Staying home as a necessity and a right
by Rebecca Solnit, Orion Magazine.
We are going to have to stay home a lot more in the future. For us that’s about giving things up. But the situation looks quite different from the other side of all our divides. The indigenous central Mexicans who are driven by poverty to migrate have begun to insist that among the human rights that matter is the right to stay home. So reports David Bacon, who through photographs and words has become one of the great chroniclers of the plight of migrant labor in our time. “Today the right to travel to seek work is a matter of survival,” he writes. “But this June in Juxtlahuaca, in the heart of Oaxaca’s Mixteca region, dozens of farmers left their fields, and women weavers their looms, to talk about another right, the right to stay home. . . . In Spanish, Mixteco, and Triqui, people repeated one phrase over and over: the derecho de no migrar—the right to not migrate. Asserting this right challenges not just inequality and exploitation facing migrants, but the very reasons why people have to migrate to begin with.” Seldom mentioned in all the furor over undocumented immigrants in this country is the fact that most of these indigenous and mestizo people would be quite happy not to emigrate if they could earn a decent living at home; many of them are just working until they earn enough to lay the foundations for a decent life in their place of origin, or to support the rest of a family that remains behind.
Cheap food is one of the problems, with agricultural corporations undermining the very foundation of local communities. Cheap, energy intensive, food imports destroy local markets, forcing farmers into bankruptcy and emigration, while monoculture transgenic seeds, which need expensive fertilisers and pesticides, and have to be bought each year from the agricultural corporations hammers another nail into the lid of of the coffin of local food production. The need for money, and the propaganda of the corporations, encourages small farmers to plant cash crops for export, instead of subsistence crops for their own consumption, or a variety of crops for local markets, and the debt that is necessary to do so.
Everything is set up to undermine local economies, and transfer ownership and control of land and the world’s food supply into the hands of fewer and fewer corporations (and hence people). Throughout the world, small farmers and local agriculture has suffered under globalism. This is a problem that needs to be addressed, and local farming diversity needs support.
From outer space, the privileged of this world must look like ants in an anthill that’s been stirred with a stick: everyone constantly rushing around in cars and planes for work and pleasure, for meetings, jobs, conferences, vacations, and more. This is bad for the planet, but it’s not so good for us either. Most of the people I know regard with bemusement or even chagrin the harried, scattered lives they lead. Last summer I found myself having the same conversation with many different people, about our craving for a life with daily rites; with a sense of time like a well-appointed landscape with its landmarks and harmonies; and with a sense of measure and proportion, as opposed to a formless and unending scramble to go places and get things and do more. I think of my mother’s lower-middle-class childhood vacations, which consisted of going to a lake somewhere not far from Queens and sitting still for a few weeks—a lot different from jetting off to heli-ski in the great unknown and all the other models of hectic and exotic travel urged upon us now.
For the privileged, the pleasure of staying home means being reunited with, or finally getting to know, or finally settling down to make the beloved place that home can and should be, and it means getting out of the limbo of nowheres that transnational corporate products and their natural habitats—malls, chains, airports, asphalt wastelands—occupy. It means reclaiming home as a rhythmic, coherent kind of time. Which seems to be what Bacon’s Oaxacans want as well, although their version of being uprooted and out of place is much grimmer than ours.
Cheap abundant oil has made our society transient. Few people have a connection with the land, and few feel like they belong. Housing in the west has become an investment, with the reality of a ‘healthy housing sector’ meaning that houses are bought and sold as a means to create wealth and income, instead of as real homes, places to be that generations share through the decades and centuries. Communing with a region or a piece of land is something that takes time, and many of us in the west have no time.
Will the world reorganize for the better? Will Oaxaca’s farmers get to stay home and practice their traditional agriculture and culture? Will we stay home and grow more of our own food with dignity, humanity, a little sweat off our own brows, and far fewer container ships and refrigerated trucks zooming across the planet? Will we recover a more stately, settled, secure way of living as the logic of ricocheting like free electrons withers in the shifting climate? Some of these changes must come out of the necessity to reduce carbon emissions, the unaffordability of endlessly moving people and things around. But some of it will have to come by choice. To choose it we will have to desire it—desire to stay home, own less, do less getting and spending, to see a richness that lies not in goods and powers but in the depth of connections. The Oaxacans are ahead of us in this regard. They know what is gained by staying home, and most of them have deeper roots in home to begin with. And they know what to do outside the global economy, how to return to a local realm that is extraordinarily rich in food and agriculture and culture.
The word radical comes from the Latin word for root. Perhaps the most radical thing you can do in our time is to start turning over the soil, loosening it up for the crops to settle in, and then stay home to tend them.
And be content in place, in symbiotic relationship with wildlife around you, watching the trees grow over the next 50 years!
