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Agriculture
The Meek
“A tough row to hoe” is not a casual metaphor if you’ve actually done it. Unless you’ve picked cotton. My mother picked cotton as a child. For her, hoeing a garden was leisure compared to pulling the heavy sacks and slicing her hands to ribbons on the sharp, dry husks of the cotton boles.
June 1994The Neugents
In the tobacco country of rural North Carolina, David M. Spear has photographed a family of plain-living people, and the beauty of his vision is startling. An old woman preparing to shampoo loosens her long, white hair; it floats, diaphanous, over a bowl of water. A man lying in bed gazes out a grimy window, his weathered, pensive face illuminated by sunlight.
June 1994Great Man Going
In the unfamiliar role of prey, we’ve come to recognize our own demise in the destruction of the environment. In the lifelessness we’ve projected on all other matter, we’ve come to see our own lifelessness.
January 1994My Study On Stay-Puts
You can do your studies on us migratory types all you want. My sister Rose came home from school last year saying that’s what you stay-puts call us. I told her you’re probably the same guys yelling White trash bastards go home when we drive through Salem. She says, no, you wouldn’t yell at us.
December 1992Defending What You Love
An Interview With Edward Abbey
But still, when all other means fail, we are morally justified — not merely justified, but morally obligated — to defend that which we love by whatever means are available. If my family, my life, my children were attacked, I wouldn’t hesitate to use violence to defend them. By the same principle, if land I love is being violated, raped, plundered, murdered, and all political means to save it have failed, I feel that sabotage is morally justifiable.
August 1990
