Electing Independence - Editorial

By Ian Baldwin

Last night I awoke at around 3 A.M. and walked outside to listen to the coyotes and enjoy the strangely lemon-like moonlight air. I looked up. Right above me in the moonlit sky I saw a broad steady band of…something cloudlike, an undiminished vapor trail, stretching as far as I could see from east to west. It was not anything ordinary. It just sat there, a motionless ribbon I couldn't fathom. After a time, I went back to bed.

In the morning I barely mentioned the event to my wife. There it was: something inexplicable, obviously human-caused, silent, at 3 A.M. unobtrusive, and therefore unremarked. Yes, maybe if I dropped the whole of my pursuits and dove into this one, possibly anomalous, random mystery, tracking it relentlessly through the Internet, maybe I'd come up with something. But I don't want to feed my conspiratorial inklings.

Clearly there are things beyond our control, even right over our heads. Up until recently we haven't controlled the weather, precisely because the effects of all our activity, as a species, worldwide, had been constrained by certain beliefs, values, technologies, myths, in short by culture, permitting us to remain within the framework once named Mother Earth, and now called Gaia Theory—the Earth as a self-regulating system.

Until recently were we so bounded. Alas, for the last two hundred years we have begun to affect the biosphere to such a degree, and with such unrestrained, culturally sanctioned wantonness, that it now appears we inadvertently “control” the climate. But that's bathos, ludicrous hubris.…Or is it? Understanding the Earth's climate system is a massive and largely unfinished scientific project. Even research scientists studying polar and glacial ice cores now find themselves in the throes of a scientific “paradigm shift,” as they begin to grasp that “abrupt climate change” of a catastrophic sort can and might occur, not in the immensity of geologic time, but in the miniscule time scale of one human generation (or less).

As we are launched on this fantastic, unintended journey into the depths of the future, driven by perhaps the strangest set of cultural imperatives ever devised by human imagination, what might the imperative “elect independence” mean? What's to be done, what work chosen, what actions taken—if you and I are to choose independence? What does it mean, to be independent in a world where violence, vainglory, and greed are the most treasured trump cards played?

“Electing” isn't about elections. These are bought and sold by a single party or interest: the global corporations (see Thomas Naylor's essay, this issue). Look for a U.S. politician who champions states rights, small businesses, non-interference in other countries' politics, independent media, a sovereign states militia (National Guard), the Bill of Rights (all of it), or the inviolability of habeas corpus—which Thomas Macaulay termed “the most stringent curb that ever legislation imposed on tyranny.” And, as you look, recall the USA PATRIOT Acts, Posse Comitatus, the Military Commissions Act, as well as the go-to-war rationale given by the president, and accepted by our “legislators,” namely, those infamous WMD. Look, but you will not find much or many among the Beltway politicians—for whom freedom no longer denotes the individual citizen, but only the collective, the nation. And especially, the nation at war.

It is precisely this thing, this “military-industrial complex” state loosed utterly from its moral moorings, we must “elect” to withdraw from: a colossus engaged in its Orwellian perpetual war, its war on terror, that same indiscriminate “terror” it itself employs to “shock and awe,” to master events, shatter people, and humiliate whole nations in a world thousands of miles distant from its native shores.

But here in Vermont, what shall we elect to be for? (It is never enough to choose against, at least for long.) Shall it not be to take a stand, a stand on the land where we live, and reforge our beliefs, remake our values, including independence, in the pursuit of a revolutionary local economy, dependent on the myriad face-to-face relationships that make a local economy vital?

In his brilliant essay on the world and the local economies (www.oriononline.org), Wendell Berry sketches the similarities between communism and ‘free-market' capitalism, saying both are “modern versions of oligarchy.” He then describes what he calls a “total economy,” essentially the world economy “defended” by American military might:

A total economy is one in which everything—“life forms,” for instance, or the “right to pollute”—is “private property” and has a price and is for sale. In a total economy significant and sometime critical choices that once belonged to individuals or communities become the property of corporations….A total economy is an unrestrained taking of profits from the disintegration of nations, communities, households, landscapes, and ecosystems. It licenses symbolic or artificial wealth to “grow” by means of the destruction of the real wealth of the world.

This is as succinct and penetrating a summary of our situation as can be told.

Faced with the searching tentacles of this WTO-sanctioned and protected monster we are, as Berry reminds us, “in danger of losing [our] economic security and [our] freedom, both at once.”

To protect ourselves we have but one realistic recourse, one “vote” to cast on behalf of our own individual living independence: to join forces with our neighbors in the creation of a “local economy.” Berry points out that most such efforts across the country are beginning with the making of a local food economy. (In this issue, both Tod Murphy and Bruce Hennessey write about their roles in shaping a local food economy in Vermont.)

Yes, peculiar things are happening, things beyond our ken and control. No, we cannot, in the end, separate ourselves from the planetary fate we have helped set in motion—those vast biogeochemical cycles we have intruded upon so witlessly. What is left to us who treasure independence is to join forces with our neighbors and forge our own home-grown versions of homestead security, versions that taken together may one day form a patchwork quilt fit for a whole state – perhaps an independent Vermont republic - to celebrate, once again.

Ian Baldwin, Publisher
South Strafford, Vermont