robertlesliefielding stories

Food sovereignty
“Food Sovereignty is the Right of peoples, communities, and countries to define their own agricultural, labour, ?shing, food and land policies, which are ecologically, socially, economically and culturally appropriate to their unique circumstances. It includes the true right to food and to produce food, which means that all people have the right to safe, nutritious and culturally appropriate food and to food producing resources and the ability to sustain themselves and their societies.”
http://www.nyeleni.org/IMG/pdf/FoodSovereignityFramework.pdf

Dialogue
The dialogue below is between a local farmer (LF) and a local government officer (LG). The discussion surrounds local issues of food sovereignty.
LG: First of all, we had better say way we mean by food sovereignty, don’t you think?
LF: Yes, of course. Well, I think food sovereignty is the right of everybody, wherever they live and whatever they choose to eat, to be able to say what their policies are towards agriculture – food production, if you prefer.
LG: Can you elaborate – explain more for me?
LF: Well, let’s begin with a family living in India – living in the countryside, growing their own food, rearing a few animals and consuming what they produce, and selling any surplus they may have in local markets to local people – neighbours.
LG: These people have presumably farmed this land for some time?
LF: Yes, for generations and generations – for hundreds of years, maybe even longer. They produce the food they need to live.
LG: So what is the issue?
LF: The trouble starts when someone comes along with deeds they have bought to the land that feeds us.
LG: What kind of trouble?
LF: We are then told we have to either vacate the land or else work on it for a wage.
LG: And what’s so wrong with that? At least you get a job to do?
LF: But we cannot then grow our own food. We must use the land to grow a cash crop – for bio-fuel – something we locals can’t eat – can’t use.
LG: Are there any problems associated with a change in land use?
LF: Certainly. Apart from us being virtually rendered homeless, the land suffers.
LG: How does the land suffer? What does that mean?
LF: It means that whereas when we lived off the land, growing and replenishing, the land could sustain us – sustain our activity, and we made sure it did.
LG: How?
LF: I said earlier that generations and generations of my family have lived on this land, didn’t I?
LG: Yes, you did. What of it?
LF: We knew how to treat it as a living thing, rather than something to be used up, like gallon of petrol or a tin of coffee – to be discarded when it’s empty.
LG: But land is not a living thing. Land consists of soil and rock – that’s all. It isn’t a living object.
LF: That’s all you know. Like I said, we living on the land ensured that we treat it with respect, putting back what we take.
LG: What do you take and what do you put back?
LF: We grow the food we live on – meat as well as vegetation.
LG: But that is to taking anything from the land. The land is still there after you have reaped what you have sewn, isn’t it?
LF: Where do you think plants get what they need to grow?
LG: From the soil, of course, and from the water you provide.
LF: So, continually taking plants from the land is fine, is it?
LG: Yes, of course. Why wouldn’t it be? Like I said, the land is an inanimate object.
LF: And I tell you that you are wrong. Take a cubic meter of soil and discover what’s in it. You will find all kinds of living creatures, plant and animal, insects too.
LG: So?
LF: So who’s going to look after them – keep them alive, if we don’t?
LG: Who cares about a few earthworms and grubs?
LF: You are showing your ignorance, my friend. Everything – every living creature in the soil has its contribution to the fertility of that soil.
LG: But those creatures will still be there after the crop has been harvested, won’t they?
LF: And how will they live when what they need to survive has been taken?
LG: How has anything been taken?
LF: Do not plants take from the soil that has nourished them?
LG: I don’t know.
LF: Fine, it’s good to admit that you are ignorant – after all, you are not a farmer, you don’t depend on this land for your survival the way we do, the way earthworms and grubs do.
We depend upon the land, so we look after it. To us, it is a living thing – something alive that helps us to live. To you and others like you, it is just something that is there, to be used up, turned into money and then discarded. After all, there is plenty of land on the surface of the Earth, why not use it and then move on?
LG: But what else can businessmen corporations - do? They can’t waste their time and their money – their resources looking after something that doesn’t pay dividends.
LF: But land always pays dividends, if you care for it like we do.
LG: But you have time to wait, plus you’re not going anywhere either, so you have patience to look after the land that supports you.
LF: And businessmen haven’t the time, is that right?
LG: Of course they haven’t. They have to be doing what they do best.
LF: Which is?
LG: Which is making money – getting the highest returns on their investment, that’s what they do.
LF: No matter what?
LG: How do you mean, no matter what?
LF: That in their calculations, their economic forecasts and their projections, they take no account of people, or land, or animals, earthworms and grubs?
LG: Of course not. How could they factor in such diverse things?
LF: So because they can’t factor certain essentials into their economics, they pretend – sorry – assume they do not exist?
LG: I suppose so, yes. What do you suggest they do?
LF: Scale down their projects – slow them down – until such factors can be considered.
LG: But then the returns would take longer to make. They might even lose money.
LF: And they reckon that losing money is far worse than losing life, do they?
LG: That’s ridiculous. Businessmen and corporations don’t set out to destroy life.
LF: But they do so just the same, don’t they? They buy up land that is not for sale; exploit it until it does not yield returns, and move on to the next and the next piece of land.
They have deadlines to meet, figures to gain, money to make. They are not in what they do for anything else but making money, whereas we local farmers do have to consider things other than money.
LG: Such as what?
LF: Well, we have to consider everyone around us, not just our immediate family, not just our friends, but everyone in our community. Do you see that man playing in the sand over there?
LG: Yes, what about him?
LF: He is thirty something years old, and yet he is still like a little child, in his mind. See, he is playing with empty cans, filling them with sand and setting them out as if he was selling something. He is imitating the shopkeepers hereabouts.
LG: Well, what is your point?
LF: Look at his clothes, are they clean or dirty?
LG: They are spotless, apart from a few spots from the sand he is playing with.
LF: And how do you think he manages to keep his clothes clean like that?
LG: I suppose his mother washes them.
LF: He has no mother or father. They died long ago.
LG: So who looks after him? Who washes his clothes? Who feeds him?
LF: We all do. Everybody in this village has something of his to wash and give him when his clothes get dirty. Everybody feeds him. He sleeps in a bed in someone’s house every night, and wakes up to find clean clothes to put on after he has washed.
LG: But why do you do that? He cannot pay you?
LF: His family paid us when they were alive.
LG: In money?

LF: Not at all, for they had little money – like the rest of us. They paid in being.
LG: In being. What do you mean?
LF: They lived amongst us, in that house over there. They tilled the soil that surrounds their home, and they helped us harvest when the time came. We all helped each other – we all live like that. For us, obligations go beyond the grave, to future generations.
LG: With obligations to each other?
LF: Exactly, and those obligations were not contractual ones such as those that bind workers to corporations – financial ones grounded in manmade laws, but unspoken obligations, tacit understandings that you cannot put a price on.
LG: Then if they have no price on them, are they not worthless?
LF: Not at all, the opposite is true. Being tacitly understood, they are the more readily accepted, unchallenged, and being so are binding in ways that contractual obligations like the ones you speak of can never be.
LG: But if someone doesn’t conform to his contractual obligations, he loses is living, his job.
LF: You say that if he doesn’t conform – in our world, that is not a possibility. We are born into the system in our neighbourhoods. We know what we need to do for ourselves, and we know what there is to be done for others. What we do for others, they do for us. Now tell me that our way is less binding than the way of the corporations and those they employ.
LG: But what has this to do with the land that sustains you?
LF: We have an unwritten obligation to it – to look after it – to nourish it so that it will continue to nourish and feed us. If we default on our obligations to the land, we suffer, and the land suffers too. The earthworms and the grubs suffer, and we suffer more. We know the value of everything, not just in terms of notes and coins – money, but in something far deeper, far more significant than mere spending stuff. We know the real value of the land we farm, and everything in it too. Most people round here can pick up a handful of soil and tell you in a minute how that soil is – whether it is healthy spoil or whether it needs something – to be left fallow for a season, perhaps – to be allowed to recover, like someone who is sick needs rest to recover from an illness.
We know the land, we care for the land, and it is our right to continue caring for it. No piece of paper drawn up in an office in a city a thousand miles away, in another country, by people who have never so much as set one foot on our land, can, with justice and right, deny us our rights to farm it, live off it and nurture it as we would one of our children. It looks after us so we look after it. That is something more lasting, more binding than a contract with a bottom line of so much money.
Robert L. Fielding

Food sovereignty
“Food Sovereignty is the Right of peoples, communities, and countries to define their own agricultural, labour, ?shing, food and land policies, which are ecologically, socially, economically and culturally appropriate to their unique circumstances. It includes the true right to food and to produce food, which means that all people have the right to safe, nutritious and culturally appropriate food and to food producing resources and the ability to sustain themselves and their societies.”
http://www.nyeleni.org/IMG/pdf/FoodSovereignityFramework.pdf

Dialogue
The dialogue below is between a local farmer (LF) and a local government officer
LG). The discussion surrounds local issues of food sovereignty.

LG: First of all, we had better say way we mean by food sovereignty, don’t you think?

LF: Yes, of course. Well, I think food sovereignty is the right of everybody, wherever they live and whatever they choose to eat, to be able to say what their policies are towards agriculture – food production, if you prefer.

LG: Can you elaborate – explain more for me?

LF: Well, let’s begin with a family living in India – living in the countryside, growing their own food, rearing a few animals and consuming what they produce, and selling any surplus they may have in local markets to local people – neighbours.

LG: These people have presumably farmed this land for some time?

LF: Yes, for generations and generations – for hundreds of years, maybe even longer. They produce the food they need to live.

LG: So what is the issue?

LF: Trouble starts when someone comes along with deeds they have bought to the land that feeds us.

LG: What kind of trouble?

LF: We are then told we have to either vacate the land or else work on it for a wage.

LG: And what’s so wrong with that? At least you get a job to do?

LF: But we cannot then grow our own food. We must use the land to grow a cash crop – for bio-fuel – something we locals can’t eat – can’t use.

LG: Are there any problems associated with a change in land use?

LF: Certainly. Apart from us being virtually rendered homeless, the land suffers.

LG: How does the land suffer? What does that mean?

LF: It means that whereas when we lived off the land, growing and replenishing, the land could sustain us – sustain our activity, and we made sure it did.

LG: How?

LF: I said earlier that generations and generations of my family have lived on this land, didn’t I?

LG: Yes, you did. What of it?

LF: We knew how to treat it as a living thing, rather than something to be used up, like gallon of petrol or a tin of coffee – to be discarded when it’s empty.

LG: But land is not a living thing. Land consists of soil and rock – that’s all. It isn’t a living object.

LF: That’s all you know. Like I said, we living on the land ensured that we treat it with respect, putting back what we take.

LG: What did you take and what did you put back?

LF: We grew the food we lived on – meat as well as vegetation.

LG: But that is to taking anything from the land. The land is still there after you have reaped what you have sewn, isn’t it?

LF: Where do you think plants get what they need to grow?

LG: From the soil, of course, and from the water you provide.

LF: So, continually taking plants from the land is fine, is it?

LG: Yes, of coursed. Why wouldn’t it be? Like I said, the land is an inanimate object.

LF: And I tell you that you are wrong. Take a cubic meter of soil and discover what’s in it. You will find all kinds of living creatures, plant and animal, insects too.

LG: So?

LF: So who’s going to look after them – keep them alive, if we don’t?

LG: Who cares about a few earthworms and grubs?

LF: You are showing your ignorance, my friend. Everything – every living creature in the soil has its contribution to the fertility of that soil.

LG: But those creatures will still be there after the crop has been harvested, won’t they?

LF: And how will they live when what they need to survive has been taken?

LG: How has anything been taken?

LF: Do not plants take from the soil that has nourished them?

LG: I don’t know.

LF: Fine, it’s good to admit that you are ignorant – after all, you are not a farmer, you don’t depend on this land for your survival the way we do, the way earthworms and grubs do.
We depend upon the land, so we look after it. To us, it is a living thing – something alive that helps us to live. To you and others like you, it is just something that is there, to be used up, turned into money and then discarded. After all, there is plenty of land on the surface of the Earth, why not use it and then move on?

LG: But what else can businessmen corporations - do? They can’t waste their time and their money – their resources looking after something that doesn’t pay dividends.

LF: But land always pays dividends, if you care for it like we do.

LG: But you have time to wait, plus you’re not going anywhere either, so you have patience to look after the land that supports you.

LF: And businessmen haven’t the time, is that right?

LG: Of course they haven’t. They have to be doing what they do best.

LF: Which is?

LG: Which is making money – getting the highest returns on their investment, that’s what they do.

LF: No matter what?

LG: How do you mean, no matter what?

LF: That in their calculations, their economic forecasts and their projections, they take no account of people, or land, or animals, earthworms and grubs?

LG: Of course not. How could they factor in such diverse things?

LF: So because they can’t factor certain essentials into their economics, they pretend – sorry – assume they do not exist?

LG: I suppose so, yes. What do you suggest they do?

LF: Scale down their projects – slow them down – until such factors can be considered.

LG: But then the returns would take longer to make. They might even lose money.

LF: And they would reckon that losing money is far worse than losing life, do they?

LG: That’s ridiculous. Businessmen and corporations don’t set out to destroy life.

LG: But they do so just the same, don’t they? They buy up land that is not for sale; exploit it until it does not yield returns, and move on to the next and the next piece of land.
They have deadlines to meet, figures to gain, money to make. They are not in what they do for anything else but making money.

LF: Whereas we local farmers do have to consider things other than money.

LG: Such as what?

LF: Well, we have to consider everyone around us, not just our immediate family, not just our friends, but everyone in our community. Do you see that man playing in the sand over there?

LG: Yes, what about him?

LS: He is thirty something years old, and yet he is still lie a little child, in his mind. See, he is playing with empty cans, filling them with sand and setting them out as if he was selling something. He is imitating the shopkeepers hereabouts.

LG: Well, what is your point?

LF: Look at his clothes, are they clean or dirty?

LG: They are spotless, apart from a few spots from the sand he is playing with.

LF: And how do you think he manages to keep his clothes clean like that?

LG: I suppose his mother washes them.

LF: He has no mother or father. They died long ago.

LG: So who looks after him? Who washes his clothes? Who feeds him?

LF: We all do. Everybody in this village has soothing of his to wash and give him when his clothes get dirty. Everybody feeds him. He sleeps in a bed in someone’s house every night, and wakes up to find clean clothes to put on after he has washed.

LG: But why do you do that? He cannot pay you?

LF: His family paid us when they were alive.

LG: In money?

LF: Not at all, for they had little money – like the rest of us. They paid in being.

LG: In being. What do you mean?

LF: They lived amongst us, in that house over there. They tilled the soil that surrounds their home, and they helped us harvest when the time came. We all helped each other – we al live like that.

LG: With obligations to each other?

LF: Exactly, and those obligations were not contractual ones such as those that bind workers to corporations – financial ones grounded in manmade laws, but unspoken obligations, tacit understandings that you cannot put a price on.

LG: Then if they have no price on them, are they not worthless?

LF: Not at all, the opposite is true. Being tacitly understood, they are the more readily accepted, unchallenged, and being so are binding in ways that contractual obligations like the ones you speak of can never be.

LG: But if someone doesn’t conform to his contractual obligations, he loses is living, his job.

LF: You say that if he doesn’t conform – in our world, that is not a possibility. We are born into the system in our neighbourhoods. We know what we need to do for ourselves, and we know what there is to be done for others. What we do for others, they do for us. That is the say. Now tell me that our way is less binding than the way of the corporations and those they employ.

LG: But what has this to do with the land that sustains you?

LF: We have an unwritten ob ligation to it – to look after it – to nourish it so that it will continue to nourish and feed us. If we default on our obligations to the
land, we suffer, and the land suffers too. The earthworms and the grubs suffer, and we suffer more. We know the value of everything, not just in terms of notes and coins – money, but in something far deeper, far more significant than mere spending stuff. We know the real value of the land we farm, and everything in it too. Most people round here can pick up a handful of soil and tell you in a minute how that soil is – whether it is healthy spoil or whether it needs something – to be left fallow for a season, perhaps – to be allowed to recover, like someone who is sick needs rest to recover from an illness.
We know the land, we care for the land, and it is our right to continue caring for it. No piece of paper drawn up in an office in a city a thousand miles away, in another country, by people who have never so much as set one foot on our land, can, with justice and right, deny us our rights to farm it, live off it and nurture it as we would one of our children. It looks after us so we look after it. That is something more lasting, m ore binding than a contract with a bottom line of so much money.

Robert L. Fielding

The value of education

“I wish for a world of peace and harmony; a world of literature and knowledge where people are valued for what they know rather than what they own. Life is more than just monetary success; it's about making a deeper impact, seeking a more meaningful purpose and touching people's lives in a profound way.” Fatima Surayya Bajia
http://gulfnews.com/life-style/people/power-of-the-pen-1.637523
Fatima Surayya Bajia is a well known Urdu dramatist. She didn’t receive a formal education yet is still held to be an eminent intellectual. Here she discusses the value of education and its role in shaping people’s lives and the lives of nations.

Dialogue

Robert Leslie Fielding: You are not formally educated, and yet here you are saying, in effect, that education plays a major part in shaping a person’s life.

Fatima Surayya Bajia: That is correct. I did not receive any formal education to speak of and yet I do indeed value education.

RLF: Could you tell us why you feel that way?

FSB: Certainly. Let us take other benefits in life, and compare them to the benefits offered and provided by being educated.

If you asked people what benefit they would most like in their lives, most would say they wished to be wealthy; to have a lot of money.

RLF: I think everyone would think that the most attractive benefit. What do you think?

FSB: I can fully understand why people want to be rich, but I think that if they really think about their lives, they would want to be healthy first and last.

RLF: Sure, that is right, but after being healthy, which obviously comes first, being wealthy would seem to be the most popular choice.

FSB: There, you have hit the nail on the head, by using the phrase, ‘the most popular’ – people think that way because being wealthy is a part of the dominant myths in modern culture. Everybody wants to be rich, so why shouldn’t I? That is the way people think.

RLF: Then how can you argue that it isn’t necessarily so.

FSB: I am going to argue that being wise, being knowledgeable, being educated, in other words, benefits people far more, in the long run.

If you think about life – three score years and ten, one’s life has to run through a lot of phases or stages. Life goes through infancy – a time we think we know very little, but actually the time when most is learned; through childhood, when formal education comes to the fore, but yet when the influence of parenting is at its peak, through youth, when there is sometimes a certain amount of rebellion, but is still characterized both by formal learning, in higher education, for example, and in vocational learning, once a young person gets a job; to young adulthood, characterized chiefly by marriage and by giving birth to children – also characterized by learning, and by teaching too – teaching one’s children, as well as learning something about oneself as one brings up one’s own youngsters, then middle age, which, for most people, is an age of consolidation, using what one has learned to make a good life, and then to old age, in which one has time to reflect on what one has learned in that long life.

Is that life not fulfilled by means of education? Of course, money plays its part, but, I would argue that the part it plays is merely a facilitative one – it allows you to live – physically live well, having food in your stomach and a roof over your head. It is education that plays the major part in each and every stage of a life – all life, and to deny that would be to deny many things, and be denied them to.

RLF: Can you give examples of what would be denied by denying someone the advantages education offers?

FSB: Of course. To live without education would be to live a life that could not really be said to be a life in the true sense of the word. We speak of the good life. What is that? It is merely having enough food to eat, having a roof, however splendid a roof, over one’s head? Surely not.

The good life is that which is spent being responsible – for one’s kids, for oneself and one’s partner, and for the community, society and for the environment in which we all dwell. We cannot count any life good if we leave out even one of those.

The key to living life to the full, taking into account what I have just said, is being rational, thinking carefully before acting. We cannot ignore each other, we cannot ignore our surroundings – near and more global, and therefore, we cannot ignore the role and the value of being educated.

To be educated, what we used to call being ‘book learned’ has changed beyond all recognition as the technological world encroaches on all our lives. And although some say the value of books is lessened in this age of computers, the role of reading and understanding is just as important as it has ever been. To understand the world in which you live is the most vital undertaking you can have.

For consider a person without this understanding – or at least, a wish, a propensity to understand. Such a person would surely fall foul to all the ills of the world – moral, social and physical. A young person just going to university, is educated, not just whilst she is in the classroom, in the lecture theater, or in the library or study, she learns much from being with other students.

Going to university is many things, but one that is least mentioned is that part of studying at university with people of one’s own age – people from different parts of the same country – people you would hardly be likely to meet in any other way, other than on a university campus.

Society – a nation – a community, is held together more closely by contact, and by that I do not just mean being in the same shopping mall, but interacting in ways that are meaningful.

To be denied that chance – the chance to interact with one’s peers from wherever they come from, is to be denied the opportunity to engage in the important work of building a nation, of building a society, of building an entity we call a nation.

RLF: Exactly right. What nation is worthy of the name if its young people aren’t educated together in one place – in a university. The home is truly important in life, but it is in leaving home that we truly grow as people, is it not?

FSB: It surely is. Insularity – isolation – selfishness – are not beneficial to nation building, to building a fuller, more wholesome, more rounded personality. The values we get from our parents – moral, religious, functional and psychological and philosophical, are the bedrock upon which the young grow and flourish into maturity. Socializing in educational pursuits is a great second to parental education.

If we grow with others, we grow within ourselves and we are, in turn, then much better equipped to bring other children into the world. Education in all its forms is the key to life.
Robert L. Fielding

HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Sources
Thoreau Reader - http://thoreau.eserver.org/
Life and works - http://www.transcendentalists.com/1thorea.html
Thoreau and the environment - http://www.walden.org/
Quotes - http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Henry_David_Thoreau/
Thoreau Center for Sustainability - http://www.thoreau.org/
The Blog of Henry David Thoreau - http://blogthoreau.blogspot.com/
The Thoreau Camp and Thoreau Center - http://www.thoreau.com/Club/Scripts/Home/home.asp
Ecotopia - http://ecotopia.org/ecology-hall-of-fame/henry-david-thoreau/
The Thoreau Institute - http://www.ti.org/
On Thoreau’s Walden - http://www.stevencscheer.com/thoreau.htm
Stanford University - http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thoreau/
Henry David Thoreau Foundation - http://thoreauscholar.org/
Henry David Thoreau talks – the good life
If I were to ask anybody what they thought the good life consisted of, they would most certainly mention money. Some would undoubtedly talk about health, the type of home they wanted to live in, their freedom to do as they pleased, and the things that centred around themselves and their family.

Ask Henry David Thoreau, who lived alone in the woods near Concorde, Massachusetts, on Walden Pond, what he thought contributed to the good life, he might answer thus.

Henry David Thoreau: I suppose there are as many versions of what the ‘good life’ consists of as there are people trying to live one. Far be it from me to tell people anything. I can only really answer for myself.
Robert Leslie Fielding: To begin with, that seems to be at the heart of our question. There are as many versions of ‘the good life’ as there are people who think they know what it is and require you and I to follow their shining example.
HDT: That is well said, my friend. I have said many times that that government governs best when it governs not at all. I might add that those who think they know better how to live our lives, would do well to just get with living their own.
RLF: But that is not the way of the world, is it?
HDT: It certainly is not. There is something we Americans call ‘vested interest’, and although we have tried to organize our government in ways that prevent too much encroachment on our civil liberties, and the right of every person to choose to live his or her live as he or she pleases, still we find that we are beset by ‘good advice’.
RLF: What do you mean?
HDT: I simply mean that if there is such a thing as ‘the good life’ and I very much doubt whether it can be quantified or explained in any way that would help us to live it, this version – the one version, in liberal democracies, has to do with prosperity – financial prosperity, and any other view of what the good life is merely gets marginalized and dismissed as so much hogwash.

I can really only say what I know to be true for myself and hope that it works for you. I have spent much time pondering on the meaning of life – my life, here by the side of Walden pond.

I have sat at the water’s edge, here, disturbed only by the pulse of water skaters delighting in that curious phenomenon – the surface tension on water confined by banks. Here, sitting with all the company I ever need – I say to myself, ‘Question authority’, which you might wish to alter to, ‘Always question all authority!’
From those few, simple words comes a world of one’s own making – for what is anything calling itself ‘authority’ is nothing more nor less than opinion masquerading as something grander.

Reality is what we crave. Look at those crazy legged pond skaters, zigzagging between the rushes that litter the water’s edge there. What do they crave? They crave stillness, for without the stillness of the water upon which they skate so precariously, they would be submerged, or have to alight on a bulrush.

So it is with men; we are hurried this way and that, dashing to rhythms that are not of our own making, dashing headlong towards something that doesn’t exist – their ‘good life’, only to expire in the attempt to find it, to reach it and to dwell in it.

RLF: I also think that should any be fortunate enough to reach those destinations to which you allude, they continue to rush past it because of this obsession with movement, with ‘growth’.

HDT: I am reminded of the fisherman lounging in his rickety chair on the shore, chewing a straw, taking a brew, talking to his cronies, left off fishing for the day to enjoy the afternoon with his friends, when a city slicker comes up and asks him what he is doing – why he is lounging about when there are fish to catch, when there is money to be made.

The loafer replies that he has caught enough fish for that day, he has made enough money to keep him and his family, and since, as he says, “The other fish out there aint goin’ no place,” he is sitting chewing the fat with his pals.

But, the city man explains, “You could catch more fish, and earn more money.” The loafing fisherman asks, “Why?”
Our city gent, now in earnest, replies, “To buy another boat, of course, to buy a whole fleet of boats.”

Again, our straw chewing angler asks the same question, “Why?”

Now our man of the world senses he can turn this man’s life around; “So you can make a fortune!”

Again, the question comes, “Why?” and then is added, “What would I do with a fortune?”

The gent smiles knowingly. ‘These simple folk,’ he thinks. “You wouldn’t have to work hard at fishing, you could take time to do whatever you want to do.” He senses that his logic has won the day.

The loafer looks up at the gent, “I’m doing that now!”
Now why would an educated Harvard Business School educated man talk that way? Why is it that he doesn’t see the circularity of his argument? Why is he blind to what is so obvious to all except him?

RLF: He is caught on a treadmill, I suppose.
HDT: That is exactly what he is, my friend. He is caught up in some ‘immense, pecuniary mangle, as my good friend, Charles Dickens once put it in ‘A Tale of Two Cities’. The mangle grinds exceedingly small and forever grinds those that dare to get so entrapped.

Here is our tardy fisherman, taking the best of the day, the early morning, to do his daily work, and now here he is, having completed that work, taking a well earned rest from his labours, discussing the price of his catch or the heavy burden of tax he is required to pay by the folks in his own state capital.

RLF: Or he is talking of no such things; merely passing the time of day in what the city gent might call ‘idle chat’.
HDT: Let me tell you, my friend; that ‘idle chat’ is no less than the cement to binds this nation together. It is driven only by one man’s interest coinciding with another’s. Once it gains direction, with goals, it becomes something else; it becomes commerce, trade, and trade besmirches everything it touches. This country and most others are built up on it.

‘Wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions.’

The first community, the first farmer who made what we now call ‘a surplus’ and thought how he could profit from it started it all. He invested something into those bushels of grain he couldn’t eat – he called it ‘value’, and he invited his neighbours to partake of something they probably had no pressing need of.

RLF: But it is done. We can’t turn back the clocks of history and pretend it isn’t so. Man trades, and lives by what he trades, surely.
HDT: Quite, except that I would go one step further and say that not only does he live by what he is able to trade, but that he also lives for that trade. It is trading, more than living that the man lives for. He is in competition now with his neighbor, and being so, feels himself more of a man if he can be the victor in that competitive activity.

Take our friend, the fisherman. Has he not learned to quell and quiet his desire to win, and decided instead, to live – to work to live, rather than the other way round.

RLF: You said, did you not, that you could well earn enough for your needs by merely laboring for no more than six weeks a year. Did you mean it?

HDT: Of course, I meant it, meant it and still do. A man is judged rich, not by the things he owns, which is the conventional, almost unthinking way of looking at success, but is rich by that amount that he can live without. Desire is pernicious when it is learned, is it not.

Take the desire to be rich – which is nothing much more or less than the desire to have more than one’s fellows. We are enveloped in comparisons, and what is being compared has value only in a culture of greed and material acquisition. Left to our own devices, we would only desire that which we could usefully use to enrich our lives.

So tell me, in what way does a row of zeros in an account lying in a vault, enrich anything? What enriches life is that which gives life – which contributes to it directly, and not what we are instructed to think does so.
Robert L. Fielding

HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Sources
Thoreau Reader - http://thoreau.eserver.org/
Life and works - http://www.transcendentalists.com/1thorea.html
Thoreau and the environment - http://www.walden.org/
Quotes - http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Henry_David_Thoreau/
Thoreau Center for Sustainability - http://www.thoreau.org/
The Blog of Henry David Thoreau - http://blogthoreau.blogspot.com/
The Thoreau Camp and Thoreau Center - http://www.thoreau.com/Club/Scripts/Home/home.asp
Ecotopia - http://ecotopia.org/ecology-hall-of-fame/henry-david-thoreau/
The Thoreau Institute - http://www.ti.org/
On Thoreau’s Walden - http://www.stevencscheer.com/thoreau.htm
Stanford University - http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thoreau/
Henry David Thoreau Foundation - http://thoreauscholar.org/
Henry David Thoreau talks – the good life
If I were to ask anybody what they thought the good life consisted of, they would most certainly mention money. Some would undoubtedly talk about health, the type of home they wanted to live in, their freedom to do as they pleased, and the things that centred around themselves and their family.

Ask Henry David Thoreau, who lived alone in the woods near Concorde, Massachusetts, on Walden Pond, what he thought contributed to the good life, he might answer thus.

Henry David Thoreau: I suppose there are as many versions of what the ‘good life’ consists of as there are people trying to live one. Far be it from me to tell people anything. I can only really answer for myself.
Robert Leslie Fielding: To begin with, that seems to be at the heart of our question. There are as many versions of ‘the good life’ as there are people who think they know what it is and require you and I to follow their shining example.
HDT: That is well said, my friend. I have said many times that that government governs best when it governs not at all. I might add that those who think they know better how to live our lives, would do well to shut up and live their own.
RLF: But that is not the way of the world, is it?
HDT: It certainly is not. There is something we Americans call ‘vested interest’, and although we have tried to organize our government in ways that prevent too much encroachment on civil liberties, and the right of every person to choose to live his or her live as he or she pleases, still we find that we are beset by ‘good advice’.
RLF: What do you mean?
HDT: I simply mean that if there is such a thing as ‘the good life’ and I very much doubt whether it can be quantified or explained in any way that would help us to live it, this version – the one version, in liberal democracies, has to do with prosperity – financial prosperity, and any other view of what the good life is merely gets marginalized and dismissed as so much hogwash.

I can really only say what I know to be true for myself and hope that it works for you. I have spent much time pondering on the meaning of life – my life, here by the side of Walden pond.

I have sat at the water’s edge, here, disturbed only by the pulse of water skaters delighting in that curious phenomenon – the surface tension on water confined by banks. Here, sitting with all the company I ever need – I say to myself, ‘Question authority’, which you might wish to alter to, ‘Always question all authority!’
From those few, simple words comes a world of one’s own making – for what is anything calling itself ‘authority’ is nothing more nor less than opinion masquerading as something grander.

Reality is what we crave. Look at those crazy legged pond skaters, zigzagging between the rushes that litter the water’s edge there. What do they crave? They crave stillness, for without the stillness of the water upon which they skate so precariously, they would be submerged, or have to alight on a bulrush.

So it is with men; we are hurried this way and that, dashing to rhythms that are not of our own making, dashing headlong towards something that doesn’t exist – their ‘good life’, only to expire in the attempt to find it, to reach it and to dwell in it.

RLF: I also think that should any be fortunate enough to reach those destinations to which you allude, they continue to rush past it because of this obsession with movement, with ‘growth’.

HDT: I am reminded of the fisherman lounging in his rickety chair on the shore, chewing a straw, taking a brew, talking to his cronies, left off fishing for the day to enjoy the afternoon with his friends, when a city slicker comes up and asks him what he is doing – why he is lounging about when there are fish to catch, when there is money to be made.

The loafer replies that he has caught enough fish for that day, he has made enough money to keep him and his family, and since, as he says, “The other fish out there aint goin’ no place,” he is sitting chewing the fat with his pals.

But, the city man explains, “You could catch more fish, and earn more money.” The loafing fisherman asks, “Why?”
Our city gent, now in earnest, replies, “To buy another boat, of course, to buy a whole fleet of boats.”

Again, our straw chewing angler asks the same question, “Why?”

Now our man of the world senses he can turn this guy’s life around; “So you can make a fortune!”

Again, the question comes, “Why?” and then is added, “What would I do with a fortune?”

The gent smiles knowingly. ‘These simple folk,’ he thinks. “You wouldn’t have to work hard at fishing, you could take time to do whatever you want to do.” He senses that his logic has won the day.

The loafer looks up at the gent, “I’m doing that now!”
Now why would an educated Harvard Business School educated man talk that way? Why is it that he doesn’t see the circularity of his argument? Why is he blind to what is so obvious to all except him?

RLF: He is caught on a treadmill, I suppose.
HDT: That is exactly what he is, my friend. He is caught up in some ‘immense, pecuniary mangle, as my good friend, Charles Dickens once put it in ‘A Tale of Two Cities’. The mangle grinds exceedingly small and forever grinds those that dare to get so entrapped.

Here is our tardy fisherman, taking the best of the day, the early morning, to do his daily work, and now here he is, having completed that work, taking a well earned rest from his labours, discussing the price of his catch or the heavy burden of tax he is required to pay by the folks in Washington DC or his own state capital.

RLF: Or he is talking of no such things; merely passing the time of day in what the city gent might call ‘idle chat’.
HDT: Let me tell you, my friend; that ‘idle chat’ is no less than the cement to binds this nation together. It is driven only by one man’s interest coinciding with another’s. Once it gains direction, with goals, it becomes something else; it becomes commerce, trade, and trade besmirches everything it touches. Though this country and most others are built up on it.

‘Wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions.’

The first community, the first farmer who made what we now call ‘a surplus’ and thought how he could profit from it started it all. He invested something into those bushels of grain he couldn’t eat – he called it ‘value’, and he invited his neighbours to partake of something they probably had no pressing need of.

RLF: But it is done. We can’t turn back the clocks of history and pretend it isn’t so. Man trades, and lives by what he trades, surely.
HDT: Quite, except that I would go one step further and say that not only does he live by what he is able to trade, but that he also lives for that trade. It is trading, more than living that the man lives for. He is in competition now with his neighbor, and being so, feels himself more of a man if he can be the victor in that competitive activity.

Take our friend, the fisherman. Has he not learned to quall and quiet his desire to win, and decided instead, to live – to work to live, rather than the other way round.

RLF: You said, did you not, that you could well earn enough for your needs by merely laboring for no more than six weeks a year. Did you mean it?

HDT: Of course, I meant it, meant it and still do. A man is rich, not by the things he owns, which is the conventional, almost unthinking way of looking at success, but is rich by that amount that he can live without. Desire is pernicious when it is learned, is it not.

Take the desire to be rich – which is nothing much more or less than the desire to have more than one’s fellows. We are enveloped in comparisons, and what is being compared has value only in a culture of greed and material acquisition. Left to our own devices, we would only desire that which we could usefully use to enrich our lives.

So tell me, in what way does a row of zeros in an account lying in a vault, enrich anything? What enriches life is that which gives life – which contributes to it directly, and not what we are instructed to think does so.
Robert L. Fielding