Eric Schwennesen - The American Frontier: Then and Now

I just got preempted by one Katy Keiffer in a periodical called The New Food Economy. I'd been putting together thoughts on the topic for a couple of weeks, and then "Who Really Owns American Farmland" popped up and she hit every point I wanted to make. It's a bit deflating, but she spells it out clearly and so I concede. Instead, I guess I'll look at the periphery which encompasses this highly-charged subject.

It's no secret that the historical home of America's frontier spirit lies in the rural West. It's been that way since the beginning, and those of us fortunate to have ties to it have felt that link in how we've tended to live our lives. The frontier spirit justifies semi-monastic tendencies: quiet, deep thinking, isolation, self-sufficiency, a strong preference for the reliable few over the frivolous many; in short, the polar opposite to the styles of life now celebrated in the hugely burgeoning urban ultra-metropolises of the world.

It's the usual pattern. The rare few, often refugees from an unbearable, crowded past, choose to explore the unknown and build for themselves a bearable, manageable future far removed. What we often do not see, though, is the calculating eyes watching from behind, waiting patiently as the myriad obstacles of wilderness are overcome, until it is no longer so wild or so threatening. By then the rude explorers are often spent or reduced to a more benign outlook as they survey the gains they have made for... for whom.?

Jinx Pyle describes in detail this period of Arizona history: the arrival of his forebears in the Mogollon and their determination to create a successful life out of a truly howling wilderness; the gradual arrival of a way of living that managed to rise and fall with the natural rhythms of fire and flood, drought and plenty, death and life and dignity. And then later, from behind, the following, rising human tide: speculation, cunning, money, crowds, investment; slowly, subtly changing the fabric of a simple existence into something far less simple. After a generation or two it was somehow less worthwhile fighting for; governments and agencies and neighbors insisted on constraints; the landscape lost some of its vitality, some of its natural promise. More people arrived to bask in the afterglow of a fading existence; prices began appearing on the priceless lands. At the time, few realized this would be the epitaph for the entire West.

Today it is clear that the future of what we knew as the frontier way of life, is mostly in the hands of the ultra-wealthy, in private foundations, in government fiefdoms and special-interest private clubs. These are not the hardy explorers who found their way to valuable existence; they are the profiteers now filling the popular magazines with spectacular, even obscene, prices for bits of a landscape they had no part in exploring.

 Schwennesen's words about the frontier spirit remind me of the book The Art of Not Being Governed by Yale University's James C. Scott and why many folks have escaped to the edges of civilization.

A short review in Foreign Affairs reads:

Scott has put rural and marginal people at the center of his previous studies, and here he offers a history of the estimated 100 million people who live in a vast hill and mountain zone that runs across southwest China, northeast India, and parts of five Southeast Asian countries. These populations fled into the hills over the course of two millennia, he argues, to avoid the imposition of slavery, indentured labor, and taxes by expanding states. There they evolved languages, economies, and ways of life designed to keep the state at bay. Outside of Asia, too, such fugitive populations define the "ungovernable" territories and "minority" or "tribal" identities usually thought of as exceptions to the norm. Scott often returns to the complex example of Myanmar (also called Burma) to explain how states mapped terrain, classified populations, and acquired resources as they expanded -- and to show how the Kachins, the Hmong, and others resisted. He believes that the uplanders' strategies of avoidance are approaching an endgame as new technologies give the modern state a longer reach. But the news from Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as from Myanmar, suggests that these ungoverned groups may hold out longer than Scott thinks.

Another reviewer writes:

...Scott’s provocative thesis is that the uplands communities of Southeast Asia (bearing the ethnic labels “Hmong,” “Karen,” “Kachin,” “Yao,” and many others) are for the most part descended not simply from lowland farmers (a now wellaccepted idea), but from people who fled the lowland state. Scott holds that the whole of the massif, stretching from northeastern India through southern China and much of mainland Southeast Asia, should be seen as one large “shatter zone”—a place to which one after another breakaway component of state-dominated society (but perhaps also many lone refugees) repaired in defense. Here, people who had reduced but not yet eliminated their vulnerability to state violence and parasitism reorganized every aspect of their lives—their material livelihoods, their social organization, their very cultures—so as to be forever inaccessible to the social force that had harmed them. Other state peripheries Scott offers in broad comparison include the “maroon” territories of highlands Jamaica and the steppes on which runaway Russian serfs became the peoples known as the Cossacks.
Scott’s argument that the massif’s communities had an antistate design is detailed. Most people, he notes, practiced (as they still do) a kind of “escape agriculture.” Shifting cultivation (swidden or “slash and burn” farming) presented a moving target, and enormous mixes of cultivars set up an impossible task for systematic taxation. Many of their crops matured quickly (thus were difficult to “catch” for assessment), could be harvested on a staggered schedule, or were grown underground (yams and cassava could even be left for a while, “hidden,” after maturation). If an aggressor thought to force changes on a hill community or perhaps to appropriate its labor, he would encounter “escape social structure”: neither specific lineages nor individuals had distinctly superior status (thus, there were no obvious persons who might serve as authority’s agents); moreover, the very idea of countenancing social and political hierarchy was often locally hateful...

Did our predecessors migrate to "settle" the West or to escape the stultifying social structure and governance of urban civilization? If the latter, it is apparent the Hmong and others developed more successful strategies than we in maintaining their freedom.