Why universities are unsustainable

      I’ve written about the unsustainability of the contemporary college and university system on this blog before. What prompts another entry is the publicity attending the recent announcement that a vice-chancellor of the University of Maine received a $40K pay increase last year while simultaneously prescribing a cut of $36 million for the University of Maine systems. Needless to say, those protesting the cuts (chiefly to academic programs and academic faculty) suddenly had a cause célebre. This revelation dramatically highlights the root problem, as I see it: American colleges and universities are academic institutions no longer. They've become corporations.
    The administrator's boss defended the pay raise. The chancellor--top banana of the university--explained that other state universities paid these people 1/3 again as much as her $205,000 salary. (Does any faculty member at UMaine earn that much? I doubt it. Even at my instiution, Brown University, where faculty salaries are higher, very few do--and if so, then for the same reason: they'd command higher salaries elsewhere.) The University of Maine was in danger of losing her to another institution, he said. She was doing a good job; better pay her what she’s worth—so runs the argument, if by good job we mean balancing the budget on the backs of academics because  university administrators had failed miserably to convince the state legislature to make up the difference. The chancellor's argument assumes a corporate model. In such a model, the administrators who run the corporation are the executives, the faculty are labor, and the students are both consumers and product. Is the corporate model the best way to conceive of education?
    Certainly it has some advantages. As a corporation, a university is likely to run more efficiently. The focus is on turning out a successful product. Proliferation of administrators on the financial end of things means that universities are now run as businesses, with the goal of increasing income: from investments, from consumers (student tuition), from donors (wealthy alumni), from government (agency grants for research; legislative funding), etc. (Never mind that UMaine's lobbyists and fundraisers weren't persuasive enough; they need hire better ones. Of course they'll have to pay them more; which means even less money for academics, unless these fundraisers can do what all their predecessors failed at.) No doubt university income has increased overall, yet somehow the cost of getting it, keeping it, spending it and growing it is outpacing the income itself. For in order to get more science grants, schools have to spend money on high profile scientists who require state-of-the-art laboratories—which are enormously expensive and getting more so exponentially, like the cost of high-tech medical care. In order to get more money from donors, the students mustn’t only be educated; they must be kept happy, which means expensive support services including counseling, pleasant accommodations, excellent food and plenty of food choices, high grades, and positioning for a successful career. Colleges and universities have become like Lake Wobegon in that regard, where grade inflation—now the majority of grades are A’s, in case you don’t know—means all students now are “above average.” In order to get more money from investments, universities compete to hire the best financial managers, those who might otherwise be running hedge-funds for the super-rich, and whose salaries make the $205,000 of this vice-chancellor look like spare change.
    The business model becomes self-perpetuating in the sense that other schools are now regarded chiefly as competitors and only secondarily as cooperating allies in a larger educational ecosystem. And the schools themselves are run on competitive models. Granted, students had always competed for better grades, and now that competition is less keen. This is because students are now regarded both as consumers and product. Don't upset them with bad grades, don't flunk them out unless they're beyond saving. The competition now takes place in the labor market—that is, among faculty. Whereas until about 1970 the supply of and demand for full-time, tenured faculty was about equal, after 1970 in an effort to save money--this was when they began to be run like corporations--universities began hiring cheap labor (adjunct, part-time professors) and paying them by the course, thereby increasing productivity. An adjunct professor typically receives no fringe benefits such as retirement savings, subsidized medical care, decent office space (or any at all), and earns about 1/3 of the amount per course taught on average compared with a tenured professor. No wonder the percentage of adjunct professors in higher education has increased to the point where they now comprise more than half of the total faculty. In 1970 adjuncts made up only one-quarter, and that included many who wanted to work part-time. At today’s salaries, an adjunct faculty member who moonlights by teaching part-time at more than one institution and winds up with a full load of courses (equivalent to what a full-time professor teaches) earns about the same amount as a person who repairs bicycles, about $23,000 annually. Tenured professors cost their institutions at least three times that, and typically their productivity is lower in the sense that they teach fewer students. Never mind research productivity, or teaching effectiveness; it's all about per-unit cost.
    I’ve experienced this transition myself, having entered college in 1961 and begun full-time university teaching in a tenure-track position in 1971. By then the academic job market was beginning to contract. When I was evaluated for tenure six years later, the profession had already contracted so much that only 10% of those at my university were then receiving tenure; the rest were fired and had to look for jobs elsewhere. I was one of the lucky 10%. Among my friends in my graduating class holding the doctorate, about half were able eventually to get tenure and maintain the kinds of teaching careers that were common through the 1960s; the others were not. Later classes fared more poorly. Certainly, ebbs and flows in the economy and trends within academia have occasionally advantaged certain disciplines—ethnomusicology is one—but in general opportunities for university faculty have gotten gradually worse since 1970 and the profession is still contracting.
    Some dreamers hold up the old model of a collegial university, run largely by faculty on temporary leave from their academic positions, to return to them after serving time in administration, as an ideal to strive for once again. In that model, students were educated, not trained. Learning meant preparing to take one's place as a critical thinker and active citizen. Of course, that also prepared one for a career, not a McJob. A return to this educational model isn't likely, except at small institutions with targeted special-interest populations, such as Sterling College, which I wrote about here earlier. There are a few others like it. Instead, productivity will accelerate until even administrators price themselves out of the game. Distance learning via Internet courses is more efficient and costs far, far less than maintaining college and university campuses.
    The structure of higher education will change to accommodate this shift as soon as the consumers (students) are proved to be just as successful, if not happy, in their careers as a result of these MOOCs (massive on-line open courses), except that they won’t be open any more. Students still will have to pay for them. But many fewer professors and administrators will be needed. The professorial industry—and it will become one—will function in a way similar to the textbook industry, with a few widely-used market leader courses earning money for their institutions and authors, and several competitors attempting to break into the market. Students will remain in their homes, or perhaps in special buildings set aside for the purpose in their home communities, where they will sit at computer workstations or their equivalent in the next generation of distance-learning technology, which will include access to all kinds of resources to supplement course work—digital libraries, or whatever the next technology brings about. Of course, maintaining the technological network where all this will take place is immensely expensive, but the cost will be borne—as it is now—by government, the military, corporations, and ordinary citizens. Imagine how much money is being spent even now just so that most everyone can connect to the Internet: trillions of dollars. (Look at your own bill for Internet service, smartphone, tablet, cable, dsl, and so forth, and multiply that by the millions of population using them throughout the world.)
    That will be the new shape of higher education worldwide, for the trajectory of the corporate model, once in control, moves inexorably to increase productivity and decrease per-unit cost, while real costs (such as climate change, growing income inequality, and so on) are meant to be hidden. And they stay in hiding until exposed by ecological economics. Ironically, when this tranformation in higher education occurs, vice-chancellors such as the one at the University of Maine whose salary was raised significantly while her actions resulted in fired faculty and eliminated degree programs (and a few riffed administrators, be it said), will find themselves looking for a job somewhere else. Some will survive, but most won't.
    The old collegial model of the university was a participatory community, not a top-down corporate hierarchy. Musical communities will continue to provide participatory models, and ultimately these are more sustainable. Again, and perhaps ironically, it is the Internet that is helping to level the playing field. More on that in a later post.

Ecology, Economy, and Music

Donald Worster's book, Nature's Economy, introduced me to the history of ecological thought. I read it in the late 1970s in preparation for teaching an American studies course, "Ecology and History in America," team-taught with an anthropologist, a biologist, and a literary historian. At about that time I was forming my idea that musical cultures could be regarded as ecosystems, and wrote it into the first chapter of the first edition of Worlds of Music (1984), and each of the four subsequent editions (1992, 1996, 2001, 2009). In recent years I've come to see an opposition between ecology and economy, or at least a commodity-based economy; and it was in the back of my mind as I wrote yesterday about stage-readiness. What does thinking about an economy of nature yield? Worster didn't explore the phrase that lent the book it's title, but it is well worth looking into.

To formulate the problem as clearly as I can, then. Diversity, whether biological or cultural, has a clear advantage for adapting to changing circumstances. For the future, therefore, we should place a value on encouraging this diversity, which means conserving species and protecting habitat, whether biological or cultural. That is an ecological first principle, and it is a principle of equity, for diversity requires the survival of all, or as many as possible. But a consumer-driven, commodity-based economy tends toward specialization, professionalization and concentration of like products, whether in agriculture (monoculture instead of mixed farming), or industry, or art--or wealth, for that matter. Concentration is the opposite of diversity and is disadvantaged for adaptation and thus disadvantaged for sustainability, whether biological or cultural. Musical sustainability is well served, then, by diversity, and ill served by thinking of music as an economic commodity.

Economy comes from two Greek words: oikos (house) and nemein (manage). There are, of course, other kinds of economies besides global corporate capitalism, which is a generally accepted description of our current economic system. "Natural economy," or Naturalwirtschaft, was coined by German economists to describe a situation in which barter rather than the exchange of money characterized most transactions, and they attributed this economy to the European Middle Ages. Of course, a barter economy still places a commodity value on work and production; but barter requires the presence of owners to barter goods and services, whereas global capitalism operates impersonally. In a barter economy the lines of responsibility, legal and moral, are clearly traced to particular human beings. In an economy based on corporate capitalism, the owners are not held legally responsible for the corporation's activities. Government officials, while subject in their personal lives to the same laws as anyone else, are not held legally accountable for actions taken by the government.

The current economic crisis is a natural outcome of global corporate capitalism's need for continuous growth. Whereas ecology teaches us that there are limits to growth, our economic system is dependent on ever-accelerating growth. We are told we must spend our way out of this crisis. The gross national product must not continue to shrink. We must avoid deflation. The new idea is that we can grow the green economy. But continuous growth as conceived under current economic conditions, whether green or not, relies on leveraging capital and creates a house of cards, a giant Ponzi scheme that makes us all vulnerable.

I recall my puzzlement when as a child I was told that the bank I put my meagre savings in did not keep the money I had deposited. Instead, they loaned it out; indeed, they loaned more money than they had. How could that be? Only if everyone paid back their loans, I was told, which they are legally required to do. Now, of course, there is another kind of payback; some loans are considered "toxic" and people are "under water" with their payments: that is, their commodities, on which they owe money, are worth less than the money they owe. This is the outcome, every so often, of an economy predicated on continuous growth: boom and bust. As my friend Hap Collins said, "You can only blow up a ballon so big until it bursts."

There is another way to think of "nature's economy." What, as Wes Jackson would say, would it be like to model our economy after nature? Of course, that depends on how we view or construct nature's economy; but there is no natural economy without human beings, not now. We are in nature interactively; the question is how will we manage that interaction in the biocultural world. An economy based on diversity, limited growth, interconnectedness, and stewardship may be inefficient in the short term, but in the long term it is sustainable whereas the other is not. The same holds for music. Heritage tourism involving music, insofar as it commodifies the product, is implicated in the wrong kind of economy. Instead, sustainability of musical cultures requires, as I have stated before, the application of those four principles and the gradual replacement of the idea that music is a commodity with the notion that it is an act as natural as speaking or breathing.

An Ecological Approach to Cultural Sustainability, pt. 1

I've neglected this blog for a couple of months on account of preparing for the new semester and then teaching. But music, culture, and sustainability have not been idle. I reproduce below a paper that I read in front of the annual conference of the American Folklore Society, on Oct. 24, only a few days ago. In a couple of days I fly to Beijing to deliver some invited lectures on music and sustainability to the musicology department of the Central Conservatory of Music. I'll have more to say about this trip as it goes. But now, here is a copy of my AFS paper:

[Paper delivered at the 2009 conference of the American Folklore Society, Boise, ID]

For several years I’ve been trying to think through ways that the discourse on sustainability might be brought helpfully to bear for folklorists and ethnomusicologists working in cultural conservation. Sustainability, if we think about it for a moment, operates chiefly in two realms: the environment and the economy. Of course, the two are closely linked, but there is a good deal of tension between those who are working to sustain the biosphere and those whose goal is sustainable economic development. Today, when even Monsanto claims to be all about sustainable agriculture, and when we have Wall Street bailouts while the U.S. unemployment rate is ten percent and rising, we can ask the question who and what is to be sustained.

Some of us interested in cultural conservation, or in safeguarding intangible cultural heritage as UNESCO has phrased it, have struggled with this tension between conservation and commerce. We promote cultural tourism at heritage sites, while our non-profit cultural conservation organizations engage in strategic planning and adopt a business mentality in order to thrive in the world of commerce. Some of us are uneasy with this business model in which folk cultures are displayed at festivals, in museums, interpretive centers, heritage sites, and so forth, and tourists are both educated and treated as consumers who walk away with product from the gift shops: CDs, folk art objects, that sort of thing. Advanced consumerism leads to connoisseurship and collections; some of the finest collections are bought by museums, which can be seen as model cultural consumers. We have faith that cultural tourism raises consciousness and promotes cultural conservation and renewal. As the Old Regular Baptists say of their faith, we have a “lively hope.” But some of us who decry global corporate capitalism remain uneasy with this tension between cultural conservation and commerce. Let’s explore some sources of that tension briefly now by contrasting the way sustainability works in the two worlds of ecology and economy.


Conservation ecologists target endangered species; they intervene through conservation to protect and sustain populations. Economists target resources; they intervene through development to manage sustainable economic growth. Conservation ecologists value diversity; economists value efficiency. Both are engaged in policy-making, but conservation ecologists proceed from the principle of human co-existence with the natural world, whereas economists consider the natural world in terms of resources for human welfare. Economists are driven to think of their world in terms of property, commodities and exchange, whereas conservation ecologists are filled with wonder and consider the natural world a gift. We could say that economists look forward to a world of prosperity while ecologists hope for a world of equilibrium with its connotations of justice and equity.

At the moment, the cultural conservation model that public folklorists employ tilts in the direction of the economists. The latest issue of NEA Arts arrived on my doorstep a few days ago, with its lead article entitled “The Business of Culture.” But what would it mean to tilt in the direction of conservation ecology instead? What would it mean for us in our cultural conservation efforts to follow nature’s economy? Nature’s economy values diversity for adaptation, and puts natural limits on growth as ecosystems move toward equilibrium; nature’s economy is built on the principle of interconnectedness, that everything in the ecosystem is connected to everything else, and that, to take a most famous example, the so-called butterfly effect, the flap of a butterfly’s wings in a park in China can transform the storm systems the following month over a city in North America. In addition to the principles of diversity, limits to growth, and interconnectedness, we add to nature’s economy the human equation of stewardship, or good caretaking, as a trustee acts in the interest of the trust, not him or herself. These four principles form the core of what we might learn by following nature’s economy.

I am returning in my recent work to an older way of thinking; twenty-five years ago in the first edition of Worlds of Music I asked readers to consider musical cultures as analogous to ecosystems, interconnected, with diversity advantageous for sustainable adaptation. Just as conservation ecologists look beyond targeted species to whole ecosystems, so those of us interested in cultural sustainability must look beyond expressive culture to the social, political, and most important, the economic aspects of the folk cultures we hope to help sustain. As the organic gardeners say, for the health of the plant look to the health of the soil. And beyond those aspects we must look at the ways in which these folk cultures interact with and are impacted by changes in the natural environment, as many of those we prize have been and are being marginalized by changes in the natural environment driven by economic desires, sometimes purely exploitative, sometimes exploitation cloaked in greenwash, and sometimes offered for sustainable development. When we put these expressive cultures on display we are offering little more than life support if we do not also work with the people in their communities, not only to conserve the expressive aspects of folk cultures, but also to confront the social, political, and economic props that keep these folk cultures going well or going badly. I turn now to two case studies illustrating these principles of nature’s economy in the world of cultural conservation. [continued in next entry]

Dark Sustainability

     A recent essay in the New York Review of Books, by Shakespeare scholar Joseph Shapiro, connects a dark interpretation of Hamlet with the dystopian climate in academia today. A young scholar just published a book whose thesis is that all the older literary critics were wrong about Hamlet: he didn’t hesitate to kill Cluadius because he had an Oedipus complex, nor because he was a coward, nor because he was depressed. He didn't oppose murder on religious grounds. Rather, he was the embodiment of a Renaissance humanism that was collapsing because it failed to reckon with the predatory force of a heartless world. Hamlet is a weak idealist. 

     This kind of claim, coupled with the ascendance of dystopian visions among millennials (such as the author of the Hamlet study), made me wonder whether sustainability itself isn’t the product of a weak idealism in the face of a worldwide struggle for existence, to use the Darwinian metaphor. In other words, why think that it might be possible to sustain a sound commons, music, people and cultures, the environment of planet Earth? And yet, dark interpretations are just that: dark interpretations. Dark money and the dark internet are new, but dark, apocalyptic visions have been around at least since the Book of Revelation. Dark interpretations of sound as an instrument of power and control dominate contemporary scholarship on sound studies. To those writers, a sound commons appears unrealistic and utopian in the face of a crisis that is deeper than environmental. I agree that it is deeper than environmental. Since 2015, in my lectures and writings I have contended that sustainability is, ultimately, a crisis in ontology (being) and epistemology (knowing). 

     But since these dystopian visions are, after all, projections of the future, it’s possible to ask what it is in the present that gives rise to them. It’s not difficult to understand why they’re ascendant now, given the current political climate—one that threatens the institutions positioned to do something about sustaining music, culture, the environment, energy, food and agriculture, and so on. Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia, muses on the possibility that the dark future for humanities scholars is reflected in this writer’s new theory about Hamlet. He wonders if the writer is a scholar who, “Hamlet-like, expected, when their turn came, to inherit an academic kingdom”—that is, to become a tenured professor of literature at a college or university. But cutbacks in funding, coupled with those institutions’ turn to a corporate model of economic efficiency, have resulted in dismal prospects in this century for professors in the humanities—that is, many fewer tenured jobs, and many more bad (part time, underpaid) ones. Embittered, the scholar doesn’t blame the politicians or the political climate. Instead, the scholar blames the failure on the liberal arts themselves, which equips educators to think, and ponder, and contemplate, and cogitate, on political philosophy; but not to act on it, to fight back against the forces allied against it—and this failure, it seems, grows out of the very idealism built into the humanities themselves: not only that persons could be educated into wisdom, but that the world could be educated into justice.

     Of course, although Hamlet himself failed, Renaissance humanism did not fail. Yoking Hamlet to a collapse of humanism makes little sense, if history is consulted. Humanism’s educational values broadened and deepened, giving way to an even greater reliance in the 18th century on reason, then a period in which reason was coupled with feeling, followed in the later 19th century by the rise of science and the modern liberal arts university. To be sure, dissenting voices of modernism and post-modernism undermined humanist ideals, while powerful contemporary voices rise in a post-human assault on the humanities, sometimes in the name of a deeper ecology, but also (as in the case at hand) arising from a darker, dystopian vision of the world. Nor is this pessimism new: Hobbes and Malthus had it during the so-called Age of Reason, while the optimism fueled by the new science and technological advances of the late 19th century was also the time when the pessimism of social Darwinism implanted the struggle for existence into human nature itself.

     As it happens, this scholar who threw up the dark vision of Hamlet seems already to have inherited the kingdom. He's a “research scholar with the rank of professor,” at an Ivy-league university. It's not clear whether he holds a "continuing appointment" (tenure); but his research and writing accomplishments are significant, and his perch in the profession of English does not appear in doubt. His interpretation of Hamlet doesn’t arise from a personal failure to thrive within the diminishing world of scholarship and universities. The dystopian vision seems to be a contemporary cultural phenomenon, especially among millennials; and anyone who advocates for sustainability needs to reckon with it.

Reconciling Ecology and Economy by means of "Nature's Economy"

From Oct. 13-16 I was in Nashville, TN for the American Folklore Society conference. For my paper presentation at the conference this year, I returned to an idea that I’ve mentioned on this blog a couple of times before: Nature’s economy. This was the title of Donald Worster’s fine book on the history of ecological thought. Re-reading it, I found the section where Worster tried to explain the phrase, tracing it to the Enlightenment naturalist Gilbert White. The explanation was intriguing in the context of my attempts to find common ground between ecology and economics, and so I decided to read White’s book, The Natural History of Selborne, compiled from letters that he wrote in the mid-1700s. Doing so, I observed White’s use of the phrase “Nature’s economy” (Nature as the greatest economist) and began to think that the concept might point the way towards a reconciliation of the two conflicting discourses over sustainability—those from conservation ecology and from developmental economics. After I delivered the paper—which is printed below—there was a lively discussion with some critique, which I will summarize in a later blog entry. I will also present a version of this paper at the conference of the Society for Ethnomusicology, where it will be framed on a panel asking the question whether ethnomusicology should consider taking a “scientific turn” at this time. Of course, it will depend on what is meant by “science.” But for now, here is my AFS paper: 
 

“Ecology vs. Economics: Reconciling Two Sustainability Discourses for Folklife through the Concept of ‘Nature’s Economy’”

     By Jeff Todd Titon, Department of Music, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA

           

[Paper delivered Oct. 14, 2010, at the annual conference of the American Folklore Society, Nashville, TN]           

Just about every other day around noon I take a walk through the woods back of my house, and I see in the forest there the operation of Nature’s economy. In this paper I want to suggest that understanding Nature’s economy is the key that unlocks the door to natural and cultural sustainability by showing a complementary relationship between ecology and economics. For, as I pointed out in my talk at this conference last year, ecology and economy come from the same Greek root, eikos, meaning household. In this paper I claim that managing our cultural household for sustainability rests on our ability to model our cultural interventions upon the way Nature’s economy manages the earth’s household.

Sustainability entered the folklife discourse with Alan Lomax’s “Appeal for Cultural Equity” (1972) and the 1983 report on The Conservation of Culture, coordinated by Ormond Loomis for the American Folklife Center. It entered developmental economics and policy planning with the 1987 Brundtland Commission Report on sustainable development. Since then, cultural sustainability has been invoked to support UNESCO’s conventions on safeguarding folklife, or intangible cultural heritage, where it enjoys great currency and has been the subject of considerable attention from folklorists and ethnomusicologists. However, the roots of sustainability may be found in the lay knowledge of natural historians; and in particular in the idea of “Nature’s economy.”

However appealing sustainability is conceptually, it remains open to a variety of interpretations, ideologies, and practices. In this paper I first review how sustainability operates in two principal scientific areas, ecology and economics. For although the words come from the same root, their meanings have diverged to the point where contemporary mainstream economists do not think of the natural world at all except in terms of resource exploitation. Second, I review two discourses of alternative economics, namely economic anthropology and ecological economics, and conclude that although each remains promising, neither one at present is able to reconcile the contemporary differences over sustainability among developmental economists and conservation ecologists. Third, I attempt to integrate ecology and economics under the concept of “Nature’s economy.” This concept does not originate with me; it may be traced through a line of naturalists from Gilbert White in the mid-18^th century through Henry David Thoreau in the mid-19^th, then to Sir Albert Howard, the founder of the organic gardening movement in the early 20^th century, and then to a variety of cultural and agricultural visionaries in the late 20^th century that include Aldo Leopold, Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson. As a concept, Nature’s economy begins with the idea that Nature is the greatest economist; as developed by organic farmers, it means that agriculture should wherever possible imitate Nature; and insofar as the concept may prove useful in the cultural realm, it means that culture workers have their best chance of success when imitating the patterns found in Nature. Finally, I outline a number of design and management principles that follow from the concept of Nature’s economy, principles that culture workers may find useful in their interventions on behalf of cultural sustainability.

Last year at AFS I prepared the following diagram, which may be helpful still in reviewing the contemporary sustainability discourse in ecology and economics:

 CONSERVATION ECOLOGY                        ECONOMY

Sustainable populations                                     Sustainable economic growth

Conservation                                                      Development

Endangered Species                                           Resources

Targeted -> Systems Approach                          Targeted approach

Stewardship                                                        Property and Ownership

Equilibrium (Disequilibrium)                             Prosperity

Gifts of nature, wonder                                       Commodity exchange & fetishism

Co-existence                                                       Human dominance

Conservation policy                                            Economic and cultural policy

Diversity  (Concentration)                                  Efficiency

Summarizing what I spoke about last year, conservation ecologists target endangered species; they intervene to protect and sustain populations. Developmental economists target resources; they intervene to manage sustainable economic growth. Conservation ecologists value diversity; economists value efficiency. Both are engaged in policy-making, but conservation ecologists, like organic farmers, proceed from the principle of human co-existence with the natural world, whereas developmental economists consider the natural world in terms of resources for human welfare. Economists are driven to think of their world in terms of property, commodities and exchange, whereas conservation ecologists look to the cycle of growth, death, decay, and reproduction in natural world as their model. One could say that economists look forward to a world of prosperity while ecologists hope for a world of equilibrium with its connotations of justice and equity.

Confronted, late in the twentieth century, with a world of diminishing natural resources, economists embraced the concept of sustainability, as it pertained to both growth and development. Not only do institutions like the World Bank promote sustainable development along with modernization in the Third World, but economists prescribe growth for whatever ails Western economies. Meanwhile corporate conglomerates jump on the sustainability bandwagon, promoting themselves as “green” enterprises good for the planet. When Monsanto proclaims that it is “green” and that its combination of pesticides and genetic seed modifications produce a healthier world ecosystem, it is time to seek out alternatives.

Alternative economics are available, both “in the past” and “over there.” Can we learn anything about sustainability from production, consumption, and exchange among indigenous peoples? The literature of economic anthropology contains at least one provocative line of thought: the contrast between gift economies and commodity economies; yet while the interpretations support the idea that these two kinds of exchange encourage different kinds of human relations, personal and impersonal, with obvious social implications, they do not directly support a hypothesis that gift economies value resource sustainability any more than commodity economies do. Do people in indigenous societies have more awareness of the natural world than people in modern, Western ones; and if so, has this led them to practice sustainability? The answer to the first question is yes, but the answer to the second is contested, with some scholars (and natives) arguing on behalf of indigenous peoples as conservationists and others taking the opposite view. Early economic anthropologists assumed that neoclassical economics did not apply to indigenous economies and sought similarities between them and pre-capitalist Western economies, rejecting the ideal of the “economic man” who always tries to act in such a way as to maximize material wealth with the least effort. Instead, the early economic anthropologists embedded indigenous economic behavior in culture, explaining apparently irrational economic behavior terms of what Melville Herskovits termed “mythological thinking” (Herskovits 1952: 492).

But how could economics be a science if it could not explain economic behavior in all societies? By the 1970s a reaction occurred; economic anthropologists, whether formalist or neo-Marxist, blew away the fog of mythological thinking and attempted to demonstrate how economic behavior in indigenous societies was both rational and materialistic. By 1990 the powerful post-structuralist critique of science that overtook cultural anthropology was returning economic anthropology to a kind of relativism emphasizing, once more, the primacy of local knowledge. This would have amused Malinowski, who is credited with introducing the idea, 100 years ago, that cultural anthropology must first of all grasp the native’s point of view in its own terms. In this way economic anthropology has followed the intellectual trends of its parent discipline, while the evidence it offers concerning sustainability is both equivocal and contested.

            Besides economic anthropology, a second alternative to mainstream economics is provided by ecological economics, a discipline founded, named, and developed by economist Herman E. Daly beginning in the 1970s. Daly’s bona fides include working for six years in the 1990s as a senior economist with the World Bank as well as holding various professorships in the United States. I’ve written extensively about Daly and ecological economics on my research blog; time permits only a brief summary here. Daly indicts mainstream economists for failing to understand limits to growth because they do not realize that economies are not worlds unto themselves, but that like all human institutions they are constrained by Nature. If we bear in mind the classic economic concept of marginal utility, then when the costs of growth outweigh its benefits we have what Daly terms “uneconomic growth,” or growth that is harmful rather than beneficial. Today the most obvious consequence of uneconomic growth is global warming.

Instead of embedding economics in culture, as economic anthropologists do, Daly embeds economics within the earth’s ecosystem, endorsing policies that promote “sustainable yield.” He critiques economic development policies based on the concept of sustainable growth, which he claims is an oxymoron because unlimited growth is unsustainable. On the other hand, he endorses the principle of sustainable development. Quoting Daly, “when something grows it gets bigger. When something develops it gets different.” For Daly, development does not necessarily imply growth; but this distinction between growth and development is lost on most people, including developmental economists, and may have been one of the reasons Daly resigned from the World Bank. Ecological economics does provide a real model for cultural sustainability contextualized within the natural world, but at present it remains wedded to Daly’s interpretation of sustainable development, which unfortunately attracts developers who pretend that there are such things as smart growth and clean coal. Is there no way to reconceive the two discourses, ecology and economics, to bring them together in a complementary relationship?

            I think there is. The clue is in a line of lay knowledge and practice spread among naturalists from the Enlightenment to the present, and its contemporary extensions into a variety of related social, political, and food/shelter/transportation/place expressions, involving lay empowerment and an emphasis on recovering the commons with an emphasis on the local, organic, and participatory. I trace this line of knowledge and practice to natural history and the concept of Nature’s economy, and to its corollary, biomimicry, or the principle of following Nature in cultural design and management.

            The influential thinkers in the twentieth century’s first wave of agricultural environmentalism understood the connections between nature and culture in just this way. Wendell Berry, for example, approached both culture and agriculture in his 1977 book, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, pointing out that both words come from an Indo-European root meaning “to dwell.” Let us recall that “household” is root meaning of the words economy and ecology. In this way, we are able to view the culture of agriculture as dwelling within the earth household. In his 1981 essay “Solving for Pattern,” Berry remarked that “a bad solution solves for a single purpose such as increased production in ignorance or deliberate disregard of the larger patterns in which it is contained.” The obvious examples of bad agricultural solutions are chemical pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and genetically modified crops. These mistakes follow the law of unintended consequences and ignore the principle of interconnectedness, one of the four principles culture workers can learn from the science of conservation ecology: interconnectedness, diversity, limits to growth, and stewardship. But these principles did not originate with latter-day environmentalists, alternative agriculturists, or conservation ecologists; they are implicit in the concept of “Nature’s economy.” Again, the idea is that Nature is the “great economist,” in the sense that everything is interconnected and nothing is wasted. Here I quote from Gilbert White’s observations in The Natural History of Selborne, Letter VII, written about 1765:

“A circumstance respecting these ponds [in Selborne], though by no means peculiar to them, I cannot pass over in silence; and that is, that instinct by which in summer all the kine, whether oxen, cows, calves, or heifers, retire constantly to the water during the hotter hours; where, being more exempt from flies, and inhaling the coolness of that element, some belly deep, and some only to mid-leg, they ruminate and solace themselves from about ten in the morning till four in the afternoon, and then return to their feeding. During this great proportion of the day they drop much dung, in which insects nestle; and so supply food for the fish, which would be poorly subsisted but from this contingency. Thus nature, who is a great economist, converts the re-creation of one animal to the support of another!” (White 1908 [1788]: 30).

White’s vision of Nature’s economy integrates ecology with economy; things are recycled and nothing is wasted.

            Sir Albert Howard, the founder of the organic gardening movement, also understood these interconnections, and extended them to humankind. In his 1940 book, An Agricultural Testament, he wrote: “The whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal and man [is] one great subject.” Howard advanced the other key idea, biomimicry, or following nature’s economy, when he wrote that the way “Nature manages her land [must] form the basis of all our studies of soil fertility. What are the main principles underlying Nature’s agriculture? These can most easily be seen in operation of our woods and forests.” As I wrote earlier, I see these principles in operation every time I walk in the woods behind my house. They include biodiversity rather than monoculture; and the cycling of plant and animal waste into the forest soil that produces the food for the next generation of plants and animals. For Howard and a few thousand pioneers in 1940, and today for the tens of millions of people who produce and consume organic agriculture, managing agriculture means managing in imitation of Nature. The definition of organic gardening contained in Rodale’s Organic Gardening Encyclopedia reads: “The balance of Nature must be respected. Each part has its own sphere of activity as well as fusing with and complementing other related parts. A substance that alters one part, for instance, may affect half a dozen others—most often to our own disadvantage. . . . The soil is a storehouse of living organisms which must be fed and cared for as any others. . . Organic gardening or farming is a system whereby a fertile soil is maintained by applying Nature’s own law of replenishing it. . . .” (Rodale 1973: 794-795).

            Imitating Nature inspires Wes Jackson’s contemporary work at the Land Institute, in Kansas. In response to the problem of agribusiness and its depletion of natural resources, Jackson undertook a plant breeding program based on what he saw in the perennial state of the original Kansas prairie. One example involves cross breeding annual wheat with perennial grass to make a perennial wheat. It would be planted once; it would replenish the soil; and some could be harvested each year. Interviewed by National Public Radio in 2009, he said that “The solution is to build an agriculture based on the way nature’s ecosystems work” [NPR story, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113766846]

            Biomimicry follows from the idea that Nature is the great economist in earth’s household. Thus ecology and economy, Nature, culture, and agriculture are brought together in a single discourse. Another contemporary manifestation of sustainability through biomimicry is found in the Permaculture movement. Permaculture, a portmanteau word made from “permanent agriculture” and “permanent culture,” is, in the words of its most influential thinker, Australian Bill Mollison, “an approach to designing human settlements and agricultural systems that mimic the relationships found in natural ecologies.”

            In conclusion, the various design and management principles that follow from Nature’s economy and biomimicry integrate nature with culture and offer strategies to culture workers acting in stewardship to the public interest. Folklorists are well aware of some but perhaps not others; it is their integration that I have been seeking here. I end this presentation with a few of those design and management principles:

            (1) Observe patterns in Nature that connect all living beings and design with these in culture. Do not impose form; in Nature form follows function. Manage for whole systems; do not offer single solutions.

            (2) Encourage cultural and biodiversity as a strategy for sustainability through adaptation and dynamic change. Encourage revitalization movements that recycle tradition and know that in order to survive, tradition must be dynamic.

            (3) From organic agriculture to culture, apply the principle “Feed the soil, not the plant.” Do not intervene to bolster specific expressive cultural genres—these will come and go naturally, and today in the internet age all are capable of staying in one form or another. Direct support to the social, political, and economic conditions or the cultural soil under which expressive cultures flourish and upon which they depend.

            (4) Nature rewards cooperation and demands local expertise; culture workers should partner with local scholars and practitioners, ascertain their desires and goals, and work towards mutual ends and rewards.            

References

Lomax, Alan. 1972. “An Appeal for Cultural Equity.” The World of Music, 14:3-4, 9.

Brundtland Commission Report. 1987. Our Common Future. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

Howard, Sir Albert. 1940. An Agricultural Testament. Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press.

Loomis, Ormond, coordinator. 1983. The Conservation of Culture. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, American Folklife Center.

White, Gilbert. 1908 [1788]. The Natural History of Selborne. London: Cassell.

Herskovits, Melville. 1952 [1940]. Economic Anthropology: The Economic Life of Primitive Peoples. New York: Norton.

Rodale, J. I., and staff. 1973. Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening. Emmaus, PA: Rodale Books.

Are Progressive Colleges Unsustainable?

       One of my recurring topics has been the cultural sustainability of the liberal arts at colleges and universities in the US. I’ve written about their transformation over the past 50 years from the collegial to corporate values and governance, how and why this occurred, and the dangers it poses to liberal arts education that nourishes intellectual curiosity and the free play of ideas at the expense, perhaps, of career goals. The head of the Board of Regents at my graduate alma mater, the University of Minnesota, once asked me why education in the humanities was so inefficient. I'd replied that intellectual curiosity requires time to explore and ponder ideas. A curious mind is going to follow them here, and there, into barren ground and back to fertile fields where they can grow. Ideas don't live well when they're gulped down and regurgitated back up, and out, on tests. Now comes news that one of the few colleges that’s retained collegial, horizontal governance and an exploratory atmosphere, Hampshire College, is in serious financial trouble. They’re looking either to close the college or to partner with another, more financially stable institution—although how that partnership would work is uncertain.
       Hampshire is of special interest to me because it’s one of the Five Colleges in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts: Amherst (my undergraduate alma mater), Smith, Mt. Holyoke, and the University of Massachusetts are the other four. Hampshire was founded in the middle of the 1960s, the year I graduated from Amherst; it opened in 1970 as an experimental, progressive college: no tenure for the faculty, an open curriculum, no grades for the students, and decisions made with input from all stakeholders—including students. Students and faculty worked together to design individual curricula for each student, suited to their intellectual interests and the faculty’s capabilities. Instead of grades, students received from their professors detailed evaluations of their demonstrated strengths, weaknesses, and overall performance in each class.
        A college like Hampshire—and there were others, many founded around the same time—appealed to students looking for something more participatory and less authoritarian, more experimental and less prescribed, while they spent four years immersed in a world of ideas and a close intensely social atmosphere. The lack of prescribed structure meant that some students floundered about for a while, looking to find out what truly interested them. Some knew they wanted a broad education that encompassed the arts, humanities, social sciences, and sciences; most tended to concentrate within only one of those four areas. Having followed where their curiosities led them, along the way developing their abilities to think, write, and converse critically, they were able to gain entrance to the best graduate and professional schools and to become lawyers, doctors, and professors; and they were able to succeed in the business world, if they wanted to, because in the highly participatory college atmosphere they’d developed superior social, communication, and thinking skills.
       In the 21st century Hampshire and similar colleges—one, for example, is in Maine, the College of the Atlantic, and several are in Vermont, Goddard College being the best known—have fallen victim to a dwindling pool of qualified applicants interested in this sort of education. Changes in the US economy, the shrinking of the middle class, the growth of income inequality, and a new instrumentalism that values career preparation at the college level, are some of the most important reasons. Financial mis-calculations by some of these colleges also have contributed to their plight.
       It's important to me that Hampshire be able to sustain itself. I admire their values and form of governance. I agree with the progressive ideals they embody in their curriculum. I wouldn’t want to teach there, for reasons that have to do with me, not them. Nonetheless I've felt close to Hampshire over the years. For one thing, it's in the town next to Amherst, where I spent my own undergraduate years; and I should add that some of the people I knew at Amherst College helped to found Hampshire and participated in its operation during its first decades. For another, the two children of a couple I've been friends with for more than 30 years went there and had the benefit of a good experimental education. For yet another, one of the students in the Brown doctoral program I led for 27 years has been teaching at Hampshire ever since she got her Brown PhD. And another reason is that when I was a visiting professor at Amherst some 25 years ago, some of the most interesting students in my classes were from Hampshire. The “five college” arrangement encouraged students to take courses at any of the five colleges, especially those that weren’t offered at their home college. Many more students signed up for my classes than Amherst would officially permit, but along with a few from Smith and Holyoke and a majority from Amherst I admitted several from Hampshire officially, and several more unofficially.
       The occasion for this blog entry—I’ve gotten around to it at last—was an article that appeared in the March 4 New York Times, by one of its education reporters, Anemona Hartocolis, whose name suggests a flower. Students, she reported, have been occupying the office of Hampshire’s president for the past five weeks. That is a long time for a student sit-in. They're of a mind that the college administration hasn't done enough to prevent the looming financial disaster. The college doesn't have much of an endowment to carry it through hard times, and it's dependent chiefly on tuition income. Evidently only 75 of their applicants for next year's freshman class were able to meet the admission standards; normal class size is around 300. Given the current turmoil, it's hard to see how they'd be able in good conscience to admit anyone. 
        Hartocolis contextualizes Hampshire’s problems by looking at the difficulties other “alternative” colleges are facing, and offers a few reasons of her own for those problems: high tuition (although many students are on scholarship); a dwindling college-age population; competition among too many progressive colleges for too few interested students; small endowments because the graduates of these colleges tend not to be attracted to high-paying jobs; and so on. Some colleges that were progressive in the 1970s, like Sarah Lawrence in the Bronx, have become conventional today, emphasizing STEM courses, and where once they were like Hampshire in not giving letter grades, today they most certainly do. Not being able to admit a full class to Hampshire would, I think, result in a death spiral unless they can find a partner school—but on what terms? How could they keep their residential arrangements, their faculty, their participatory government, their democratic curricula, and the close, in-person nature of their daily education if they partnered with another school? And how could they find enough money to keep going without changing their nature beyond recognition?
        It seems, in other words, as if this particular progressive model for liberal arts education is unsustainable in the US in the 21st century. And yet what the current moment needs more than anything is a well-educated citizenry to become high-information voters and to choose our leaders and policies rationally based on facts and truths, not propaganda and lies. And this is precisely what liberal arts education encourages, and what experimental colleges like Hampshire, when they succeed, are able to accomplish. Hampshire’s horizontal governance shows what democracy can be like at its best (and also, be it said, at its most demanding, and annoying).

Some students and faculty at Sterling College, Vermont, 2018

        
     Are there other models that might succeed where Hampshire is having such difficulty? I've mentioned the College of the Atlantic, which has a curricular focus and strengths in environmental science and the environmental humanities. On a much smaller scale, the environmental college in Vermont that I wrote about, Sterling College, appears to be succeeding, with a similar focus. Possibly a focus such as the environment, which of course is timely and could be viewed as career preparation for a life as a scientist, or for working in an environmental organization, will enable an experimental college to be resilient. At the same time, though, it's impossible for these colleges to offer the depth in the liberal arts curriculum that Hampshire has offered. Yet for now this may be the only kind of adaptive management that maintains resilience and the sustainability of the progressive educational model among small US colleges.  

Music Appreciation, Cultural Tourism, and Cultural Capital--What Is It Worth Today?

    In this blog's entry dated January 21, 2009, “Is music useless,” I wrote about the classical music appreciation industry, with its paraphernalia of college courses, professors, composers, musicians, concerts, concert-goers and critics, and its media presence, all supported by private, corporate, and government patronage. I’ve also written here, frequently, about heritage and cultural tourism. Now I want to bring the two together, and think about music appreciation as cultural tourism. For if we want to think critically about the contemporary practice of sustaining the traditional arts by constructing them as heritage and then marketing them for tourists, we can look to an earlier model of this very same process in the rise and fall of the classical music appreciation industry, one which is losing relevance daily as the contemporary media engender enormous changes in the way people receive information and in the kind of information we do receive. What might we learn from this example?

    Several years ago I revised my syllabus for an introductory course in ethnomusicology, one meant for music majors at my university. For the most part these are practitioners of music, ones who will take many courses in music-making, and whose courses in music theory, history and appreciation will be taught at a deeper analytical level. The introduction to ethnomusicology course is required of our majors, many of whom would prefer to be off making music themselves, composing, or practicing their vocal or instrumental techniques, than to ponder the ideas and musical curiosities that we ethnomusicologists like to vex ourselves with. I decided to try to reach the students a little closer to where I thought they were, and to turn an ethnomusicological lens on the classical music industry. Never mind that I overestimated their interest in classical music; based on their previous training in Western art music they felt, at least, on more common ground. I decided it would be enlightening to have a look at the prefaces and introductions to the twentieth-century music appreciation textbooks to see what they said about what they were doing and why. We noticed in these textbooks, first of all, a defensive tone—why study music, why is art important in a world where most people are concerned with getting and spending, with family and neighbors and politics and power and war and peace and anything and everything but music?

    These appreciation textbook authors were not hedonists; they did not justify the pursuit of music on the grounds of pleasure, or as aesthetic object, “music for music’s sake.” Such a justification, though it  gains assent from music-makers and music-lovers alike, was not suited for the music education business. There must be Purpose, and the purpose was Culture. The authors of the textbooks usually justified appreciation in terms of “acquiring culture,” in the sense that one’s mind and soul would be improved, ennobled, and liberated by encountering the great cultural monuments of the past—Our Musical Heritage, as one textbook was titled. (Interestingly, this particular textbook took a very broad view of that heritage, but that is another story.) Engaging with Great Ideas, Great Art, Heritage, “the best which has been thought and said in the world,” as Matthew Arnold put it in Culture and Anarchy, was, of course, the purpose of a liberal arts education—uh, wasn’t it? This engagement developed taste and refinement in one's personality, a more "civilized" human being, a better person. It is no accident that this is the same justificatory rhetoric that was used to promote the actual Grand Tour, cultural tourism, the European monuments, the museums, the cathedrals, for a century and a half.

    What the authors of these textbooks did not say was that taste, or aesthetic discrimination, leads to collecting and connoisseurship (getting and spending); and that appreciation creates a class of patrons who support the arts. Late twentieth-century cultural theory informs us that music (and art) appreciation builds a kind of cultural capital (that is, knowledge and taste as a stock of cultural goods and strategies) as well as a refined personality that once served the middle classes well in their striving for power.

     But I write "once served," in the past tense, because it is becoming clear that taste matters less and less in the world of common culture (the information commons) and (un)civil discourse, a world dominated by celebrities whose confrontational behavior (whether among politicians or on talk radio or FOX news) is not considered rude and boorish, except by a generation of old-fashioned elders and a small group of young idealists. Ironically, the cultivation of cultural capital is now proving an obstacle, as the refined public personality is no match today for the angry naysayer in the public sphere, or “shock and awe” on the battlefield.

    I am reminded of an observation told to me some years ago by a professor of music, whose  discriminatory powers were highly developed. It concerned the makeup of the student body in the appreciation course being taught that semester. “A majority of them are Asian!” the professor exclaimed. “Not that I have anything against people of Asian extraction," he added, "but where are those whose Heritage this really is? They’re the ones who should be taking this course.” But they weren’t, perhaps because they were unconvinced that the course would provide much useful cultural capital for the twenty-first century. And so we may ask what kind of cultural capital, if any, will be useful in our still-new century?

The discourse of management

If music is to be sustained on a model of cultural heritage management based on ecosystem management, we had better examine what forms management takes. The discourse of management now recognizes that control is beyond possibility; it seeks to realize goals in a world of uncertainty, whether the manager is a conservationist, a corporate manager, or a manager of a baseball team. A manager is a strategist; when managing people, also a motivator and a coach.

US National Folk Festival, 2017

The National Folk Festival celebrated its 77th anniversary, in Greensboro last weekend, with a seven-stage musical extravaganza featuring traditional music performed by professional musicians from various parts of the US and the world. If you were in attendance, you could hear a variety of traditional North American musics, with the usual emphases: old-time music, bluegrass, and country; Cajun, Cape Breton, African American blues (Lurrie Bell) and gospel music (The Fairfield Four), Polish-American, and so on, mixed in with a smattering of ethnic musics not usually heard at these festivals--last weekend it was Egyptian music from New York City. Besides the music performances, more informal, educational presentations occurred, with musicians from different performing groups gathered on a single stage: for example, seven fiddlers, each representing different traditions and demonstrating similarities, differences, and the characteristics of genre and style. 

     The National is one of two major, annual, long-running US folk festivals. The other is the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, which takes place in Washington, DC, whereas the National moves from one city to another every four years. The Smithsonian’s is more ambitious, with more stages, more performers, and a many more crafts artists besides, often demonstrating what they make, whether boats or baskets or Polish Easter eggs or any number of other hand-made objects. When the National was in Bangor, Maine, 2001-2003, the Maine Folklife Center partnered and offered a crafts stage with Native American basketmakers, state-based violin makers, and other crafts artists; in Greensboro there were crafts demonstrations in a North Carolina tent area. One stage at the National is always reserved for traditional dance music, and the crowd is always given a huge dance floor and encouraged to dance (see photo below). I was one of the presenters at the National this year, and it was my job to work a little at the dance stage and introduce Lurrie Bell and his Chicago blues band, and also Bruce Daigrepont and his Cajun band. There must have been 500 people happily dancing at each performance, while another few hundred looked on. Mutliply that by seven stages along with others moving about from one stage to another, or to the food concessions, and I guess about ten thousand overall in attendance. The National (and Smithsonian Folklife) festival have no admissions charge, but at the National a bucket is passed around for suggested contributions of $10 per person per day, and most people do contribute. The money is used to defray expenses. Other expenses are borne by corporate sponsors such as large telephone companies, along with local businesses, that get a chance to advertise at the festival. Sometimes the city council also contributes, hoping that the festival will attract out-of-town tourists whose expenditures will enhance the local economy. It’s good in that it brings people in the city together for a common, pleasurable experience; and in a city as diverse as Greensboro, this had a very positive impact. There was an atmosphere of celebration, a feeling that all traditions are valuable; there was no competition to speak of among ethnic groups, as there can be in certain European folk festivals.  

     The history of these festivals is complex and interesting. The National is much the older one and, like many that took place before the 1960s, it concentrated on Anglo-American musical traditions, implicitly promoting the idea that the US’ folk heritage is largely British, stemming from the British Colonies. The silent message was that the vast number of immigrants from outside of the UK, along with the Africans who were taken and sold into slavery, had less of a right to claim a pure American heritage. In the 1960s US immigration laws were relaxed, the nation began to be viewed as a mosaic of various ethnic groups, while the old "melting pot" idea came under pressure as ethnicity became a positive attribute and tracing one's roots became a pastime for some. The Newport Folk Festival added a significant number of African-American and Euro-American performers and traditions, and the Smithsonian (which began as the Newport was fading into obscurity) gradually increased ethnic as well as regional and class diversity among the performers and traditions they represented, making a special effort in the aftermath of the war in Indochina to bring displaced Asians and their traditions into the festival lineup. The National, also, became more diverse in its programming during this period. Soon, the Smithsonian festival partnered with folklorists overseas, and in most years traditional music and arts from one non-US nation was featured. For the US Bicentennial, the Smithsonian festival ran throughout the summer and traditions from many nations were on display along with their US diasporic counterparts, a festival extravaganza that has not been equalled since.

     The audience understands these festivals primarily as entertainment, but the festival organizers want also to inform and educate to some degree. The performers are unfamiliar to most of the audience, and in some cases the genres are as well. The presenters have the option of informing the audience, before the performers take the stage, about the traditions they represent, and something about the performers’ lives and careers. Of course, the audience grows impatient for the music if the presenters take more than a few minutes’ educating them. For me, this is a real danger because as a college professor I tend to lecture in a situation like this, so I have to remember to keep it short, especially when presenting on the dance stage. 

     At the Smithsonian festival, the stages are either performance stages or so-called narrative stages. In the latter, presenters engage the performers in conversations, and then performers demonstrate what they’ve been talking about—so it’s a much more educative environment. I recall that in the early 1990s, when I was working for the Smithsonian festival, in response to a few of my questions blues singer Johnny Shines delivered a scathing indictment of racism while explaining the history of blues. I had visited with Shines in his home in Alabama some years earlier, and found him to be not only a fine musician, singer and composer, but also a reflective person who, he said, had been writing his autobiography. I didn’t stay close to him, though, and by the time he died several years after performing at the Smithsonian festival, he hadn’t published the autobiography, nor did any part of the manuscript surface after his death. 

Customized antennas and other DIY electronics atop Big Joe Williams' 
station wagon, ca. 1980. Photo by Jeff Todd Titon.

     In 1976, the first time I worked at a folk festival—it was the Smithsonian—I was asked to present blues singer Big Joe Williams. At that time, the directors of the festival and the Smithsonian’s folklife division—Bess Lomax Hawes and Ralph Rinzler—were invested in the idea that folk music would be adulterated if presented accompanied by amplified guitars, electric basses, drums, and so on. Yet they understood that in the blues tradition, electronic amplification had become the standard after the second World War, and so they permitted a little of it, at low volume so that the sound didn't bleed from one stage to another. Big Joe had brought his own amplifier, a home-made rig consisting of an old floor-model radio from the 1940s, with a huge speaker, into which he’d placed an army surplus amplifier. It was very beat looking and at least 25 years old. Joe, who was quite a DIY electrician, carried it with him to his gigs in towns and cities up and down the Mississippi River, from New Orleans to Chicago, where he traveled almost constantly. I recall that when Bess and Ralph took their first look at his amplifier, they recoiled, thinking that it must be an electrical hazard. But he demonstrated otherwise, and the gigantic amp that looked like an ancient radio became an object of the audience’s fascination, though of course for Big Joe it was just an amplifier. 

     Joe also played a 9-string guitar, which was a six to which he’d added three more, another home-made rig. I’ve never heard of anyone else who played a 9-string guitar, or anyone who wanted to, for that matter. The three added strings included one that doubled the G-string an octave higher, as in a 12-string guitar, giving Joe’s guitar the most distinctive sound of the 12-string, the octave G. Joe’s station wagon also was a magnificent DIY contraption, to the extent that he’d customized the electronics and several other aspects of the interior. It was quite a sight, and I took many photos of it. I’ve told elsewhere, in an interview, about an incident with Big Joe at that 1976 festival, one that has troubled me for many years; but there’s no need to go into detail about that here. 

     I’ve written here before, also, about the paradox in presenting mediated performances of "authentic" traditional musics which, in their natural contexts, are not mediated, even though they may be staged. Presenters, of course, are the chief mediators, explaining the musical traditions and saying something about the performers’ lives and careers, aspects of the performances that would otherwise be absent. And yet, insofar as a greater percentage of these performers are professional folk musicians today—due in no small part to support from festivals like these, and from state and local arts councils—most of their performances are staged and many are mediated. And some of the genres that they perform have been presented from the stage and on recordings for at nearly 100 years, including blues and old-time string band music, while for others the natural context is the stage, not the home. A more realistic description of these musics, I think, is that they have front-stage and back-stage aspects, neither more authentic than the other. Old-time, bluegrass, and country musicians, for example, perform from stages but also get together to play with and for one another informally at home and on the road in motels, and in campers at festivals, and so forth. In some traditions, what was once done in the home kitchens, on porches, or in living rooms with rolled up rugs and carpets, moved into community halls, or bars and pubs, or both, retaining the community flavor of a large family. And so there is that aspect of this music as well, back-stage and informal, that not only remains but is in a sense encouraged by festivals like the National and others that help support it in all of its aspects. 

    One of the best things about these festivals, over the years, is that they’ve encouraged people in the audience to learn and make music. At the National, two of my friends and colleagues, who teach in Greensboro, brought their four-year-old son; and he was thrilled to see and hear the music, especially up close. Bruce Daigrepont, leader of the Cajun band, noticed him, walked over to the section of the stage close to where his father was holding him on his shoulders, and moved his accordion back and forth towards and away from the youngster, who was entranced. Although the boy is too young to know what kind of music this is, surely he continues to identify music with movement and pleasure, something that will serve him well when he decides to take up music systematically and learn to sing or play or both, himself. He already pretends to make music—certainly he makes sounds—at home, on toy instruments; and it won’t be too long before he’s ready to apply himself to learn the skills needed to make real music.

     

Conservation, environmentalism, ecology

    A review of a new biography of Rachel Carson, one of the pioneers of modern environmentalism, affords an opportunity to compare and contrast three keywords in my work on music and sustainability—all of which are very much involved in contemporary sustainability discourse here and elsewhere. Those keywords are conservation, environmentalism, and ecology.
    Carson’s book, Silent Spring (1962), with its warnings about agricultural pesticides' effects on bird and other animal life, ushered in the modern era of environmentalism in North America. Carson wrote it while living on a remote island in Maine where she witnessed DDT's impact on bald eagles. Tim Flannery, who reviewed the biography in the New York Review of Books for November 22, 2012, writes that the biography's author, William Souder, argues that Silent Spring “‘marks the birth of the "bitterly divisive" concept of environmentalistm. Before it, environmental politics was characterized, he says, by the ‘gentle, optimistic proposition called “conservation,” which concerns the wise use of resources and has broad appeal across the political spectrum. Environmentalism, in contrast, can be politically polarizing because it involves a clash with vested interests'” (1). Of course, Carson was not the first environmentalist; Thoreau was one in the 19th century, and arguably so was the Englishman Gilbert White in the 18th. One might even make a case for John Bartram, a botanist (in the American Colonies) who lived a generation before White.
    But although we can point to earlier 20th-century North American, science-grounded environmentalists such as Aldo Leopold, Carson was the first to change public consciousness. Indeed, Carson’s work was polarizing: while President Kennedy and the general public took her side, the chemical companies who manufactured pesticides tried to discredit Carson, influence the public debate her book ushered in, and lobby Congress to prevent the eventual ban on DDT. Carson prevailed. Since then, of course, many global corporations have done their best to fight environmentalists in similar ways, adding greenwashing and large campaign contributions to their arsenal.
    At issue here is the distinction between conservation and environmentalism. Among early conservationists in the US, such as Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, and again in the 1930s with the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the guiding principle was so-called wise use, which included public recreation and managed extraction of natural resources; the National Parks are examples. But even in the early period, and especially during the CCC era, more radical voices argued for setting wilderness areas aside: not wise use, but either light use or no use at all. The keyword "conservation" still implies a compromise between strict environmentalists who would severely limit or prohibit use, and “wise use” conservationists. In contemporary sustainability discourse, the wise use faction is represented by those who advocate “sustainable development” which, to use the words Flannery quotes from Souder, is a “gentle, optimistic proposition” and one under which certain developers and environmentalists find common ground.
    Besides wise use, conservation also bears another cross as a movement supported by the wealthy at the expense of the poor. The National Parks (Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountain) that were built in the southern Appalachians, for example, were established by eminent domain; that is, the federal government dispossessed the inhabitants (chiefly subsistence farmers) against their will and resettled them elsewhere “for the good of the Nation.” Such dispossession by the law of eminent domain is not exactly a new thing in the US, and there is a shameful history behind it (consider, for example, the treatment of Native Americans).

Local forest path

     And if one looks around today at the various conservation heritage trusts, the ones that receive charitable contributions from the wealthy to buy up land and turn it into preserves for nature trails, ocean access, farmland preservation, and the like, the question arises as to who uses these preserves. In my part of the US, as in many others, they're for those with money, leisure and an aesthetic interest in nature--in short, for environmentalists. The heritage trusts do not set aside land for trailer parks and RV campgrounds or for ATV and snowmobile use. Local naturalists in my part of Maine host a series of “walks and talks” through these forest and coastal preserves during the warmer months, for tourists and interested residents; subjects include local bird and animal life, geological formations, and other aspects of natural history. These rural preserves do not host visits from inner city residents who are below the poverty line; not only do the urban poor have no means of getting to them, but nature walks aren't high on their list of priorities.
    When conservation was first coupled with the word “cultural” beginning in the 1970s, the historic preservation model was applied to culture. Managed and wise use was the watchword, as federal and state agencies, historical societies, and NGOs got into the act. Cultural conservationists tried to manage cultural flow so that traditional expressive culture was not crowded out by what were felt to be the fads and fashions of modern, media-driven, popular culture. (I’ve written recently that those of us involved in cultural conservation and cultural sustainability need to be aware not only of cultural threats but also economic and environmental ones; I needn’t repeat that here.) Yet there was, in the early decades of cultural conservation, a kind of top-down, wise-use mentality in operation, one which has gradually and unevenly been giving way to cultural partnerships, participatory action research, and bottom-up management.
    As a keyword, environmentalism is usually distinguished from ecology in that the former is a political movement while the latter is a science. The distinction can be made clearer by saying that the science of ecology, like all science, aims to be objective and apolitical, or politically neutral; whereas environmentalism advocates in the political arena with its agenda to protect and preserve the natural environment. In this sense, it is plain that the conservation land trusts, with an ideology of environmentalism, ought to prohibit snowmobiles and ATVs from their nature trails if these tear up the land and bother the nearby animal inhabitants (human and otherwise) with their noise and fill the air with their carbon exhaust. Sometimes, of course, in popular discourse the word "ecology" is used when "environmentalism" is meant; people sometimes refer to “the ecology movement” as if they were referring to the environmental movement and at other times use the two words interchangeably. Indeed, even the word "ecosystem" is becoming common in public parlance.
    Yet in some instances this distinction between ecology and environmentalism is hard to maintain. For example, the science known as conservation biology (sometimes called conservation ecology) can be regarded as an applied ecology: environmentalism based on ecological principles.
    Just which ecological paradigm should rule, though, is a crucial question. Returning to the new book about Carson, Flannery reveals his own ecology-informed environmentalism. Concluding, he writes, “After recently rereading Silent Spring, I discussed Carson with an Indian friend, who put a question to me: ‘What is more orderly, a jungle or a garden?’ After a moment’s thought the answer became obvious. Of course it is the jungle, where the invisible laws of ecology dictate the relative abundance of plants and animals, and where they occur. The very shape and position of every leaf abides by those eternal rules” (p. 23). When Professor Flannery invokes the “invisible laws” and “eternal rules” of ecology he is thinking of the ecosystem paradigm in which nature in relatively pristine areas such as a jungle achieves a “balance” or equilibrium (the “relative abundance,” “shape and position of every leaf”) that it tends toward elsewhere, except when the balance is upset by human intervention (or as Joni Mitchell sang, “They paved paradise and they put up a parking lot”).
    The only problem with a balance of nature is that most ecologists—that is, the scientific ones—no longer believe in it. Beginning around the same time that cultural conservation arose in the public arena—the 1970s—ecologists began seriously to challenge such concepts as stable ecosystems, climax forests, and the balance of nature, arguing that the evidence indicates the opposite: that left undisturbed by humankind, the natural world does not move inevitably toward balance but is, rather, characterized by frequent perturbation, disturbance, and merely temporary equilibria—indeed, many different equilibrium points, one in which the relative abundance of plants and animals is always changing, as is the shape and position of every leaf.
     It is not accidental that ecologists were abandoning the balance of nature theory at about the same time that scientists were advancing chaos theory, a view of an uncertain universe that aligns with the new ecological paradigm of a natural world consisting not of ecosystems but of “patches” moving, in response to disturbing forces beyond their control, from one state toward another. How conservation biologists and environmentalists, let alone cultural conservationists and sustainability advocates, react today to this changed ecological paradigm depends on their awareness of it and how seriously they take it. Like a number of environmentalists, the reviewer for the New York Review of Books appears unaware of this paradigm shift. But to those who are aware, a concept like “resilience” is one way of responding—and I have blogged about resilience in this space before (please see the entry for July 21, 2011: "Sustainable Music: Resilience"). That is, resilience is the ability to resist or recombine in the face of perturbation or disturbance; management for resilience is one way to think about conservation under the new ecological paradigm.
     But there are other “downers” at work against environmentalism and musical and cultural sustainability. These include some of the obvious, such as the ideology of global corporate capitalism and neoliberalism; but it also includes powerful critiques (from critical theory) of science as privileged truth, and of environmentalists’ concepts of nature. It can even be supposed that environmentalism and sustainability efforts are themselves responses to the changed intellectual climate of the past forty years. In order to understand music and sustainability in its contemporary context, it’s important to view it not simply as a response to the changing natural and sociocultural environments, but also as a response to various currents in contemporary Theory which undermine old ideas of nature and culture. Some of the environmentalist response is, predictably, reactionary; but some of it attempts to think along with critical theory. I will be writing from and about this perspective in the coming months as I try to organize my thoughts on this music and sustainability project.

(1) Tim Flannery, review of William Souder, On a Farther Shore, New York Review of Books, Nov. 22, 2012, p. 21.

Photo "Local Forest Path" by Jeff Todd Titon, East Penobscot Bay, Maine, December 2005.