News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
I spent a couple of days last week with high school and college teachers (and some people from the "real world") talking about how we might educate humans in a context where we and our students have powerful AI tools at our fingertips. If all goes well, these conversations will blossom into a book in the next year or two.
- In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about work, friendship, and literacy.
- Brandon McNeice defends the goods of child labor--with some key qualifications: "The claim is simple: when it is local, supervised, age-appropriate, and limited, children’s work helps form responsible adults. Somewhere along the way we let the worst abuses of industrial child labor define the whole idea of kids working. We mistook the sweatshop for the shop. The first deserves prohibition; the second deserves protection."
- Emily Harrison warns against the lasting harms caused by viewing violence and murder in our social media feeds: "When will we confront the reality that terrible things can be etched into our memories in milliseconds?"
- Ian Hearn describes how he came to feel at home in a new and strange place: "Belonging cannot be immediately grasped, but it must be chosen little by little."
- Joseph Hudson visits the Kirk memorial in the Illinois town where he and Kirk both grew up: "I pray Charlie’s old neighbors will keep the flags flying, the campus debates respectful, and their doors open to all visitors."
- Kelsey Peterson muses on the goods of flawed, human writing: "Although my cold, Luddite heart cannot find much to celebrate about AI, this is perhaps the one debt of gratitude I owe to it thus far: that it’s clarified what writing is, and that writing is for humans."
- John Murdock talks with Bill McKibben for the Brass Spittoon podcast about why Bill is feeling more cheerful these days.
- Michial Farmer listens to songs about solidarity--that bastion of Catholic social teaching--this week.
David R. Montgomery’s Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations is an excellent book, and I’m not sure why it’s taken me this long to read it. It’s not the book on soil biology that I’d like to read but that, as far as I know, doesn’t exist. What it is, though, is a survey of how cultures have treated their dirt and how soil erosion (or conservation) has contributed to their fall (or sustenance). Montgomery’s concluding chapters about the possibilities of agricultural practices that view the soil as a biological ecosystem rather than a bucket for various chemicals is particularly encouraging. But on a more dour note, here he is describing the views of Milton Whitney, one of the early advocates for imagining dirt in terms of its chemical composition:
In effect, Whitney conceived of the soil as a machine that required tuning in order to sustain high crop yields. He thought that American farmers’ destructive habit of ignoring the particular type of soil in their fields reflected the fact that they didn’t stay on their land very long. In 1910 more than half of America’s farmers had been on their land for less than five years, not long enough to get to know their dirt.
Here was where soil scientists could help. “The soil scientist has the same relation to the partnership between the man and the soil that . . . The chemist has to the steel or dye manufacturer.” Whitney literally considered soil a crop factory. “Each soil type is a distinct, organized entity—a factory, a machine—in which the parts must be kept fairly adjusted to do efficient work.” However, he was unimpressed with how American farmers ran the nation’s dirt factories. In Whitney’s view, new technologies and more intensive agrochemistry would define America’s future.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro