Almanack Contributor Adam Wilson

Photo: Trevor and Angus one year ago. These boys now weigh more than a half-ton each.

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

I recently found a copy of the undergraduate thesis in Anthropology that I wrote two decades ago.  I hadn’t looked at it since.  I opened with the following questions:

What is it that seems to be driving humanity towards the ecological brink?  How can we go about changing course?

For those who have signed up to receive this Newsletter recently, the various topics explored here—gift economics, traditional agriculture, animism, and the work of making human culture—all circle around these two questions of ecological grief, with one small addendum.  The second question about changing course betrays the desire for solutions that I carried back then.  I would phrase things slightly differently now:

Was it inevitable that it would turn out this way?  Could it have gone another way?  Might we still?

So perhaps this Newsletter serves as an invitation to gather ‘round a digital campfire and cultivate a quality of companionship that could allow us to look directly into the blinding light of a world ablaze.  These writings court the possibility that humans are capable of much more than the Western imagination allows, including a recovering capacity to turn from the easy seduction of grievance and cynicism to the hard, honest work of grief.

» Continue Reading.

I am writing a book that tells a story of giving food away at Brush Brook Community Farm.  While that Farm project has been closed for a year and a half now, the website is still live.  The home page reads:  “Brush Brook Community Farm is an experimental agricultural gift economy in Huntington, Vermont.”  As I write, I am realizing that the book amounts to a map—story lines scratched onto a blank page to summarize a living terrain peopled by humans and nonhumans.  Maps are used primarily for navigation, for wayfinding.  We rely on navigation in every moment as we decide which way to proceed—right, left, forward.  Where to procure food, to find love or companionship, to seek rest, to alleviate boredom.  But we don’t tend to use maps for terrain with which we are familiar.  It might seem an obvious statement, but let it sink in for a moment.

I recently talked with a class of college students about the late Brush Brook Community Farm.  I began by asking them to raise their hands if they knew what “community service” was.  All hands went up.  “How many of you have done community service?”  Again, all hands.  “Would anyone be willing to offer an example?”  A volley of one-sentence stories filled the air.  “I raked leaves once for my elderly neighbor.”  “I volunteered for a few hours at the Food Pantry.”  “I picked up trash on Earth Day.”

» Continue Reading.