ECOLOGICAL COMMUNITIES:

Wes Jackson (The Land Institute):  Well, what happened to Matfield Green
is what has happened to the environment generally.  This place has been a
quarry to be mined.  It's all in the interest of that black hole we call
the economy. 

Narrator:  Several years ago, this small town in Chase County, Kansas,
attracted the interest of Wes Jackson, president of The Land Institute
near Salina.  Wes and some of his friends began to acquire and renovate
various buildings in Matfield Green, including a number of small houses,
an abandoned hardware store and lumberyard, and the local school, which
had closed in the 1970s.  He talks about the impact of what he calls the
extractive economy.

Jackson: What seems to me happened in the little places is that the
extractive economy effectively put suction pipes in each one of them that
drained the wealth to the distant cities.  There is more money that has
gone to Chicago and Kansas City from Matfield Green than has been
retained in Matfield Green. We should make clear that we're not here to
upgrade this community; rather we're here as a place to study ... some of
the dynamics of a community that has been a victim ... and a county that
has been a victim of the extractive economy. 

Narrator:  Rather than assessing the vitality of a community based upon
purely economic terms, alternative methods are being developed that take
long-term environmental costs and benefits into account.  An environmental
historian associated with The Land Institute, Brian Donahue has been
involved with the development of an approach called ecological community
accounting.

Brian Donahue (Environmental Historian): That's something that we haven't
completely pinned down, but my part in it has been to try to trace what
you might call the ecological economy of this area -- the town and its
surrounding rangeland and farmland over the century or so that white
people have been farming it ... to try to recreate those ecological
systems -- what was being farmed; what was being ranched; how were people
working; how did the small tenant farms relate to the larger ranch
operations in providing labor, in growi ng feed for the winter ... just
try to describe the system ecologically.  And I guess the question we're
trying to ask here is just to describe that story and to ask whether these
different periods were ecologically sustainable or what that means; how on
e led to the next; and to look for ways that more people could live in
places like this in ways that were ecologically sustainable but had more
neighbors. 

Jackson:  Here's the problem as I see it -- if you take Lawrence, Kansas
-- the University of Kansas attracts a lot of folk and Lawrence is an
attractive place; so is Boulder; so is Santa Fe, New Mexico.  But these
are all donuts ...  you'll have good co ffee and foreign films and cheese
that you've never heard of before and intelligent conversation ... what
you might call the accouterments of civilization are flourishing , but
they are not an example for Matfield Green. They are not examples for
Protecti on, Kansas.  Those places -- some would call them holes.  

Well, I happen to think the hole is more important than the donut ...
because in the long run here are the people that historically have held
civilization together; here are the places where the sunlight falls on
the fields that provides the food and fiber that makes civilization go. 

Narrator:  The people from The Land Institute who've come here are quick
to point out that they're not here to carry out any sort of community
development projects.  The director of program development, Emily Hunter
explains their view of the community.

Emily Hunter (The Land Institute at Matfield Green):  Well, community's an
interesting thing.  There's been a lot of talk about the fact that
Matfield doesn't have the population it once had; that there are a lot of
derelict old houses here and so forth ... and sort of The Land Institute's
job is to revitalize Matfield Green. 

But Matfield is a very vital community.  It's not as big as it once was,
but the people who are here had all the options that the 250 people who
left had.  But they chose to stay.  And they're very deeply rooted here,
an d they've found very ingenious ways to live in this place -- out of
deep affection ... and commitment to a way of life. 

Jackson:  So we thought this would be a pretty good place to begin at once
a physical and intellectual endeavour toward figuring out how through
community life we can say "no" to the extractive economy and "yes" to the
renewable economy and have the example right in front of us, rather than
have it as a mere abstraction. 

Narrator:  In hopes of stimulating thoughtful discussion of various ideas
about the ecological foundations of sustainable communities, The Land
Institute hosts occasional gatherings of creative thinkers.

Hunter:  We have what we call Matfield Greens, because they're not true
conferences in the sense of a lot of people convening.  Wes invites key
people to come to work hard for three or four days around a particular
topic, like ecological community accounting, for example. 

Narrator:  They're also planning a summer workshop for school teachers in
conjunction with Emporia State University.

Donahue:  And we're going to bring them here -- the plan is for a weeklong
workshop, to look at this place as a model -- of its geology, its ecology
its history.  So that then you have these different sources for
understanding what's happened in a place.  And it's just kind of a
wholistic way of looking at the place where you live and coming to
understand it.  And not so that kids just learn to praise their own
hometown, but so that they learn to look at it critically as well --
really open their ey es to how it got to be the way it is.  But definitely
learn that it has value. 

Hunter:  We talk about community and the loss of community with a lot of
sentimentality and nostalgia ... longing for something.  We use the
vocabulary of a past that's gone.  But I think we may never have had as a
species the community that we are moving towards and have to move towards
if we're going to survive as a species. 

Jackson: We're not gonna pull out of this nose-dive that we're in, which
is a whole world with an exploding population moving fast towards six
billion people and consuming the resources at the rate we're doing and
fouling up the world besides ... we're no t gonna do it by some kind of
exercise in mere human cleaverness.  That's not to say there's no place
for human cleaverness, but it's not going to be mere human cleaverness
that pulls us out of the nose-dive.  

And so this seems to me to be a place to begin a long ... a very long
program to work out what kind of a context would make it possible for us
to live a little more lightly on the planet ... not a little more; a lot
more. 

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		(Copyright 1997  KTWU/Channel 11,  Topeka, KS.)