LETTER: The Greenneck Revisited

by Jeff Bickart

So, the “greenneck” recognizes but “doesn't care” about “the contradictions” (for example, between having solar panels on his house and also having a too-big engine on his Chevy)? The greenneck, then, by this example from his column in the Vermont Commons summer 2007 issue, is amoral; his recognition of the contradiction in his behavior is worthless.

What a real “greenneck” would recognize, and accept, is the extraordinary difficulty of aligning his deeply-held values and his actions, and the near impossibility of achieving a perfect alignment. But he keeps steadily plugging away at it—the contradictions in fact continuously pester him.

A greenneck is fiercely committed to family and community self-reliance, and independence as far as possible from a culture rooted in thoughtlessly and carelessly doing permanent violence to the land and its creatures (while he understands and generally accepts the short-term, and not lasting, violence inherent in providing for oneself, as in hunting, or slaughtering domestic animals for food). A greenneck wants to see his own and his neighbors' “skill sets” ever expand, knowing that to the extent that one's true needs (food, clothing, shelter, tools, and so on) are supplied from distant places, to that degree one is not free (and not secure). And he always has a vegetable garden, and his family takes care of a small orchard. Somebody he knows can repair chainsaws, if he can't do it himself, and somebody else nearby is a welding wizard, able to fix any busted piece of metal. The guy down the street can shear sheep, and there's a woman who doesn't live too far away who can turn a 500 square foot plot of flax into five linen shirts, no problem. In fact, in a real greenneck sort of place, there are enough skills to rebuild a civilization (or to survive peak oil, climate change, and the dissolution of the Union).

A greenneck shakes his head at people who don't know how to do anything, who haven't a clue how to provide anything needed for themselves. He wonders with a mixture of pity, scorn, and bemusement how most people can be happy buying everything. And then he gets back to work.

Because if there's one thing the greenneck respects above all else (besides honesty and thrift), it's plain hard work. He himself spends much of his life sweaty and dirty—and rather unattractive, no doubt, to the tourists who roll through his town. On the rare occasions he has to travel, he looks in amazement at the clean hands of the other people in the airport or the highway rest stop (as his own seem permanently soiled), and in absolute astonishment at the long fingernails of many of the women there—those of his own wife are country-short—and he realizes that those women don't do anything real. And then he wonders if all those folks will be heading to his town in desperation in a decade or so, and whether they'll have anything useful to offer in exchange for his know-how. In his darker moments he wonders if he might have to use his hunting rifle to protect his family and land from ravaging gangs coming north out of a crumbling Boston or New York.

The greenneck is generally a reluctant activist. He admires and has enormous respect for Bill McKibben's unwavering commitment to truth and to action on climate change. But a few years ago when he heard the guy, during a talk he gave at UVM, jokingly say—apparently as an excuse for not growing much food himself—“I have a black thumb,” he thought to himself, “That's bullshit. Anybody who really wants to can have a decent garden. He'd just rather be writing books and speaking before audiences.” Which is more or less okay, as the greenneck would certainly rather be planting beans, which are almost definitely going to produce a sackful of food, than jetting all over the continent trying to convince fairly stupid people that all hell really is coming soon to a summer near you, and knowing that most of them just won't get it. The greenneck likes results. But he does head to the Statehouse when necessary. And he'll share his beans with Bill.

The greenneck is plenty worried, however, by the big-picture calamities coming along. And he's plenty appalled by the pathetic state of preparedness even in rural Vermont. Surveys from the road suggest to him that maybe 20%, at best, of his townspeople are putting anything into their mouths that they themselves have grown or raised. And he's all for Community Supported Agriculture, and some of his best friends have shares in the year-round CSA run by the big organic vegetable grower in town. But what's going on? Those friends have plenty of land of their own. He thinks to himself that a CSA is maybe just another sort of consumerism, buying what you could produce yourself, because you don't want the hard work and like most other people would rather be “recreating,” and your connection to the roots of life is withered even though you live in the country. The CSA share doesn't actually do anything to empower and build the confidence and self-reliant skills of the CSA member. It's just another purchase (albeit enlightened and righteous).

The Greenneck has been around for a long time. Back in the day, he might have been called an agrarian. But it doesn't matter to him much what word is used. What matters is the land.