The gift economy

Martin’s last post about our entertainingly (or so we hope) ill-prepared entry into the marketplace has got me thinking. (Martin says the most terrifying words in the world are “Honey, I’ve been thinking...” when they come out of my mouth. Reader, beware!)

In preparing for the seminar we’re going to lead at the Gemini Ink Summer Lit Fest in San Antonio next month, I’ve been rereading Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. The description of our seminar asks all the Big Questions about our hopes and plans for Madroño Ranch. I’m not sure what prompted me to look at The Gift again, but whatever it was, it was, well, a gift; Hyde beautifully untangles many of the ideas knotted in my head about those hopes and plans.

He begins by identifying the two distinct economies in which a work of art exists: the market economy and the gift economy. While a work of art can exist without a market, it cannot exist without a gift. Harlequin Romances, for example, follow guidelines set by market research and sell very well. But are they works of art? Probably not. While writing one requires a certain level of competence, a Harlequin Romance probably doesn’t have a foot, or heaving bosom, in the gift economy.

Hyde develops a theory of the gift, which of course has multiple levels of significance. Its economy is marked by three related obligations: to give, to accept, and to reciprocate. Gift exchange is what one early theorist called a “‘total social phenomenon’—one whose transactions are at once economic, juridical, moral, aesthetic, religious, and mythological.” Gift exchange is an issue in medical ethics as well, especially with reference to organ transplants: what is the status of body parts? Is it appropriate to commodify what has traditionally been regarded as a gift? What are the consequences when something moves from the gift economy to the market economy—when worth and value are confused?

Hyde cites the case of the Ford Pinto, a car that had a tendency to spill gas in low-speed collisions, a defect that killed at least 500 people. An easy fix for this defect existed, but after a cost-benefit analysis which valued a human life at $200,000, Ford decided that the costs of fixing the Pinto exceeded the benefits. While the decision may have made sense from a market perspective, it ignored the fact that most of us participate in another economy as well, one in which the gift of life cannot be assigned a dollar value.

One of the marks of a gift is that it is always in motion, transferred from one individual or community to another. It must be consumed (i.e., eaten, immolated, thrown into the sea) or given away; otherwise, it ceases to become a gift and becomes mere property. A true gift is the antithesis of personal property. Hyde says that “a gift is consumed when it moves from one hand to another with no assurance of return.... A market exchange has an equilibrium or stasis; you pay to balance the scale. But when you give a gift there is momentum, and the weight shifts from body to body.” Gift economies generally operate in relatively small communities like families, brotherhoods, or tribes; market economies tend to emerge at the limits of gift economies as a means of negotiating with outsiders. While my truncated description makes gift economies sound primitive, they aren’t; Hyde cites the (ideally) unrestricted flow of ideas within the scientific community as an example. When ideas become remunerative for an individual or a portion of the community instead of free to the entire community, the gift economy dries up and the spirit of the group evaporates. The gift of ideas ceases to move.

Gift economies foment community; market economies fragment it—another iteration of the endless wrestling match between the Many and the One. One of the great benefits of a market economy—freedom from bondage—has significant limits. Where “the market alone rules, and particularly where its benefits derive from the conversion of gift property to commodities, the fruits of exchange are lost. At that point commerce becomes correctly associated with the fragmentation of community and the suppression of liveliness, fertility, and social feeling. For where we maintain no institutions of positive reciprocity, we find ourselves unable to... enter gracefully into nature, unable to draw community from the mass, and, finally, unable to receive, contribute toward, and pass along the collective treasures we refer to as culture and tradition.”

So here's what I’ve been thinking, honey: industrialized nations have converted the gift properties of nature into commodities. Any aboriginal people could have told us that disaster would ensue as a result of buying and selling what was pure gift, something not earned but given to us in abundance that the gift economy demands we pass on to our children in its original abundance.

I’ve also been rereading Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature, in which he quotes the journals of the early American artist, writer, and wanderer George Catlin. Riding north to the Missouri River, Catlin found a campsite “in one of the most lovely little valleys I ever saw, and even far more beautiful than could be imagined by mortal man... an enchanting little lawn of five or six acres, on the banks of a cool and rippling stream, that was alive with fish; and every now and then, a fine brood of ducks, just old enough for delicious food and too unsophisticated to avoid an easy and simple death. This little lawn was surrounded by bunches and copses of the most picturesque foliage, consisting of leafy bois d’arcs and elms, spreading their huge branches as if in offering protection to the rounded groups of cherry and plum branches that supported festoons of grapevines with the purple clusters that hung in the most tempting manner over the green carpet that was everywhere decked out with wild flowers of all tints and various sizes, from the modest sunflowers, with their thousand tall and droopy heads, to the lilies that stood, and the violets that crept beneath them.... The wild deer were repeatedly rising from their quiet lairs, and bounding out and over the graceful swells of the prairies which hemmed it in.” McKibben comments, “If this passage had a little number at the start of each sentence, it could be Genesis....”

So with Hyde and McKibben in the front of my mind, I was stunned to read of Judge Feldman’s recent injunction against President Obama’s moratorium on offshore drilling, which just proves that I live in a lovely little bubble along with fairies and elves and a herd of unicorns. I do not argue against the fact of the market economy any more than I argue against the changing seasons. Nor do I argue against the gravity of depriving tens of thousands of Gulf Coast residents of economic stability. But those who value the treasures of the Gulf through a market-driven cost-benefit analysis need to remember that they’re operating in a gift economy as well, and that there will be an audit.

Back to Gemini Ink and Madroño’s mission. We hope that Madroño will operate in a way that recognizes the beauty and necessity of both markets; after all, I’m out there hawking the virtues of bison meat. But I hope that in producing that meat we recognize the gift of abundance it brings us, that we honor that gift, and that we pass it on to our children and to the community in and around the ranch.

—Heather

What we’re reading
Heather: Bill McKibben, The End of Nature
Martin: Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability

Adventures in Business-Land

This week, during a solo trip to Madroño, Heather spent much of her time knocking on doors in Kerrville, Bandera, Medina, Tarpley, and vicinity, hoping to convince chefs and restaurateurs to buy locally raised, grass-fed bison meat from the ranch. Our initial herd of fifteen animals has grown to thirty-six, including a couple of young males who have already, by their obstreperous behavior, nominated themselves as the first to be harvested this fall.

I’m not particularly objective, of course, but I think she could make a pretty compelling case to those potential customers. To wit:

• Bison meat generally has more protein, iron, and nutrients than beef or chicken;
• Bison meat is lower in fat and calories than beef or chicken;
• Our bison spend their lives ranging freely on Madroño’s 1,500 acres, and never set foot on feedlots;
• Our bison are never injected with or fed growth hormones, steroids, or any other supplements;
• To ensure the quality of the meat and reduce stress on the animals, our bison will be field-harvested on site under the supervision of a licensed inspector from the Texas Department of State Health Services.

Another point we hope to emphasize is that, since we’re a small-scale, local operation, our customers will also be our neighbors, which means we’ll be accountable and responsive to them in a way that Big Agriculture isn’t. It also means that every penny our customers spend on our meat will stay right here in Central Texas.

Our hope is that the sale of bison meat, eggs, and produce from Madroño will (eventually) provide significant financial support for the residential center for environmental writers we hope to open at the ranch. We know there’s a growing market in Austin for fresh, local, sustainably raised food, but we’re not planning to sell in Austin—too complicated and expensive logistically, plus we wouldn’t want to compete with our friend and mentor Hugh Fitzsimons of Thunder Heart Bison—so we’re hoping to find a comparable demand in the area right around Madroño. (And based on Heather’s schmoozing this week, the early returns are encouraging.)

Make no mistake, though: going into business—especially the business of turning a creature into a commodity—presents all kinds of challenges for a couple of recovering English majors. Virtually all of my adult work experience has been in the nonprofit sector; shifting to something that is explicitly designed to make money, no matter how noble we believe the cause to be, is a bit of a shock. (A couple of years ago we were told that the mother of one of our daughter’s schoolmates referred to us as “just a couple of old hippies.” She did not intend it as a compliment.) As entrepreneurs, we are babes in the woods.

I imagine our first bison harvest will be quite an adventure, as will the processing and distribution that will follow. We’re already moving out of our comfort zone—I’m pretty sure Heather never imagined herself as a salesperson—and confronting a couple thousand pounds of dead buffalo will move us even farther into unknown territory. I mean, business plans? Financial projections? Balance sheets? Puh-lease!


Of course, it’s probably good for us complacent old hippies to be forced out of our comfort zones occasionally; we just have to hope that we don’t make a total cock-up of it.

On the other hand, maybe we don’t want to get too caught up in this whole mercantile thing. I’ve been reading Ian L. McHarg’s influential book Design with Nature, originally published in 1969. McHarg, an expatriate Scot who pioneered the field of environmental planning in the United States, writes witheringly of the prevailing view in his adopted homeland: “Neither love nor compassion, health nor beauty, dignity nor freedom, grace nor delight are important unless they can be priced. If they are non-price benefits or costs they are relegated to inconsequence. The economic model proceeds inexorably towards its self-fulfillment of more and more despoliation, uglification and inhibition to life, all in the name of progress – yet, paradoxically, the components which the model excludes are the most important human ambitions and accomplishments and the requirements for survival.”

Of course, McHarg is hardly the first thinker to decry a fixation on financial gain. In the sixth century BCE, Lao-Tzu put the same sentiment somewhat more pithily: “Chase after money and security and your heart will never unclench.” In a similar vein, I Timothy tells us that “the love of money is the root of all evil.” (I Timothy is also the source of the phrase “filthy lucre,” by the way.) Jesus himself reminds us, in Matthew’s gospel, that “You cannot serve both God and Mammon.”

And yet, and yet... we live in a fallen world, and money is an intrinsic part of it. The love of money may be the root of all evil, but money itself is not necessarily evil. (Or, as Peter J. Gomes writes in The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart, “Wealth is not a sin, but it is a problem.”) The trick, obviously, is to learn money; to use it; to see it as a means to an end, not an end in itself. I mean, why can’t Madroño become an example of enlightened capitalism, a model of a countercultural way of thinking about commerce—a way that emphasizes the small-scale, local, sustainable long term, instead of the bigger-is-better, metastatic, smash-and-grab short term? I think we’ve all seen enough of the latter way of thinking, and its consequences, to last us a good while.

Of course, it’s easy for me to preach self-righteously about the corrupting dangers of the profit motive; we’re unlikely to make enough money selling bison to threaten the state of our souls. Indeed, just breaking even seems like an ambitious goal right now. I'm sure we’ll be writing more about Heather and Martin’s Adventures in Business-Land in the weeks and months to come. In the meantime, pray for us – and our bank account.

—Martin

What we’re reading
Heather: Richard Powers, The Echo Maker
Martin: Ian L. McHarg, Design with Nature (still)

Home with the armadillo: a love letter to Texas

Recently we and our three kids went to Martin’s native San Francisco to help celebrate his father’s eighty-fifth birthday. The five of us spent an afternoon walking along the cliffs of Point Reyes National Seashore, where the ground was springy, the wind was fierce, and in some spots along the trail we pushed through wildflowers up to our shoulders. Hawks wheeled through the cloudless sky, elk sunned in the lees of the cliffs, and the ocean’s shining hide swelled and stretched like the flanks of a well-groomed, self-satisfied, and very large cat. At one point, our son Tito turned to us and said incredulously, “You mean we had a choice between this and Texas?”

Yes, well. Despite Martin’s entertaining recent post on how he has come to terms with living in Texas, he has spent much of his time in the Lone Star State not entirely convinced that civilized life is possible here—certainly not from May to October, and frequently not after elections. I grew up spending summers in Colorado, where despising Texans is a competitive sport, and as a teenager and young adult I also got to spend time in places of unsurpassed beauty such as the highlands of Guatemala, the Swiss Alps, the Masai Mara, Paris, and the Canadian Rockies. And yet I love Texas and can’t imagine living anywhere else. Time for that apologia, son.

Some of my love of Texas is just an old bad habit. Many fine writers have noted how people stubbornly cling to the smells and sounds of their childhood, sensations that undermine the idea that time moves only into the future. Much of my first decade was spent in the then-unbroken woods just north of the San Antonio airport. The uncanny whinny of the screech owl, the languid moan of the mourning dove, the overpowering sweetness of mountain laurel at Easter, the loneliness of the north wind on a clear winter day: each time I experience these now I’m reminded that the girl who was gripped by them forty years ago is still inside me. She isn’t gone, despite all appearances to the contrary.

There’s more to it than nostalgia, though. Texas tells stories about itself, some of them true. While I know that many find this self-conscious tale-telling irritating—maybe even pathological—I find it sort of comforting. So maybe we actually lost the battle of the Alamo. So maybe the Texas Rangers weren’t a bunch of ethically ripped superheroes. So maybe every cowboy doesn’t have the soul of a poet. But there seems to be a (nearly) conscious yearning for the power of myth to work among us with these stories. Of course, there are stories Texans tell about themselves that I loathe: bigger is better, we should each of us be our own posse, it’s manly to kill animals with automatic weapons and spurn the meat—but this is a place that recognizes the power of stories to shape reality.

One of the stories told over and over in multiple variations is the power and variety of the land itself. One of my favorite signs is on Interstate 10 at the Louisiana-Texas state line. It reads something like this: Beaumont, 20 miles; El Paso, 937 miles. While I have lived only in Central Texas—in some ways the easiest part of the state to love—I’ve learned to respect and admire many of the landscapes between the ends, from east to west and from north to south. I make no claims to anything but the cursory knowledge that comes from road trips involving grumpy children – me and my siblings years ago, and more recently our own children. My parents drove us to Colorado every summer through the Panhandle; Martin and I chose instead to make our annual pilgrimage by way of Fort Stockton and then north through the Pecos wilderness. One hot summer day the gas tank light came on when we were halfway through the hundred inhospitable miles between Pecos and Loving, New Mexico. The prospect of running out of gas here at midday with a dog and several children concentrated the mind wonderfully and caused me to sweat through my clothes despite the car’s air conditioning. (We managed to make it to the next filling station.) We passed by multiple examples of the land’s indifference to human striving: we often threatened to abandon our squabbling children in Orla, an oil ghost town baked into dusty submission, if they didn’t behave. (It didn't help.)

We always planned our route back to Austin through Balmorhea and Fort Davis and, inevitably, a thrashing summer thunderstorm would force us off the highway—or so we assumed, since we couldn’t even see the highway through the mud on the windshield. But before the storm hit, you could see the Guadalupe Mountains to the west, and when we made it to Marfa and the high grasslands, we—well, some of us—were exhilarated by the wind and the shadows, by the pitilessness and delicacy of the Chinati Mountains.

At the other end of the spectrum, I love the featurelessness of the south Texas brush country, an admittedly perverse passion. In March, the mesquite bloom neon green. At least as many things will sting, bite, or poison you as won’t. As our friend and mentor Hugh Fitzsimons of Thunder Heart Bison says, there are two seasons in south Texas: January and summer. At the rare watering holes, there are birds of remarkable beauty: green jays and hooded orioles and American widgeons. Once in April, on my way back from Piedras Negras and Eagle Pass, I drove through a migration of yellow sulphur butterflies that extended for dozens of miles. When I got back to Austin, probably a dozen people pointed out the grotesque beauty of my Suburban’s grille, which had become an extravagant collage of dead butterflies.

I’m leaving a lot of verses out of my Texas love song, but the last verse here has to be the one about the Hill Country. Loving the Colorado Rockies as much as I love any landscape, I’ve been trained to seek out views, to climb and pant and strain and exult upon reaching the summit. Well, the Hill Country upends that paradigm. Once you make it to the top of the hill—at least at Madroño—the landscape sinks into an unexpected anonymity. The personality of the Hill Country is in its draws and canyons, the intimate interstitial places where oaks and pecans crowd together, and great slabs of limestone create undulating walls and pools, and ferns and cedar sage grow with the demure confidence of cloistered beauty. In February, the draws ring with the slurred chatter of hundreds of intoxicated robins and waxwings. The draws also snarl with the movements of feral hogs, coyotes, and mountain lions, and vibrate with the possibility of rattlesnakes on sunny shelves, the clatter of unseen hooves in caves and cedar brakes, and the songs of maddeningly invisible birds that suddenly move, shine, and disappear again before they can be named. The draws protect and expose, invite and terrify. You want stories? You’ll find them here.

So, son, I’ll be happy to spend time in California, especially in August, even if the locals make fun of how I talk and where I’m from. But I’ll always want to come home.

—Heather

What we're reading

Heather: Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality
Martin: Ian L. McHarg, Design with Nature

Listapalooza: top ten Texas movies

Yup, another one of those crazy lists. This time we thought we’d offer our ten favorite movies about (or set in, or somehow related to) Texas. Pass the popcorn, and turn off that damn cell phone!

Dancer, Texas Pop. 81
Giant
The Last Picture Show
Lone Star
Lonesome Dove (yes, we know it was originally a TV miniseries, but give us a break!)
No Country for Old Men
The Searchers
Tender Mercies
Terms of Endearment
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

Bonus movie trivia: The iconic silent Western star Tom Mix, who claimed in his autobiography that he was born and raised on a ranch on the Rio Grande, was actually a native of Pennsylvania who never lived in Texas, though governor James Allred named him an honorary Texas Ranger in 1935.

—Martin

What we’re reading
Heather: Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures
Martin: David Grann, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon