Contemplating an Agrarian Peace
By John Kaufman
He who devises harm for another is harming himself.
–Hesiod, Works and Days
What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground. And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand. When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.
–The Book of Genesis
The relationship between land and peace is an old one. Today we speak of a peaceful place as somewhere beyond offices and city streets; we drive out into the country or walk into wilderness or even an urban park and we look around and say, “How peaceful it is here.” We mean, of course, that this natural spot lacks the noise, the traffic, the general hubbub of industrial civilization. Peace in this context is a quiet serenity; we could call it an agrarian feeling, though those who work in rural and wilderness areas understand that making a living outdoors is not without its share of stress, noise, trouble, danger and violence.
Handling livestock with the proper care, for example, is not what most urban folks would consider a bucolic pursuit, as it often involves dealing with frightened, bellowing, headstrong animals who don’t take their own best interests to heart. The humane slaughter of animals for food is still slaughter, a violence many vegetarians object to. Weather can be violent, too. And even a tree that is being logged in a sustainable fashion will not hesitate to disturb the peace and end a careless or unlucky life. Unless one is in the country to have a picnic or in a forest for a hike, land and peace are not necessarily compatible.
To kill animals for food is one thing, but to slaughter fellow human beings is something else entirely. Seamus Heaney’s poem, “Anahorish 1944″ (see editor’s note below), is written in the voice of an Irish farmer who describes a moment when American troops pass by on their way to invade Normandy:
“We were killing pigs when the Americans arrived.
A Tuesday morning, sunlight and gutter-blood
Outside the slaughterhouse . . . .”
The speaker and his fellow butchers go out in their bloodied aprons to watch the soldiers pass, not knowing
“Where they were headed, standing there like youngsters
As they tossed us gum and tubes of coloured sweets.”
It is a poignant scene, and not without the suggestion of an agrarian judgment.
To be considered a prominent nation today, you have to own the power to obliterate other nations and a good part of the world with “conventional” and nuclear weapons. To disarm, unilaterally or otherwise, smacks of “weakness” or “appeasement”, for military might is the sole measure of a nation’s standing in the world. But it was not our military might, for example, that brought down the former Soviet Union; it was the peaceable courage of Russian citizens.
In the agrarian tradition lies the notion that some powers and actions should be refrained from precisely because we are not divine, that the earth and our very existence is a gift. If we harm the earth or other people, even those who threaten to do us physical harm, we are harming ourselves. The circle cannot be broken. Christ’s Sermon on the Mount is certainly in this tradition; it is spoken, after all, upon a mountain.
In the United States we most associate agrarian pacifism with the Amish who live among us in peaceful, horse-drawn communities and who are quaint and useful for tourism but who we feel are not the sort of people a global superpower in the age of terrorism should be inspired by. Our leaders, we expect, will come from Ivy League universities and military academies where they will have learned all they need to know about using “cutting-edge” knowledge on frightening realities. Peace, we are taught, does not come from living frugally and peaceably on one’s land and dealing honorably with other lands; “peace” comes only from “making a killing” and making war. And so we create “wealth” and a wealth of weapons and suspicion which naturally leads to war of many sorts, including economic violence against land and people as well official “wars” against officially-approved enemies.
I need hardly point out that not all American farmers and other agrarians are pacifists. Many of the soldiers now fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan come from rural communities. And many progressive or liberal-minded Americans both rural and urban oppose our current war in Iraq but support the armed conflict in Afghanistan and the use of military force in general.
Nevertheless, a nonviolent approach to foreign policy and national security has ancient religious and agrarian roots: One need not be Amish or a Quaker to be an objector to the popular premise that war is an inevitable, necessary evil. Peaceable and practical alternatives to armed military force have been all but ignored or quickly dismissed in historical and political discussions within the halls of government and the halls of education. (For a brief history of the development of one nonviolent alternative to war, see Philip Bogdonoff’s article in the May issue.)
Let us turn then to our various fields, forests, mountains, gardens, oceans, lakes and deserts, to religion, literature and art, to the many quiet, brave voices outside of official circles. It is not necessary to ruin our own land and others to have food and prosperity, and it is not necessary to destroy the world (or some places in it) and kill each other for peace.
[This poem can be found in Heaney's District and Circle published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Seamus Heaney of Ireland has won the Nobel Prize in Literature.]
Organic dairy farmer, activist, writer, fellow of the Food and Society Policy Fellows Program, Goodman writes this time on the nutrition and joy of the farmers market. He lives and farms in the hills surrounding Wonewoc, WI.
In a column certain to raise the eyebrows, if not the ire, of many a staid, lawn-loving suburbanite, Walbert discusses how best to enjoy one's backyard, including eating cake with a blonde on a white sofa. David Walbert, gardening and frolicking just outside Durham, North Carolina, is the author of "Garden Spot: Lancaster County, the Old Order Amish and the Selling of Rural America." 
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