“we have not become more concerned with men than profit”

Edinburgh – I’ve left the farm, but I suspect it will be days before I can close my eyes without seeing kale or beetroot leaves. On my last day, Uwe took me on a walk to the far corner of the property that they are renting. At 80 acres, the entire farm is far bigger than the area under active cultivation, and I had not even seen most of it prior to this eleventh-hour tour. Uwe told me that before they moved here, their landlord kept a herd of sheep. Their dream is one day to buy the land from him, in partnership with ten or so other families, and divide it into a series of small family crofts. This sort of thing is happening in small pockets all over Scotland, Morven later told me.

If my hosts achieve their dream, the transition of the land will be rich with historical symbolism, because it will represent a small-scale undoing of one of the sorriest episodes in Scotland’s history. I hadn’t even known about the Highland Clearances prior to this trip, but a brief mention of it in a travel book caught my interest, and while browsing a used bookstore in Inverness I found a paperback history of the subject. In brief, the Clearances were an era of forced depopulation on a massive scale, leaving most of the Highlands’ people to scratch out a miserable existence on the coasts or leave their homeland for good.

The story of the Clearances begins after the Battle of Culloden in 1745, when English forces had their final triumph over Jacobite rebels from Scotland. I passed the battlefield on my way from the airport, and I later read that the Queen had just paid a visit there, which is another indication of just how much old passions have cooled. The battle’s immediate aftermath, however, caused a seismic shift in Scotland’s political system. Under the historical clan system, people lived on small farms under the protection of a hereditary chief (ceann), and were ready to fight for the clan at the drop of a hat. (Interesting aside: In his most recent book, Malcolm Gladwell advances the argument that feuding between extended families in the American South trace back to the Highland culture that early settlers—many undoubtedly expelled during the Clearances—brought with them.) The victorious English saw to the demolition of this system and stripped the clan chiefs of much of their traditional power.

Gradually the chiefs transitioned from their old role as patriarchs-cum-warlords to being little more than neutered landlords. Their kinsmen-turned-tenants had no legal rights. At the same time, England’s wars, its new industrial wealth, and its growing population led to exploding demand for meat. A new breed of sheep, the Great Cheviot, seemed perfectly made for the Scottish highlands. Entrepreneurial Englishmen and Lowland shepherds saw an opportunity to make a tidy profit, and they set about persuading the chiefs that selling or leasing their land for sheep farming would be far more lucrative than the present arrangement. Most chiefs took the bait, and over the ensuing decades, thousands of Highlanders found themselves evicted in the name of "Improvement."

There were protests, to be sure—a large one took place in the town closest to the farm—but the Highlanders lacked leadership, were forbidden from keeping weapons after Culloden, and still felt an attachment to their traditional chiefs, so these bits of rebellion were easily quashed at musket-point. An especially cruel new proprietor set fire to all of the homes on his land, one with an elderly, bedridden woman inside. Some of the expelled were "generously" offered new plots of poor land on the coast, a few found work fishing, but most simply had to leave the country. If you’re in the U.S. or Canada and you have ever met anybody whose last name begins with "Mac," there’s a good chance the Clearances had something to do with that. Thus, if Morven (herself a "Mac" by birth) succeeds in transforming former sheep pasture into a series of family farms, things will have come full circle.

Explaining why he wrote this history, the author of The Highland Clearances notes that "we have not become so civilized in our behaviour, or more concerned with men than profit, that this story holds no lessons for us." I wholeheartedly agree. Viewed from a purely economic perspective, the Clearances were an "improvement": they converted Scotland’s land to a higher-value mode of production and facilitated its transition from an agrarian to an industrial country. In the long run those who emigrated probably found their livelihoods improved, again in a purely economic sense. This is, of course, an extremely impoverished mindset—but I believe it is the same mindset that has guided a lot of modern-day development policy in poor countries. I think the analogy is especially relevant to trade, which mercilessly demolishes long-standing ways of life even as it enlarges the GDP of countries rich and poor. The point is not that economies shouldn’t change, shouldn’t industrialize, or shouldn’t trade—by all means, they should do all of those things. The point is that what happens in the transition matters too. Scottish farmers didn’t need to experience hunger and homelessness at the hands of their chiefs any more than African farmers need to experience hunger and homelessness at the hands of a First-World technocrat with a Structural Adjustment Program.

Those who advance the purely economic worldview often cite the thought of a Scotsman who once taught here in Edinburgh: Adam Smith, the "father of economics." In what may be the most celebrated sentence in the most celebrated economics text of all time, Smith wrote in his Wealth of Nations that people acting in their own self-interest within a market system often promote the larger social good, as if guided by an "invisible hand." I don’t know if any of those who perpetrated the Clearances had read Smith, but I suspect lots of them really did believe that what they were doing was for the larger social good. Here’s the rub, though: Smith also believed that benevolence and social cohesion are foundational to a properly functioning society. The "invisible hand" is not an unlimited license to be selfish; it only works its magic in a world where people have a certain level of decency and concern for one another. The Highland chiefs failed on that count, and I think that we too are failing Smith’s test today.

On that cheerful note, I am off to Ireland to meet my parents for a brief tour of the ancestral land before returning to Cambridge with them for graduation. I doubt there will be much time for blogging, so watch for a roundup in a little over a week’s time.

dispatches from the farm

Ross-shire, Scotland – In my first 72 hours as a WWOOFer I have harvested potatoes, built trellises for peas, picked strawberries, collected and packed eggs, fed hogs, pulled weeds, and witnessed the beheading of two hens. I am here for a little over a week on a family farm in a moderately isolated patch of the Scottish highlands with Morven, my super-energetic hostess, her builder partner Uwe, their two adorable children, a fellow WWOOFer from Germany named Katrin, and a massive complement of four-legged and winged friends. Somewhere in my head a treatise tying my observations here with the history of the Scottish highlands is simmering—would you expect anything different from me?—but for now, here are a few tidbits from my first days of WWOOFing.

Childhood flashbacks. My mom has a stash of anecdotes from my childhood that she brings out whenever she needs to embarrass me in front of somebody (new girlfriends, etc.), and one of her favorites is the Children’s Barn at Endicott Park. I can’t say this of all of her stories, but I actually remember and can attest to the truth of this one. Anytime my parents would take me there as a wee lad, the smell of the animals would overwhelm me and I would commence gagging. Memories of the Children’s Barn came roaring back on my first morning as Katrin and I stepped into one of the henhouses, feed bags in hand, and the fetid smell of birds and their shit filled my nostrils. As an adult, fortunately, I have the self-control needed to preserve my dignity in the presence of animal smells. Nonetheless, I was grateful when the feed was distributed and we could move on to the less stinky task of collecting, inspecting, brushing off, packing, and labeling the hundreds of eggs that those odiferous birds put out each day.

Paydirt. I know that I’m not working with a statistically significant sample here, having never WWOOFed anywhere else, but I really feel like I have hit paydirt with this farm. We WWOOFers get to share dinner and occasionally bedtime stories with the family, and the kids (ages 6 and 4) are awesome, even when they’re climbing on my back while I’m trying to weed. Morven has only been running this farm for a year and change, but she’s very good at integrating WWOOFers into the rhythms of the farm, finding useful and varied tasks for us to do. Thanks to Katrin, I don’t have to sort hundreds of eggs or face the hungry hogs alone. The farm offers great views of mountains, the nearby loch (lake) and distant firth (fjord). Daylight lingers well past 11 pm, as expected in a place on roughly the same latitude as Juneau. Slowly but surely, I can feel contentment settling in.

How I spent my Fourth. On Saturday night the WWOOFers got to tag along to the local ceilidh (KAY-lee), a traditional Scottish dance held in a community hall a few miles from the farm. Tickets went for £8 apiece, but Morven bartered for our entry with the strawberries we had picked earlier in the day. I’m actually quite experienced at this kind of dance, thanks to contradancing at Williams, but it was challenging without a caller to yell out the next steps. It was the Fourth of July, but the only way I could find to honor my homeland was consuming Budweiser in its trademark red, white, and blue cans, which Uwe generously kept coming throughout the evening.

Mooching x 4. To get up here I flew from London to Inverness, the “Capital of the Highlands,” and before catching my train out of town I stopped for lunch at a Spanish restaurant, drawn in by its Cruzcampo sign. (You may recall my preoccupation with Cruzcampo beer during that weekend in Seville.) There I happened to meet Richard and Frances, a recently retired Scottish couple who took a keen interest in what I’m doing here and who live in a tiny hamlet about twenty minutes north of the farm. They gave me their phone number and offered to show me around if I had any free time—which it turns out I did, earlier today. They treated me to a driving tour of the area and brought me along to a barbecue at Frances’ sister’s house. Thank goodness Sarah Barracuda is back in the news, because it allowed my new friends to bring in the “guess what—Shawn has lobbied Sarah Palin!” factoid, and I was able to regale the crowd with Alaska-talk. (As an aside, if she does stay on the national scene for a while, the silver lining for me is that I’ll be able to get that much more mileage from my “Don’t look at the governor’s legs!” story.) In a surreal turn, my hosts’ son-in-law was born in the Philippines, and I heard a brief snatch of Tagalog at the dinner table between him and his Italian mother. At some point it occurred to me that I was engaging in fourth-degree mooching. I got to the UK in the first place by mooching off Bill Gates’ money; I’m in Scotland mooching off Morven et al (though this is the least moochy step given that I’m working for them); my afternoon out was a mooch off Richard and Frances; and the barbecue was a fourth degree of mooching off their extended family. It’s pretty much as far off the tourist grid and into “real life” as you can get, and the experience made me grateful that I answered the siren call of Cruzcampo back in Inverness.

i am a cliché: an essay in two parts

Part 1: WWOOFing. "Man, we are such clichés!" proclaimed an e-mail I received from my friend Stella, who was a member of TeamParis and ¡TeamSevilla! She was referencing this New York Times article about "a new wave of liberal arts students who are heading to farms as interns this summer." She and I are both contemplating spending a few extra weeks in Europe after we leave Cambridge under a program called WWOOF (Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms), which enables volunteers to work on organic farms in exchange for free room and board. I currently have WWOOFing plans in the works for Scotland and France in July. I'm motivated less by disdain for industrial agriculture than by the opportunity to stay in Europe longer on a small budget, to practice my language skills and experience these countries outside of tourist hubs, and to live out my longstanding Tolstoy-influenced farmer fantasy. "If WWOOFing in America has 'as much bohemian cachet as backpacking through Europe,'" Stella observed, quoting the article, "then we must be getting cachet up the wazoo for doing it in Europe!"

That article alone would have been enough to make me feel like a cliché, but it came right on the heels of further evidence that farming is all the rage among the bohemian liberal arts crowd. Last week I had a phone date with my former executive director from Alaska. She had recently visited her alma mater, a liberal arts college in the Midwest, to deliver a talk to students in her capacity as a distinguished alum. I don't remember if she told me this in response to my plans or if she volunteered this information, but apparently tons of the students she met are planning on putting down their books and taking up their hoes this summer too. And this is at a college where, I am told, odors from a nearby turkey farm waft through campus with some regularity--not the ideal environment to inspire would-be farmers, I'd think.

Interestingly, both my former boss and the Times article point to a common culprit for this surge of agricultural enthusiasm among the youngsters: Michael Pollan. He wrote The Omnivore's Dilemma, which certainly ranks among my favorite books in recent memory. Pollan's philosophy on food includes eating more plants; avoiding processed stuff (or as he calls it, "edible foodlike substances") to the maximum extent possible; eating locally and seasonally as possible; and eating animals that lived in something approximating a natural environment, as opposed to a factory where they live in cages while being force-fed government-subsized corn. (It's not just what you eat that matters, Pollan says, but what "what you eat" ate.) Pollan's gift for storytelling and ability to weave together politics, ecology, and personal morality make him the kind of author who inspires disciples and not just readers. So maybe I am a cliché, but hopefully I am also part of a groundswell in a generation that will demand that we develop a more environmentally sane system with which to feed ourselves.

Part 2: Stuff White People Like. It has probably not escaped your notice that I am white, in the demographic sense of the term. But apparently I am really, really white in the cultural sense of the term, as described by that great arbiter of what constitutes urban, upper-middle-class white culture: stuffwhitepeoplelike.com.

You already know I am thinking of joining those corporate ag-hating liberal arts students on their unpaid stints on organic farms, but consider also that I am studying abroad for my graduate school education in a country with free health care and lots of opportunities for traveling. Prior to coming here, I worked as an advocate for low-income people at a non-profit organization in Alaska. In my free time I hung out with my gay friends, ordered movies from Netflix, watched the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, hosted dinner parties, tried learning Spanish, and spent time outdoors with my gear from REI and LL Bean. Also while in Alaska, I dated a half-Asian woman with a gifted, multilingual child; we watched Juno and attended an ugly sweater party together, and had a difficult breakup. Oh, and did I mention my love for coffee, local beers, wine, hummus and sushi?

If this has offended you, I apologize--but that would suggest that maybe you're a "white person" too.