It's a start.

Hi, and thanks for reading this. What I’m hoping this blog to be is mainly a place where I share stories of my travel year. Please feel welcome to reply to the stories with your own thoughts and questions for me and anybody else reading.

Of course, it takes a little audacity to have a blog. After all, instead of writing to particular people that I know, I’m writing to whoever wants to read. And if too many people that I don’t know start reading this blog, I’ll find myself with a certain notoriety. So just for the record (and because I wouldn’t feel comfortable starting a blog without some commentary about why I did so), I’ll have you know that I actually found myself waging quite the war with myself about whether to blog or not to blog. I’ll spare you the sordid details of my internal battle over blogging, but suffice it to say that while I was mired in a quandary over the hubris of this ignoble avocation, the poem below assured me that my aversion to stepping atop the cyber-soapbox was a myopic mistake.

Dilemma
by David Budbill

I want to be
famous
so I can be
humble
about being
famous.

What good is my
humility
when I am
stuck
in this
obscurity?

In other words, take my poetic justification for writing this blog and making my stories known to the world with a grain of salt. I actually have no hope that this blog will make me famous, but I wanted to let you know that fame is a risk I’m willing to take so I can share my stories with you.

With that said, I haven’t left the US yet, but I will on July 31st. My first stop is the UK, and my first real posting on this blog will probably be from there. But as a little prelude to the first real posting, and to give you an idea of what I hope to do and why, I have also copied two essays below that I sent to the Watson Foundation as part of my application for the fellowship. The first is my personal statement (about me, primarily) and the second is the project proposal (about the project, primarily).

Thanks again for reading. Throw me an email at keefekeeley@gmail.com if you’d like me to let you know when I write new stories. Until then.

Personal Statement for Watson Fellowship

I have always been engulfed in the culture of agriculture, though my immediate family does not farm. Many of my neighbors, friends, and extended family are farmers, so I grew up working on various pieces of land. On farms I experienced the communion of breaking the soil with my fingers to find potatoes, sometimes stopping to hear the oscillating sounds of Bob Dylan and Bob Marley emerge from the cassette tape player in the nearby pickup truck. On farms I experienced the rude shock of stepping outdoors on frozen December mornings to feed the neighbor’s mules. On farms I experienced the repeated pricks of brazen bushes rife with raspberries. On farms I experienced the unparalleled consummation of eating what I had harvested. And in hard farm work I am satisfied; there is a potent peace – a sublimity – in standing sunburned beside my co-workers in the late, long shadows, admiring our pickup full of harvested potatoes or a strawberry field redeemed from weeds by our hands and hoes. There was a time when most of the people on earth farmed. I imagine that this reflective moment represents a recollection of that ancient consciousness, a collective awakening: we are intrinsically woven with each other in our dependence on the land.

I am fortunate to know farmers on both ends of several spectrums, and the paradox of these poles holds my passion. To point: I have a cousin who runs a multimillion-dollar corn and soybean agribusiness; I have neighbors that till their fields with mules instead of tractors. My cousin is a Christian; my neighbors profess no formal religion. My cousin is focused on making money; my neighbors are more interested in preserving the land. This pattern seems to be common. Though there are important exceptions, the farmers at my church seem to employ conventional, earth-harming practices; the majority of earth-friendly farmers that I know through my father’s employment at an organic foods distributor are not church-goers.

Why is there such a split? Do people’s religious beliefs influence the values that shape how they farm? Some claim that indeed they do, and that this split – that Christian farmers tend to not care as much for the fate of fields – is persistent because Christianity contains an inherent mandate to subdue and domineer the earth. Much of the environmental squalor that the world faces today has been blamed on the regnancy of this attitude. I will be among the first to agree that Christian-Imperialist-Conqueror attitudes have shaped modern farming methods, and have caused ecological damage. But as a Christian who loves the land, I have harbored a deep distrust of the sufficiency of this simple explanation of the situation.

Allow me to digress from this distrust in order to explain why it pains me to see my fellow Christians despoiling the landscape on which I lived. Reading A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold was a galvanizing experience; it served to inflame and refine those passions that already existed within me. Leopold put words to my experience—the passing of the seasons, the interconnectedness of the species, the impact of humans on the land. While I grew up almost half a century after Leopold wrote his landmark work, my family’s trailer home was tucked in a small glade less than 75 miles away from the old farm that is the muse of Leopold’s tales. It is not hard to imagine myself hearing the same insistent call of the whip o’ will he often heard on that quiet farm. Our local landscape is graced with the quaint bouquet of manure from the cows grazing on our property, and after rains the erosion of the cornfields that fed these cows transformed the languid trout streams in which I played into liquid chocolate.

While I saw and experienced the same world that Leopold did, it was within his writing that I encountered the power of well-spoken wisdom that springs from observation. His words awoke a desire in me to live out the expectation that the land itself speaks to us, when we listen: be a part, not apart. He wrote of the land as a community of soils, water, plants and animals. His call represents an eloquent alert to the quiet tragedy of calling the land a commodity instead of a community. Where greed governs our earth-ethic, the land suffers, and – as part of the land – we suffer.

I discuss Leopold because I find myself in his footsteps: a boy who found himself growing up on a farm in Wisconsin; who found that he loved spending time in the woods; who found a passion for scientifically understanding the “complexity of the land organism” and the impact of humans on it; who found the common practices of his day unacceptable because they sought not the preservation of the land for future generations, but present-day profit. Leopold said that “no important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal change in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions. The proof that conservation has not yet touched these foundations of conduct lies in the fact that philosophy and religion have not yet heard of it.”

It is here that we return to my long-harbored distrust. Per Leopold’s proverb, my formative intellectual life did indeed suffer such amputation: I entertained no cognitive connection between fifth grade ecology lessons and the moral lessons I was learning in Sunday School at the small country church my family attended. Strip-cropping to save soil and salvation to save souls were never equated in my mind. In my church we prayed for rain during droughts and for comfort for farmers when milk prices dropped, but besides creating it, God’s connection to the land never went any further. And so I was left with dissatisfaction. My religion did not seem to hold any values that could substantially guide to how to live with the land.

Then I came to Swarthmore College. I began work with Earthlust, the environmental student group, and I noticed that friends with whom I worked were Jews, Hindus, Muslims, New Age folks, Atheists, and Christians. This contrasted the virtual Christian-or-not dichotomy of my corner of Wisconsin, and I started to witness how various religions might give birth to our values concerning how we live on the land. I started to become very curious about how one’s religion might inspire her to champion earth-causes.

This exploration became more formal when I enrolled in a class called “Religion, the Environment, and Contemplative Practice.” My professor laid the wager of this course: relieving ecological crisis is not a matter of the mind (we know what the problems are and how to solve them), but of the heart (we just do not care enough to change). In other words, the ecological crisis is a spiritual crisis. Our project became to plumb the religions of the world for their contribution to turning people’s hearts towards earth-care. In exploring Christianity, Judaism, Native American religions, Confucianism, Taoism, Shintoism, Buddhism, and New Age traditions such as Deep Ecology, we performed the rituals that these religions offered. These rituals became the crux of our study; they drew us into an intimate understanding of how these religions might inspire people’s moral actions.

I found the material on each religion fascinating, and wished throughout the course that we could go into more depth with each religion. As a conflicted Christian with a heart for the earth, I met the material on what my religion could bring to the eco-care table with extra eagerness. With fervor, I read authors who contended that the Christian God not only cares about the land, but that God actually imbues Godself’s own presence into the created material world. Thereby, the land becomes sacred; the soil becomes a site of the divine itself. Therefore, to have communion with the divine, one must have communion with the land. Here, care of the land becomes more than an option; loving God inevitably includes loving God’s creations.

What an epiphany for me! Woods that host my wanderings, creeks that cradle my canoe, fields I farm: these are sacred places. My spiritual suspicion, so long squelched, became real, internalized, and validated. It was not any sort of new addition to the religion that reworked my convictions. Instead, my faith was reinvigorated by authors and friends who founded their thoughts on traditions and texts from within the religion itself. It was not values bending my religion; it was my religion forming my values. That my two loves (land and God) might be organically fused in a seminal essentiality – what joy!

And so I thought: if the internal wealth of my religion – despite a sometimes sinister environmental history – can call me towards caring for the earth, can others also be so called? Could my Christian friends (particularly those who are farmers) find within the resources of the faith they already possess an inspiration for a new land-ethic? My own epiphanic experience suggested so. And if so, might this be a vital thread in the tapestry of turning our species towards sustainability? Might we come to value the preservation of the verdant spaces of this life-covered earth-crust for future children? With faith enlivened by this potent vision, one of my greatest joys is helping Christian friends to find earth-care inspiration within their own religion.

Now, I seek to travel abroad and witness how other religions inspire the values that guide how we commune with the land. I do not wish to intrude or to impress my beliefs, culture, or agriculture on others; I just want to experience this interplay of spirituality and land stewardship in the context of the religions and ecological issues of new places. My travel will be a real extension of my earlier desire to have more substantial encounters with other religions in that transformative course. This will increase my conception of how this process of finding values that govern one’s earth-action broadly works, and thereby enable me to more adeptly guide my Christian friends at home in the United States toward a healthy relationship with the land.

If you will recall, the perplexity of farming was the locus where earth-care and religion-born values first captured my attention. In some sense, it is precisely because I have been exploring this issue apart from the farm field that I long to go back. I really miss working with farmers. But though it has been more than three years since I have done a full day of farm work, I have been approaching agriculture from a new angle: biological research. The knowledge I have gained through this research has concretized my childhood conception that the farm represents humankind’s most intimate and influential interface with the land.

And now my most driving desire is to work within agricultures across the earth, and to unearth the values and religious rituals that farmers employ to frame their relationship with the land. I want agriculture to be the arena where I encounter persons in other fluxing societies wrestling with their religions to obtain a land-ethic. Developments in agriculture remain the foundation for fundamental change in entire societies, so I want to perceive how other religions engender values that push and pull farmers to act as land-lovers or world-wasters. Understanding this process for different places, people, and principles in will indubitably help me understand it for Christian farmers in the United States.

My greatest hope is to learn from others, not to teach them. So though I have spoken boldly about how my own religious beliefs motivate me to pursue this project, I realize that during my travels it will not always be beneficial for me to speak so explicitly about my spirituality. When it is appropriate and affirming I look forward to exchanging spiritual narratives with people. At other times, it will be best to observe and listen to others, withholding my own beliefs. In both cases, my hope is to become close enough to others to see the world from their perspective, and to thereby understand their religion and how it shapes their lives.

I am fortunate to have grown up experiencing the land as a community worth my love, and to have encountered people who farm differently and who have different values that may or may not be based in their religions. I am grateful for my opportunities to reinvigorate my convictions and to work to intellectually uncover how these differences might be intertwined. I am now eager to step onto foreign soils and encounter the confluence of faith and the farm mixing in new ways.

Project Proposal for Watson Fellowship

Abstract
I propose a project of farming with people of different religions in different regions of the world. I take great joy in farm work, and I seek an understanding of how people’s religious values affect the ways that they relate to the land. My itinerary includes the United Kingdom, Zambia, New Zealand, and Sri Lanka.

My Aims
I wonder what values farmers draw upon to make choices about how to relate to the land, especially in a world of dynamic technologies and demands. Further, what is the role of their religions in informing values that influence farming choices? My aim is not to acquire an academic knowledge of this process, but to gain understanding by befriending farmers who are making these choices. I enjoy farm work and the friendship that it fosters, so I plan to spend most of my time working beside farmers, following their lead, contributing to their cause, and learning how they employ their values to make daily farming decisions.

I also wish to learn about farmers’ religions in an experiential rather than a cerebral way. I seek to humbly and thankfully follow the lead of those farmers who will welcome me, and to join in their religious expressions. I do not seek to challenge or change the values of those with whom I work, I only seek to gain the experience of observing or participating in the religious rituals of farm families, and contemplating the interplay among the rituals, religious-born values, and the farm. In general, my approach to inquiry will be simply to form friendships as I farm with people. Fortune has granted me very close connections with the folks I work the fields with in Wisconsin; I hope that my hosts will also welcome me into their homes.

My Destinations
United Kingdom:
As an increasingly secular, industrialized nation, the United Kingdom may not seem like an intuitive choice for a sojourn focused around religion and agriculture. However, there are several very compelling reasons for my trail to pass through this place.
1) Organic food consumption. The UK ranks as one of the leading consumers of organic foods worldwide, which signifies that many people there are concerned with the origins of their food. Do these concerns arise from religious convictions? Is it a genuine concern for the state of the land and how it might provide for future generations or because of health concerns? Is it simply affluence? I hope to frequent grocery stores and food markets and talk to people and vendors about these attitudes.
2) Imported versus local food. Much of the organic food sold in the UK is imported, despite the existence of local producers. I am eager to meet and get to know some local organic farmers as I join them in the fields. I hope to learn about how they perceive their role in society, and what values motivate them to grow food organically. Are these values centered on a desire to treat the land well? Does this desire spring from any religious convictions, or is organic farming simply an attractive niche market for small producers?
3) Christian and Neo-Pagan inspired earth-ethics. There are multiple organizations devoted to practically linking church congregations with locally and sustainably produced food. Few organizations like this exist in the United States, so I am very excited to work with the people in these organizations and to learn from them. The UK is also a site of sizeable growth in pre-Christian religions such as Wicca, and there are interesting interactions with environmental movements such as Deep Ecology and eco-feminism. I will get to know followers of these spiritualities at Findhorn Ecovillage, an open community of Neo-Pagans that practice sustainable agriculture. I have also been in correspondence with Laura Deacon of Christian Ecology Link and Reverend Stephen Cope of the Rural Theology Association; they have said they can connect me with farmers.

Zambia:
Here is a land bursting with agricultural promise, trembling with the awakening of this promise, and yet struggling tragically with chronic poverty, periodic famine, and the devastation of AIDS. There are three main aspects of Zambia that beckon my inquisition.
1) The burgeoning organic foods market. Intriguingly, there are currently two main large organic exporters that hire much cheap labor. I have been in touch with York Farm, one of these exporters, concerning my hopes to work there. Why do the hired laborers work for wages on a large farm instead working their own small fields? How do they relate to land they do not own? Additionally, though organic farms are generally perceived as small and local, these large organic farms export most of what they produce to the UK. How do these operations compare with smaller farms in the area that supply food to local markets? How do the values towards the land differ among the workers and owners of these two types of farms?
2) Christianity and traditional ethnic religions. Christianity is the most prevalent religion, but roughly 15% of the population practices traditional religions. What are the differences in how each group values the land?
3) Attitudes toward genetically modified organisms (GMOs). In 2002, in the midst of famine, the Zambian government rejected aid from the USA because the aid package included large amounts of GMO corn. The government remains resolved against GMO intrusion due to the potential jeopardy to Zambia’s organic exports and due to hopes that organic farming operations, which contribute a sizable portion of Zambia’s agricultural exports, might remain outside the corporate clutches of US agribusiness. The resistance was led largely by Jesuits who have been training farmers in sustainable practices for decades. What are the motivations of the Jesuits? How do farmers view these policies, and how do their religions influence their attitudes towards GMOs in agriculture? I have contacted Jesuit priest Roland Lessups at the Kasisi Agricultural Training Centre with my hopes to spend time with farmers who have been trained there.

New Zealand:
Generally considered a Mecca of alternative agriculture, New Zealand contains 896 farms in the Willing Workers on Organic Farms program. Each of these farms welcome workers by exchanging room and board for labor, so it will be easy for me to find farms on which to work. My desire to travel in New Zealand stems from a long-held personal desire and from several specific reasons that concern my project.
1) Maori spiritual connections with the land. This intimacy with the land through indigenous nature-deities has been described as umbilical. The Maori have been forced into peasant agriculture instead of their historic hunter-gatherer lifestyle. How have they have applied the values of a religion from a hunter-gatherer society to their farming methods, especially since the New Zealand government has been eager to develop Maori lands in recent years?
2) Christianity in a very eco-aware society. I am curious to see whether Christianity operates as a source or a sink of land-loving values in such a society. Additionally, many farmers profess atheism or agnosticism, and I am looking forward to working with these folks and gaining some understanding of how they generate their values.

Sri Lanka:
Two central symbols of Singalese national identity are the rice paddy and the Buddhist temple. These symbols are fueled by a nationalist vision of pure, eternal, rural Buddhism, but are complicated by the fact that shrines to local deities surround Buddhist temples and other crops surround traditional rice paddies. This discrepancy between symbolism and reality is especially germane because of political tensions in Sri Lanka. I want to know how rice farmers live as a symbol in a culture that is rife with symbology.
1) Modern agricultural technologies and growing environmental problems. With a growing population that remains largely in poverty, there is much pressure on farmers to increase production through technology and by putting marginal lands into production, while specializing for export markets. How are rice paddy technologies such as fertilizers, insecticides, and modern seed varieties perceived? How do religious values affect these perceptions, and how do new technologies influence rituals that contain traditional farm wisdom and cultural identity? Is there a link between changes in religious rituals and environmental problems? I have been referred to the farmer G.K. Upawansa, who promotes traditional organic farming, and my exchange with him has been very exciting around these matters. Sandun Thudugala at the Movement for Land and Agricultural Reform has also assured me that they are able and happy to connect me with farmers.
2) Buddhism in a spiritually complex land where Christianity has had little influence. How do Buddhism and the abundant deities surrounding it in Sri Lanka shape the attitudes toward the land? What is the promise for a land-ethic in the annual religious harvest celebrations? What about in the wealth of sorcery, demons, spirits, local deities, auspiciousness, nature-divas, omens, and charms that compose the spiritual landscape? I am eager to learn from families navigating this landscape as they make farming choices.

This itinerary excites me to no end. The best part will surely be learning from friends made in the farm fields. Each country has different crops and livestock that I have not described in detail here, but I am very interested to learn. I am working on aligning my dates of travel to coincide with harvest season in each place. I plan to document my experiences with journaling and photography. Upon my return, I hope to draw heavily on my work in foreign farm fields to write a series of essays on global agricultural issues.

Skills and Challenges
I do not believe it will be a challenge to find farms at which to work. I have contacted organizations in each country that work with farmers, and I have found people that are helping me find farms. Additionally, I predict that farms will almost always take a friendly helping hand whom they do not have to pay. Language will not be a problem in the United Kingdom, Zambia, or New Zealand. In Sri Lanka, English is a common but not universal language; the director of the Murugan Bhakti (Living Heritage) Network assured me that there are farmers who speak English well and are happy to host foreigners who want to learn. Despite this, I plan to spend the greatest amount of time in Sri Lanka so as to learn some Sinhala, and because I want to spend the entire growing season there. The last main challenge that I can anticipate is that of general cultural assimilation. Though I have not lived in a foreign culture, I believe that I can adjust and look forward to the challenge. I travel alone often, and I am the sort of affable guy who strikes up conversations in airports. I am also an avid athlete and competent musician, so I am enthusiastic to get to know people across cultural barriers through these universal enjoyments. Most essentially, I love farm work, and I know I will connect with people in laboring with them.

The skills I have gained studying religion at Swarthmore will be essential to this project. My courses have provided the tools to interpret (not to categorize) the purposes, aims, and origins of diverse religions. It is vital that I be able shed preconceived notions and judgments so that I may fully experience and understand the generative power of religious rituals and principles to yield values that motivate farming practices. The Swarthmore Religion Department consistently studies each religion on its own terms, so I am well trained and personally committed to approaching each religion with humility and respect for the sincerity of expression that it embodies, without romanticizing, patronizing, or changing it.

Conclusion
The chance to dive into the dirt with farmers across the globe, to engage in soulful expressions with these farmers, and to intimately encounter the kind of kinship that perhaps only the farm field can foster: this is my dream. Why do all this? First, I am fulfilled in farming. More broadly, my very personal goal is to help Christians see how their religion might lead them towards earth-care. I believe that if I can understand how other religions inspire values that chart earth-ethics, I can help Christians grow ethically earthwards. Given its inestimable influence in this nation, it is imperative that Christianity contribute to sparking change, especially in practicing sustainable farming. These are knotty issues with no simple solution, but if our society is to positively change, our religions must play a key part in renovating our values. Realizing my dream – to live with farmers in their fields and faiths – will enable me to be a part of this imperative process.