Yesterday, in response to the picture I posted of my grandfather on the farm, Jeff asked,
When you have time, could you tell us more of the story of your grandfather and his family? Where in France was the picture taken? What did he farm? What would he have thought about all this climate change problem that we’ve created?
I lost my grandfather when I was 5. To this day, ‘Pepe Marcel‘ still looms tall in my memory. I realize I owe it to him to care so much for nature, and what’s happening currently. Times on the farm with my him are some of the most precious items in my green memory bank. Like my French blogging sister, Nadine, much of what I write is informed by these early moments.
I started writing a sappy response to Jeff’s question. A romantic interpretation of what I thought ‘Pepe Marcel‘ would be telling me now. Imbued with nostalgia about the old days, without cars, and planes, and supermarkets. Times when his old village was still very much a real community, and seasons dictated the rhythm of people’s daily lives. When organic was a word that did not exist, and yet everything we ate was organic. When tractors had not yet replaced the horse led ploughs in the fields, and the plots were still small and not cultivated to excess. When the bread we ate tasted like the real thing, and was not whitened artificially to make it ‘more enticing’.
Soon, my grandfather’s real voice came through, and it whispered a very different message. If I was living now, you can be sure I would be living just like you and your friends. I would drive a car and shop to Neuville at the supermarket. I would ride a tractor, so I could be home sooner. Actually, I am not even sure I would be a farmer still. Life on the farm is hard. May work instead as a cook in a restaurant in Poitiers, and drive the 50 kilometers commute every day. I would have upgraded the farm, so that we have all the modern conveniences and your grandmother did not have to do laundry in the big old boiler, and hang it on the lines. I am sure we would have a TV. We may still have a vegetable garden and fruit orchard in the back, but I am not even sure. It’s so convenient getting that stuff at the store. For vacations, we would go on cruises, or fly to America, like all the neighbors.
That’s when I realized there is no stopping ‘progress’, whether here, or in China, or India, or anywhere else. Moving forward means imagining new ways to live sustainably again, that may appear almost similar to the old. But the motivations, and the awareness are on a different level. Jungian analyst Aldo Carotenuto‘ s image of ‘The Spiral Way‘ comes to mind:
Book Cover for The Spiral Way
This time applied to healing not just one woman, but the whole world.
PS- Jeff, to finish answering your question. My grandfather came from a long line of farmers in the Poitou region of France. The farm is in Champigny, a small village where I spent every summer when I was a child. Pepe Marcel cultivated about 40 acres, most of it in wheat and vineyards. After he died, we farmed it out to other farmers. Now there are only three farmers left in the whole village, and their farms are more akin to industrial enterprises.
La Marguerite 
I just got back from a fantastic weekend by my mother’s family, in the countryside near Nancy. (East of France for those who can’t place this nice town on a map… ^^ )
As I probably told you my dear Marguerite, my grandpa is (was as he has retired now) a farmer just like your Pépé Marcel. The village where they live with my grandma and two of his sons and their families is much like the same as it was after WWII.
Of course there are a lot of cars and so on. of course, the farm got pretty much industrialized with a lot of huge tractors and so on. But things remained the same by changing.
Yes there are washing machines and so on, and a tv, something my own Papy Louis enjoys very much (with his books…)
And yes they have a garden where they grow potatoes and so on… so your Pépé Marcel would live a bit like my own grandfather is living right now. Except he never flew and went only as far to Roma in the 1970s…
I will write something on my family as it like you played a huge lot on my environmentalist side. Many thanks for this post.
Keep up the good work and have a great week !
(by proofreading me, I am amazed how we think the same… 😀 )
Spot on again Marguerite – and that’s why buying local food (and shoes and washing machines…), living local to where you work and all the rest isn’t really about being green. The real reward is a sense of place, community and the well being that arises from it. (the new economics foundation have done a lot of work on this: http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/).
Of course living in close-knit communities has it’s draw backs. I grew up in a farming community in the 1960’s – and there were times when close-knit came close to stifling. But I think the pros outweigh the cons.
When I was a boy, we were taught that each generation had responsibilities to assume and duties to perform with regard to the acknowledgement and acceptance of the challenges that are presented to us, so that the next generation can have a chance at a better life. Under no circumstances, would it be correct to pose as willfully blind, hysterically deaf or electively mute in the face of any challenge, as many too many in my not-so-great generation are doing in these days.
What has happened to the misguided leaders of my generation? So many in the elder generation have determined to let the looming challenges in our time fall into the laps of our children. At least to me, today’s leaders show an astonishing unwillingness to examine the prospects of a good life for those who directly follow us, let alone coming generations.
After my single, not-so-great generation finishes the `missions’ (ie, fools’ errands) the leading, self-proclaimed “masters of the universe” among us have set before the human community, what resources will be left for our children to consume; how many more people will have to share what remains of the dissipated and degraded resources; where will they find clean air to breathe, clean water to drink? I shudder when thinking about what our children might say about what we have done so poorly and failed to do so spectacularly, all for sake of selfishly fulfilling our insatiable desires for endless material possessions and freedom without responsibility…..come what may for the children, coming generations, global biodiversity, the environment and Earth’s body.
How could one generation go so wrong? Here are some of the ways.
First, the leaders in my generation of elders wish to live without having to accept limits to growth of seemingly endless economic globalization, of increasing per capita consumption and skyrocketing human population numbers; our desires are evidently insatiable. We choose to believe anything that is politically convenient, economically expedient and socially agreeable; our way of life is not negotiable. We dare anyone to question our values or behaviors.
We religiously promote our widely shared and consensually-validated fantasies of `real’ endless economic growth and soon to be unsustainable overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities, and in so doing deny that Earth has limited resources and frangible ecosystems upon which the survival of life as we know it depends.
Second, my not-so-great generation appears to be doing a disservice to everything and everyone but ourselves. We are the “what’s in it for me?” generation. We demonstrate precious little regard for the maintenance of the integrity of Earth; shallow willingness to actually protect the environment from crippling degradation; lack of serious consideration for the preservation of biodiversity, wilderness, and a good enough future for our children and coming generations; and no appreciation of the vital understanding that humans are no more or less than magnificent living beings with “feet of clay.”
Perhaps we live in unsustainable ways in our planetary home; but we are proud of it nonetheless. Certainly, we will “have our cake and eat it, too.” We will own fleets of cars, fly around in thousands of private jets, live in McMansions, exchange secret handshakes, frequent exclusive clubs and distant hideouts, and risk nothing of value to us. We will live long, large and free. Please do not bother us with the problems of the world. We choose not to hear, see or speak of them. We are the economic powerbrokers, their bought-and-paid-for politicians and the many minions in the mass media. We hold much of the world’s wealth and the extraordinary power great wealth purchases. If left to our own devices, we will continue in the exercise of our `inalienable rights’ to outrageously consume Earth’s limited resources; to recklessly expand economic globalization unto every corner of our natural world and, guess what, beyond; and to carelessly consent to the unbridled global growth of human numbers so that where there are now 6+ billion people, by 2050 we will have 9+ billion members of the human community and, guess what, even more people, perhaps billions more in the distant future, if that is what we desire.
We are the reigning, self-proclaimed masters of the universe. We enjoy freedom and living without limits; of course, we adamantly eschew any talk of the personal responsibilities that come with the exercise of personal freedoms or any discussion of the existence of biophysical limitations of any kind.
We deny the existence of human limits and Earth’s limitations.
Please understand that we do not want anyone presenting us with scientific evidence that we could be living unsustainably in an artificially designed, temporary world of our own making….a manmade world filling up with gigantic enterprises, virtual mountains of material possessions, and boundless amounts of filthy lucre.
Third, most of our top rank experts appear not to have found adequate ways of communicating to the family of humanity what people somehow need to hear, see and understand: the rapacious dissipation of Earth’s limited resources, the relentless degradation of the planet’s environment, and the approaching destruction of the Earth as a fit place for human habitation by the human species, when taken together, appear to be proceeding at breakneck speed toward the precipitation of a catastrophic ecological wreckage of some sort unless, of course, the world’s colossal, ever expanding, artificially designed, manmade global political economy continues to speed headlong toward the monolithic `wall’ called “unsustainability” at which point the runaway economy crashes before Earth’s ecology is collapsed.
Who knows, perhaps we can realistically and hopefully hold onto the expectation that behavioral changes in the direction of sustainable production, per human consumption, and propagation are in the offing…..changes that save both the economy and the Creation.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, est. 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
Thanks Edouard. Glad I am inspiring you to write about this topic. There is a recent post on DotEarth that talks about elders’ wisdom, in reference to being a repository for disasters’ memory. I responded by suggesting that elders also provide us a precious reference for times when we all lived harmoniously with nature and other species.
Simon, thanks! Agree, a sense of place is so important, and I am afraid many of us have lost it, as we moved away from our birth places, to pursue other lives, far away. I certainly feel it as a great loss, personally. Although I hold my grandfather’s farm as a very special place in my heart, it is not the same as living there. Hence the vague malaise I experience, as I am uprooted in a different country, thousand of miles away. This does not mean I want to go back there. Only that the loss is there, and that it needs to be recognized and that I need to do something worthwhile with that feeling.
thank you for the sisterly mention, marguerite.
mobility has eroded our sense of place,
we gain, we lose. we regain, we abuse.
consciousness gathers instincts, and we practice what we know.
i feel privileged to claim my ancestral village in Charente as a solid beginning, though raised in the city i always felt grounded in the connection between labor and product.
when the animal senses the safety of his surroundings, he assumes more responsibility for its maintenance.
the land is now consolidated and the woods are shaven into fields, productivity is enhanced by corporate means. and satisfaction suffers from the price of oil.
the stones speak, the woods answer,
man reaps the fruit of his labor.
Nadine, your image of the “woods shaven into fields” reminded me of what I saw during my last trip to Tuscany. Beautiful hills interrupted by slices of bare land, rendered infertile by man’s excesses. Very sad.
I think the saddest part of all is that a quarter or a third of these fields see their products finish into the garbage.
I find that staggering, yet it was the subject of an article you wrote Marguerite. Imagine how we could preserve Nature if we stopped wasting so much.
The prices are kept low so there is only one solution for producers : make more and more… when they should be able to produce stuff with improved quality, not quantity.
I think it was Chateaubriand that stated that before people there are forests, and after, deserts…
it is not the exact quote but you get the idea. it is really true in many parts of the world.
Good old Chateaubriand! Brings back high school memories . . .
Edouard, your comment reminds me of the video “The Story of Stuff”. I blogged about it a while back.
Marguerite, thanks very much for telling us more and for (once again) digging deep and expressing a very thought-provoking post.
It has me thinking, so much so that I don’t quite know what my thoughts are yet.
For now, I”ll just mention one easy thought. If you have and know how to use Google Earth, you could find your old farm or at least the town where it was and give us the geographic coordinates. Then, we could all explore that countryside, from the “air”, seeing what it looks like now. Just a thought.
Thanks again for the great post.
Jeff
I’ll Show Ya Mine . . .
For example (just for fun), if you go to these exact coordinates on Google Earth, what do you see?
(Hint: They are all related to energy.)
(Another hint: If you put these into the right Google Earth format, the program will take you right there. Otherwise, you have to navigate a bit and look at the numbers at the bottom of the screen until they’re just right.)
35 deg 01’ 15.39” N / 117 deg 33’ 19.00” W
37 deg 42’ 41.91” N / 121 deg 37’ 45.42” W
37 deg 56’ 31.72” N / 122 deg 23’ 26.73” W
34 deg 19’ 54.90” N / 119 deg 36’ 48.28” W
Using the same approach, you could show us your grandpa’s old town and perhaps even the site if his farm.
Cheers.
Just a quick clarification: The numbers in the previous post identify four different locations. In other words, each pair of numbers identifies one location.
Cheers.
Thanks Jeff. Love that guessing game idea! I will shoot you address of the farm in email, and you can play around with it!