions of her own.” There is no appeal from her justice. “In the hereafter, the Lord may forgive our wrongs against nature, but on earth, so far as we know, He does not overturn her decisions.”)

Does the grim picture of deforestation above mean that nature has been abandoned by her stewards? Their absence suggests that it has. Where are the people?

That there aren’t any (save one) is suggestive of some grim realities, one of which has been well-stated by Wes Jackson of The Land Institute, who for a while now has been tossing around a general rule of his own observing. It came about as a result of his correspondence with Wendell Berry, who once wrote to him:

I was standing at the corner of Ed Poe’s little cattle shed the day before yesterday. (Ed is the neighbor who was mowing grass when we talked to him.) All cornering in there within easy range of a cheap camera were a small pasture, a one acre tobacco patch, a one acre field of soybeans (for hay), and a patch of potatoes (for eating), patches of woodland on two sides and not far away. And men of four households at work in the shed, putting up a harvest of about 400 bales of excellent bean and millet hay from about two acres of very “marginal” ground. Pleasant work, good economy, truth, and beauty. One big tractor would ruin it all.

Jackson comments thus: “What was going against those men of four households was a combination of economics made possible by low-priced nonrenewable energy. It was perhaps this paragraph that caused me to consider the possibility of a general rule: high energy destroys information, in this case the information of both the cultural and biological varieties.” That is to say, as energy in a given context increases, knowledge decreases, because the energy quite simply extracts us from the context, buffers us from it. If, for example, you can sit–sit!–in the cab of the One-Armed Yellow-Breasted Eucalyptus Muncher, do little more than move levers, and yet obliterate a hillside, you have cut yourself off from knowledge of two kinds: knowledge of the biological kind, which includes the forest’s slow mysterious work of enriching and replenishing itself and providing for the many creatures, both known and unknown, that live in it, and knowledge of the cultural kind, which includes the ways and skills and stories by which people know where they are, what their local capacities are, and to what uses the place can be put.

And there is much more from which you are cut off: for example, the conviviality and camaraderie that accompany shared labor performed not by high energy concentrated in a machine but by low energy dispersed among many people who enjoy not only one another but their work as well. In the video clip above there are no crosscut saws and no fathers and sons working them. There are no yarns, no stories being told about a given people in their place, stories that enable them to recognize themselves across the generations. No children are playing at any kind of labor in preparation for inheriting and undertaking it themselves someday; no one appears at noon with sandwiches and iced tea and blankets to sit on. And there is no rest from this labor. Imagine that! There isn’t even a person, only an “operator,” probably going deaf because of the engine or an iPod.

And somewhere down the line there is a buffet-style crowd of consumers who know nothing about their lumber except that it is readily available in all-you-can-eat quantities, thanks to high energy destroying two kinds of knowledge in one mighty bear hug. Apparently the destruction–of the land and of knowledge–is an acceptable cost of doing business.

A second grim reality, not unrelated to the first, was well-expressed eighty years ago by John Crowe Ransom, who noted that industrialization isn’t really about reducing labor; it’s about reducing laborers: “a fresh labor-saving device introduced into an industry does not emancipate the laborers in that industry so much as it evicts them,” he wrote in the introduction to I’ll Take My Stand. And Ransom saw even then that with labor-saving devices there would come, inevitably, a loss of vocation:

The constitution of the natural man probably does not permit him to shorten his labor-time and enlarge his consuming time indefinitely. He has to pay the penalty in satiety and aimlessness. The modern man has lost his sense of vocation.

Much could be said about satiety and aimlessness, but I am going to limit myself to a few comments on vocation.

“Vocation” (or “calling”) is a theological term. A priest, monk, or nun was said to have a “vocation,” which is to say a calling to holy orders and to chastity and obedience. The reformers expanded the idea of vocation to include everyone, not just those who had taken special vows. Since the Reformation “vocation” has generally carried this larger meaning; it implies work we engage in, and dedicate ourselves to, the purpose of which is to glorify God and restore the fallen created order. Oriented thus toward our labors, we make it possible to say that work is prayer.

The difference between a vocation and a job is at least qualitative; the differences, if Jackson’s rule be admitted, may well be quantitative, especially if you consider the differing net gains of, say, small-scale agriculture and industrial agriculture. A vocation may answer to issues of scale and effect, whereas a job must answer to the simple, simplified, and simplifying demands of efficiency and profit. A vocation is concerned with propriety, a job with productivity. A sense of vocation, deeply felt, may well prevent me from taking this job or that. Can I be a pimp–that is, an advertiser–for the glory of God and the good of creation? An applied scientist whose job is to enrich lumber barons? Ransom again:

Advertising means to persuade the consumers to want exactly what the applied sciences are able to furnish them. It consults the happiness of the consumer no more than it consults the happiness of the laborer. It is the great effort of a false economy of life to approve itself. But its task grows more difficult every day.

The task grows more difficult every day–eighty years after Ransom wrote those words–because the false economy is running out of its lifeblood. Of course its apologists will chant the usual mantra: “someone will think of something” (and maybe somehow squeeze that mantra into the tune of “We All Live in a Yellow Submarine”). They will also consider themselves clever when they remind me that I am beneficiary of this false economy. I do not rejoice to be told things that, in the case of the first remark, are untrue, and, in the case of the second, I already know. But the truth of the matter is that hamsters running in their exercise wheels are not going to produce the energy needed to run the One-Armed Yellow-Breasted Eucalyptus Muncher. It has no more of a future than the Interstate Highway and Defense System or the airlines. In the future there are going to be more of us on the land trying to figure out how to do the work we have little or no cultural memory of. We were so “advanced” that we let credit and cheap energy and machinery obliterate knowledge–just as we obliterated hillsides in the manner of that wag who defined “selective logging” as “selecting a hillside and logging it.”

We need to collect, know, and transmit the biological and cultural information that high energy destroys. The good news is that we’re going to get some help in this enterprise from declining oil reserves–provided they decline fast enough.

Lucky for us we have “fuel-efficient” cars, which invite us to drive more, not less–efficiency being the accelerant that it is.

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