The annual Eco-Fair was held at the Austin Convention Center simultaneously
with the Realty Roundup, whatever that is. At one end of the sterile public
corridor that runs through this strange building were men and women dressed as
Ken-and-Barbie-Do-Business, with more cellular phones pressed to their ears
than hearing aids at an AARP gathering. One woman in a skin-tight ensemble that
looked like the uniform for the Euro-Snob Military Band was wrestling with a
giant black feather hat someone had stuck on her head – surely she could not
have placed it there herself voluntarily – in an attempt to get the receiving
end of her tiny, squawking phone closer to her ear. At the other end of the
corridor, I found earnest folks dressed in wrinkled, pigment-dyed cotton and
enough Birkenstocks, if strapped together, to float 25 yards of moist compost.
Guess where I was headed?
The Eco-Fair trade show held the usual booths of products and philosophies:
sustainable building information alongside organic cotton clothing; tables
filled with government-generated brochures about recycling and pesticide-free
lawn care next to wild-seed purveyors; organic soil food salesmen neighboring
pitchmen for rainwater collection. It was a gentle celebration of PC
consumerism. I liked it. I filled a bag with free pamphlets, pencils, and Dillo
Dirt, then hurried off to catch the keynote speech by Dr. Wes Jackson, author
of Becoming Native to This Place.
Dr. Jackson has been called a “freethinking geneticist” and “a prairie
prophet” because of his work in the field of sustainable agriculture at the
Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. He may be all these things and more, but I’m
sure no one attending his lecture would call him a dynamic public speaker. He
reiterated some of the exact same sentences he used in an interview in Mother
Earth News. Unfortunately, he was without an editor and an interviewer to
cushion his rather oblique phraseology with down-to-earth information.
Statements such as “Just as the church built cathedrals and the nation-state
built national capitals, now economics builds the shopping mall to the glory of
the gods of secular materialism” and “Rather than a knowledge-based world view,
how about an ignorance-based world view?” were tangled helter-skelter with a
dizzying array of name-dropping of mostly dead white men: Descartes, Darwin,
Bacon, Copernicus, Dante, Shaw, and the Wizard of Oz. I had to rush home and
look up every one of them, except the Wizard, in Webster’s New World
Encyclopedia. And I still don’t know what the hell Dr. Jackson was talking
about. And from the looks on the faces of his audience – organic gardeners,
straw bale home builders, people just trying to feel good about making their
way gently through this life – I wasn’t alone in my confusion. I crept from the
auditorium drained of nearly all my hope for the future of nature and human
kind. I’ll take the tangible philosophy behind a bag of gayfeather seeds or an
organic cotton dish towel any day.
Or I’ll take your questions and stop ranting about this esoteric gunk: Suzebe@aol.com or PO Box 49066, Austin, TX 78765.
This article appears in October 13 • 1995 and October 13 • 1995 (Cover).