The voice of Gomer

Flash! Front page news in the Billings Gazette, this just in—fertilizer prices rising, wheat farmers hard hit! Right underneath was a story about oil prices probably going to rise a whole lot more. Somewhere, maybe not in Billings, I am sure there are more than a few people who see the connection and who saw all this coming a long time ago. Why anybody would think the current system could persist at all is beyond me. While reading these articles all I could hear was the voice of Gomer Pyle in my ears: “ Surprise, surprise, surprise . . .”

Wheat has only been grown in large swathes on the Great Plains since the 1930’s when it became possible because of large plows pulled by gasoline powered tractors. They got a good crop for a few years before the soil wore out and of course the answer thought up, even then by bankers, machinery salesmen, and commodity brokers, not farmers, was to apply increasing levels of chemical fertilizer, buy bigger tractors, and farm larger acreages. Seventy years on, the topsoil is gone, fertilizer has become so vital that the scheme works even if the wheat is grown in sterile sand. (Huge amounts of soil blow away each year on the plains but no one really cares because with chemical fertilizer they think they don’t need the topsoil anymore.) Not only is much of the fertilizer made from petroleum, it takes increasing amounts of diesel to pull the spreaders since more and more must be applied as the soil wears out. What if a typical, hard-headed Montana rancher had been in charge of the whole process back then—he or she would have said, “Nope, won’t work. Can’t get into something like this, costs too much. We’re gonna lose out and then get stuck with a bunch of machinery we can’t pay for.” But there were too many bankers persuading the rancher that he was too timid and no Montanan likes to be called timid, so he bought his first tractor and then it was downhill to the present day. Huge chunks of perfectly good rangeland that raised lots of cattle (and buffalo) in the past are now so exhausted it will take centuries before they can even grow grass. If all fertilizer applications were suddenly stopped tomorrow, most of the Golden Triangle (that’s the wheat bowl area north of the Missouri and east of Great Falls) would, in a very few years, become the Great Northern Desert and tourists would no longer have to trek to the Sahara or the Gobi. When all this shakes out over our lifetimes and those of our children, people may survive on the plains as farmers, but if they do it will probably be with horse drawn plows and small acreages. If there had never been the instantly addicting jolt of petroleum shot into the veins of the world’s economy, there might now be stable systems using large-scale composting and no-till planting that still could feed large numbers of people.

When the politicians and the headline-grabbers and the shouters with their tiny minds and large appetites for power rant about the “energy problem”, the assumption made, and tacitly accepted by their listeners, is that this is a problem that can be solved. They insist that there are alternatives available to us that can allow us to continue living as we have come to enjoy, that it is carved on some stone or God-given tablet that Americans (leading the way,as usual!) and all people (eventually, when they become as enlightened as Americans) are entitled to live leisurely, supermarket-fed lives, working at a nice clean job for a few hours a day, spending their evenings in creative pursuits, maybe taking a pottery class (how creative! how earthy!) or living for a few hours in the virtual lives of TV movie characters. No American dreams that they might have to get dirt under their fingernails in the future or see their children go to bed hungry.

Thirty years ago when I left the academic world for the life of a potter I felt the need, as did many in my generation, to “get back to the land” to do something “real”. I did not see then how many layers would have to be peeled off the onion to really reach the core of “reality”. In the 21st century making pottery in America is a feeble gesture, almost fatuous. Instead of practicing the “real” trade I had sought, or doing something that would in fact bring people closer to the earth, it gobbles up huge energy inputs with inefficient kilns and long hauls for specially prepared clay (not just dug out of the hillside anymore, sorry). The resulting pottery is a curiosity, a bauble for the rich and its “art” if there is any, must cater to the whims of the spoiled and powerful. That’s just my story—many people, if they are totally honest with themselves, will see the contradictions built into their part of the system, will see how overextended and petroleum-addicted it all is. I don’t see that there are drastic things any of us can do about it on an individual level, except perhaps not vote for idiots. Rather than doing feeble little things to get in touch with the Earth, I am pretty sure that soon the Earth is going to get in touch with us in a very forceful way. Hang on. Shake your head and talk like Gomer Pyle, it might make you feel better.