The Wizard of Kansas

Most Friday afternoons I meet with students in a small coffeehouse in Knoxville to discuss "The Big Questions": the nature of truth, the meaning of life, and other queries worthy of late adolescent exuberance and idealism. Often our conversations touch on the dreadful state of "the environment" and how so many seemingly insurmountable problems could be responsibly addressed if people would only do as the bumper stickers say: "Think globally, act locally."

By the third or fourth cup of French Roast, the enthusiasm reaches such a crescendo that I, too, begin to believe our planet's woes can be resolved with merely the right combination of intellectual abstractions. Grease this big global machine with the proper public policies, the appropriate environmental legislation, and the sound future of the Earth will be assured. To meet their objectives, these soon-to-be graduates of the University of Tennessee set their sights on "the big city" or working "inside the Beltway"-these are the places to really get things done. With such grandiloquent schemes, who can blame them when they do not care to return to the old home town of McMinnville or White Pine or Bean Station?

Meanwhile, a voice cries out in the wilderness...out in Kansas, where there is a well-known tradition of not looking too far beyond one's own back door. There, just outside of Salina, Wes Jackson, a plant geneticist with a certain passion for changing the face of agriculture, is getting back to his roots, our roots. Part Amos, part Albert Schweitzer, and seasoned to taste with a dash of Wendell Berry and a pinch of Wallace Stegner, Jackson radically challenges the wisdom of the global thinkers in his most recent book, Becoming Native to This Place.

Jackson is wary of abstractions, of "the Big Ideas," having felt all too keenly the destructive effects that agribusiness (a notorious global thinker) has had on his "ground of being." Surveying his once-vibrant rural community in America's heartland, he reflects on a seemingly simple question: Why is it that so many young people who love this land can't make a living here?

With Wendell Berry, Jackson realizes that rural flight has a distinctively Euro-American cause, one that was not present, for example, among the native Quivirans whom so many Kansas settlers displaced. Essen-tially, the homesteaders came "with visions of former places but not with the sight to see where they were." There has been a complacent and destructive tendency in our country to heed blindly the philosophical assumptions of René Descartes, which include a very mechanical view of nature (just recall your high school physics class!), and the presumed sufficiency of human reason to solve any and all of the world's problems (...just recall your high school physics class!).

When added to a fallen human nature-marked by the tendency to desire more, more, more for me, me, me-this is a deadly mixture indeed. This is why agribusiness continues to hot-wire the landscape and suck the marrow from the already dry bones of the Kansas soil, and why the All-American Wal-Marts and megamalls funnel away rural wealth to such urban centers as New York City and Chicago. Not surprisingly, young globally minded consumers are only too quick to follow the Pied Piper into Hamelin. The result, as witnessed in so many small towns across North America, is the devastation of communities that once placed only the highest premium on the spiritual connection between "face" and "place."

SO WHERE LIES the hope? Certainly not in "the Big Ideas," nor in "the big city." For too long we have been enticed by the Cartesian legacy and lofty ideas about "saving the environment" or "the economy, stupid!"

Jackson proposes that a more modest and responsible approach is needed. He calls for what Alfred North Whitehead referred to as a "recurrence to the concrete for inspiration." Look in your own back yard. Ask the questions that present themselves. Possess an intimate knowledge of the limitations and peculiar qualities of your own place, realizing that these are as much a factor in your identity as any spiritual or intellectual categories.

In other words, "become native"; think locally, and act locally. Before rushing off to save the planet, see what can be done first about allowing Bean Station to enjoy its "beanness." And this can only be done after one has "entered into conversation with nature," agreeing to perceive it on its own terms. In short, Jackson is suggesting that we must regard local ecologies as the measure for defining the distinctive characteristics and values of our communities.

Wes Jackson harbors no romantic illusions about returning to the "simpler and happier times" of the Cracker Barrel variety. He is not out to create an Eco-Disneyland. Such proposals, he suggests, have not listened to nature where "change is the rule."

However, acutely aware of the limitations of his own and others' places, he does want "to build cultural fortresses to protect our emerging nativeness," communities that can stave off the pervasive allure of consumerism. And this will require a new type of leader, "the homecomer," one committed to going someplace, digging in, and beginning "the long search and experiment to become native." Coming home, one will realize that the so-called little questions can be sufficiently beguiling to be most satisfying, and in the asking one can certainly come to know oneself.

As with most prophets, Wes Jackson is likely to go unheeded while the cows of Bashan grow fat on their satellite dishes, exported imperialism, and imported French Roast coffee. But he is planting seeds and dressing the garden, willing to greet and take delight in the admittedly small community that grows out of the Kansas soil beneath his boots. Sure, he will no doubt attract his handful of disciples (and a handful is all it takes to change the world!), but Jackson is not looking to garner devotees or followers. Indeed, one gets the clear sense that after a polite and intriguing conversation with this wizard of Kansas he might simply tell us to take up our crosses and go home.

DANIEL G. DEFFENBAUGH teaches religion at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, and is assistant editor of Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal.