 On a day in late July in 1846, a small even comic drama played out in the Massachusetts village of Concord, a 29-year-old failed school teacher and aspiring author by the name of Henry David Thoreau, had followed the example of an older friend by the name of Brompton Alcott and he had refused to pay his poll tax for the previous five or six years. The poll tax was a tax on every voter in the state of Massachusetts and it was exactly a buck and a half every year so it wasn't very much. Thoreau had never voted and he never would vote. He viewed that as a badge of honor but he didn't pay the poll tax for that reason. It's not on the grounds that he didn't feel like he was using this service or opportunity and he didn't want to pay for something he wasn't doing. On the contrary, he refused to pay because he believed that he had to withhold his money from the state of Massachusetts because he believed that the government of the state was complicit with slavery in the American South. Thoreau was currently living in his now famous cabin by Walden Pond and he came to town to get a shoe repaired. Sam Staples, who was a friend of his, was also the constable in town and Sam was responsible for paying all of the taxes that he was supposed to gather. He was personally responsible for the money that was then paid to the state of Massachusetts so if he didn't gather the taxes he had to pay out of his own pocket. So Staples, as the constable, approached Thoreau and he asked him if he could pay his tax and he said if you don't have money I'll pay it for you. He offered apparently to pay his tax for him. That just made Henry mad and Thoreau got up in his face and he said I'm not paying on principle. I'm not paying because I don't have money. I'm not paying because it's wrong to pay this tax. Staples was taken back by this. Here he was being a friend trying to help his buddy out and so Staples says if you don't pay I'm going to throw you in jail, which he's not allowed to do by the way. All he's allowed to do is confiscate a dollar and a half worth of property from Thoreau. They're mad. They're poking each other and so I'm going to throw you in jail and Henry says go ahead throw me in jail and at that point he had to. So I threw him in jail. He threw him in the county of jail in the middle of Concord. He had a cellmate who had been accused of burning a barn. An unknown person probably one of Thoreau's many aunts came down and paid the tax but by the time that word got out Staples' daughter went home and told him that the tax had been paid Staples had his boots off for the night. He was done. He said Henry's going to sit in jail tonight. I'll let him out in the morning. I'm not going out. He was mad. The next morning he goes down and Thoreau was still mad and he wouldn't leave. And so Staples had to kind of physically throw the guy out of jail. This is where Thoreau continued on his errand to the cobbler and then he makes another comment and I'm going to come back to this comment in a few moments. The other comment is that he then went on to a Huckleberry party and the Huckleberry party was a group of people who went to gather wild food up in the hill above the village. So two years after this event, this small little event between two friends and acquaintances, Staples turned out to be one of the last people to see Thoreau right before he died and said, you know, the small town stuff. So two years later in 1848, in response to what he claimed were inquiries by his neighbors, Thoreau lectured twice on this event at the Concord Lyceum. The following year in 1849, he published an essay based on these lectures under the title Resistance to Civil Government. The essay received next to no attention at all. We only know of one review in the People's Review in London. As far as we know, nobody paid any attention. Two more famous authors were in the volume that it appeared in, Hawthorne and Emerson. And they got a little more attention than Thoreau. Thoreau died in 62, 1862. And four years after that, his sister and a friend edited a series of Thoreau's, what they called his reform papers, his political papers. And the essay now appeared with a different title, Civil Disobedience. We don't know of Thoreau approved the change of title before he died, but there's no evidence to suggest that he did or that he ever, for that matter, used the phrase Civil Disobedience in his entire life. I know of no evidence that he did. There is reason to imagine, however, that his editors in the aftermath of the brutal Civil War thought that they wanted to tone down the essay a little bit, and the title Civil Disobedience was less belligerent than the title of Resistance to Civil Government. Regardless of why it happened, this change of title has been a source of confusion ever since. The original, after all, gives a significantly more militant tone to the project than the Civil Disobedience. Indeed, there's no reason at all to think that Thoreau wanted his disobedience to be civil in any way. And it was certainly not the case that he intended civil respect for the laws and the structure of American political institutions, the way that many people who practice Civil Disobedience today claim to. It's clear, however, that the essay that we now know of as Civil Disobedience is Thoreau's, what we might think of as his apology, in the sense of much like the text that Plato writes for Socrates, presenting Socrates before the court. It's his text in which he explains why he refused to pay his tax, his defense of the moral and political views that informed that decision, and his own spin on the arrest, and his brief imprisonment. Now, some of you are familiar with this essay, and some of you may not be, so I'd like to just briefly mention some of the arguments that it's best known for. First and probably most famously, we find a robust defense of individual conscience over all other claims to our moral attention. Quote, must a citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first and subjects afterwards. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law so much as for the right Thoreau rights. In Thoreau's view, we're mistaken if we think that we're obliged to respect and obey the Constitution and the civil laws when they conflict with our conscience. Indeed, in Thoreau's mind, the current American government, at both the federal and the state level in Massachusetts, are hopelessly corrupted by their support for and protection of slavery, as well as their support for and protection for the imperial war with Mexico that was motivated in Thoreau's view by slavery. Citizens, he claims, are disgraced by their association with the government. Our consciences, on the other hand, recognize higher moral laws and principles, and make clear to us the horrors of slavery. So, most famously, Thoreau defends the conscientious individual against all claims that were morally bound to respect and support a state that is seriously, perhaps fatally morally compromised by its entanglement with slavery or any other great evil. Now related to Thoreau's defense of individual conscience is an attack on all consequentialist forms of moral evaluation. For Thoreau, principle requires that we not consider the consequences of our behavior as a mitigating fact when we're evaluating an evil as great as the evil of slavery. He explicitly demands that we'd be willing to do what's right, consequences be damned. Principle, that is, demands that we'd be willing to lose our nation rather than compromise with and thereby legitimize the slave power. Quote, he's very clear about this, this people must cease to hold slaves and to make war on Mexico, though it costs them their existence as a people. And it's not only the American constitutional order that Thoreau attacks. He attacks democratic majoritarianism. He identifies it as a kind of insult to individual moral responsibility. He equates voting with a kind of gambling in which we give up our moral responsibility by weakly registering our preferences but then saying in effect, whatever the group decides is okay with me. So for Thoreau, our primary problem isn't that we don't know right from wrong. It's rather that we find ourselves compromising this knowledge for two significant reasons. First, we're simply confused about our obligations. We grant way too much respect to the government and to human law, he thinks. And second, we're corrupted by both our wealth and our cowardice. He insists that we must live so simply that we will not require the protection of the state or fear the state's threat to confiscate our property. He insists as well that we begin to have the courage and not only the knowledge of our convictions, the famous line, oh for a man who is a man and as my neighbor says, has a bone in his back that you cannot pass your hand through. Resistence to civil government, Thoreau suggests, is best achieved by withdrawing one's support from the government by simply refusing to be involved with it. Thoreau's resistance then takes the form of a moral renunciation and a refusal to politically engage unjust institutions. His demand is for us to stand outside both the slavery-based economic order and the political order that makes the slave economy possible. Quote, I do not hesitate to say that those who call themselves abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw their support both in person and property from the government of Massachusetts, end quote. By this Thoreau meant that we should not participate in political life, either by voting or by paying taxes and that we must arrange our lives so as to require no services from the government. Injustice requires a withdrawal from unjust institutions and the creation of a personal life that makes it to withdraw possible. While we might expect in a document first title resistance to civil government and secondly civil disobedience, we might expect to discover there in a political program for organizing and influencing politicians and future legislation. But what we find instead as a demand that we simply withdraw from political life altogether. This wasn't as odd in Thoreau's time and with his local audience as it might sound to us today. He was surrounded and conquered by a significant number of Christian anarchists and abolitionists who promoted a similar withdrawal from political life. But it's a curious fact that one of the most significant documents in the American protest tradition is a remarkably apolitical document as well. And in fact Thoreau's document has become a central text in the American political tradition. A couple of years ago my colleague, Alex Zecharis, with another scholar was invited to discuss civil disobedience on an NPR talk show and the host was so excited about Thoreau's essay that Alex and his colleague had to kind of talk her down a little bit from her claim that the essay may have been the most, maybe not the most but certainly one of the most important documents in human history. And it was pretty over the top and it was pretty fun to listen to Alex kind of tone her down a little bit. In truth it's a document that was widely ignored in the United States for the first hundred years of its life. Although Leo Tolstoy and Gandhi as well as a small handful of American radicals like Emma Goldman and Upton Sinclair were influenced by it. But it wasn't until Martin Luther King explained in a famous comment published in early 1960s that he'd been deeply influenced by civil disobedience. It was only then that Thoreau's essay became an iconic statement of American political protest and resistance. It became a central text for both the civil rights and the anti-war movements and it has become today a central text for elements of the environmental movement. Over the course of the past half century or so it has gone from obscurity to prominence in our political discourse. Now what I wanted to say a few words about this afternoon was what I wanted to address the issue of just what still speaks to us from this text written 167 years or published 167 years ago in Concord, Massachusetts. So let me begin by just saying a few words about what other people have thought about this text and how it's been interpreted by others. I break down the schools just for the sake of convenience into four basic interpretive schools. First is perhaps the most long lived of the interpretive schools and in fact probably the most fun to read. It is the school that thinks that Thoreau is just simply crazy. That he's incoherent, probably nuts. This has been a theme since Thoreau was alive. Some of you may have had the pleasure last fall of reading the most version of this general take on Thoreau in the deliciously nasty essay published in the New Yorker magazine by Katherine Schultz under the title Pond Scum. It's just a crazy article but it was great fun to read. Schultz takes Thoreau to task for many sins, moralism, narcissism, misanthropy and a general humorlessness which is the least convincing part of her argument. Thoreau was actually goofily silly in his writing. It's just that he's so goofy that we miss it a lot because he's a punster and he has a very quirky sense of humor. But reading Schultz last fall reminded me of reading Thomas Jefferson's 1814 letter to John Adams in which he confesses that a recent reading of Plato's Republic left him baffled. These are Jefferson's words. He says, while wading through the whimsies, the pluralities and unintelligible jargon of the work, I laid it down often to ask myself how could it have been that the world should so long have consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this? Schultz's view of Thoreau is very much the same as Jefferson's view of Plato. Many others have shared Schultz's view. Thoreau's contemporary James Russell Lowell declared in an essay published three years after Thoreau's death that Thoreau had quote not a healthy mind and he said he had no humor in that he was not a strong thinker but he was a sensitive feeler. A few years later Robert Louis Stevenson described Thoreau as a prig and a skulker so much for all those healthy walks through the countryside. He calls him a skulker. Stevenson changed his mind a little bit later when he discovered that Thoreau actually had suffered terribly in his life and that he had some virtues and admirable traits but nonetheless Stevenson's view reflects a more general attitude of a lot of readers of Thoreau that really his biography and only his biography can explain these weird books and texts that he has written. He is probably a damaged person, perhaps a very hateful person and possibly even a mentally ill person. There's some great Thoreauian stuff from the 60s on this issue. Given this very unfriendly perspective, this first interpretive school that I've identified, it's not surprising that people don't bother to assess Thoreau's work kind of in terms of internal to the work itself. These works are dismissed by this camp as the expression of an unhealthy or unbalanced mind more or less. Much of the literature of this sort is not specifically addressed to civil disobedience but consider in this light the views of Heinz Ulaou, one of the most trenchant Thoreau critics from the 60s. Ulaou writes, Thoreau's whole political philosophy was based on the theoretical premise of individual conscience as the only true criterion of what is politically right and just. The political world, however, is composed of many citizens with conscience as Ulaou observes. There's no assurance or any reasonable expectation in fact that these consciences will generate similar moral knowledge or commitments even remotely similar to one another among most conscientious democratic citizens. Thus, Ulaou believes that Thoreau's moral absolutism is foolish and naive and actually promises to produce impossibly incompatible demands by comparably self-righteous individuals in the real world. Thoreau insists that it's imperative to defend moral truth in actual political practice. Ulaou claims such an insistence generates a cacophony of incompatible understandings of the truth leaving us with no reasonable way of mediating between these different views. And the news is even worse than this. If there's no way to mediate political disputes among conscientious individuals, power and force will have to resolve these differences. What looks at first blush like a firm respect for individual rights and freedom and integrity perversely promotes a kind of intolerant political absolutism. Thoreau's political views for Ulaou and others are incoherent in the deepest sense. They profess the opposite of what they achieve. Now, there's a related argument, a second group of interpreters, that claims that Thoreau's views are fully coherent yet are nonetheless profoundly anti-democratic. That is, the second group of critics claims that Thoreau reached his anti-democratic positions honestly and self-consciously rather than through confusion or incoherence. This claim seems obvious to some readers of civil disobedience given that Thoreau is explicitly, as we've seen, very tough on voting and democratic decision making. Political theorist, Harry Jaffa, claims that Thoreau's individualism self-consciously drives him away from the democratic process altogether and leaves him simply railing against any and all political orders as equal threats to individual integrity. He's left isolated, alone, claiming the right to do as he sees best regardless of how his choices are viewed by others. Jaffa says that he wishes to live beyond restraint or above restraint, and Thoreau is left with no option other than to view the conscientious individual as superior to even the most democratic communities. Now, in contrast, those who paint Thoreau as an anti-democrat, either self-consciously or through confusion, is a generation of contemporary interpreters who try to rescue Thoreau from the kind of criticisms we've seen so far. They believe that Thoreau is actually engaged in a democratic project of the greatest importance. All admit that he is no systematic democratic theorist, but they also claim that he's deeply concerned in civil disobedience with a project at the heart of all serious democratic theory, and that is how to encourage the development of responsible citizens with the strength of character to resist injustice and majority tyranny. If it's true that democracies can at times make terrible mistakes, democratic citizens need to have the independence of mind and strength of character to speak out, and as Reverend King notes in his praise for civil disobedience to refuse cooperation with evil. Political theorist George K. Tebb has argued that the kind of independence we see in Thoreau and in Emerson and in Whitman promotes a valuable democratic individuality, he calls it. Jane Bennett, another political theorist, makes a similar argument, suggesting that civil disobedience is really about how we become citizens capable of disobedience when needed. Arguments of this sort view Thoreau as an important and responsible critic within the democratic camp and have become quite popular with the contemporary generation of readers of civil disobedience. I have myself participated in this strain of analysis from time to time. I'll admit however that at this point, as I was thinking about my remarks today, there's one more interpretive strain that I find in the secondary literature, and it's a strain that I find myself most provoked and challenged by. In order to explain this, let me admit that I have found the debates I've been explaining so far to be less and less important to what I think is the most important point. They seem to me to miss what is most important at the end of the day in Thoreau's essay, or at least the element that continues to resonate to me and to what I take to be our political condition today, or at least part of it. The ideas I keep coming back to aren't Thoreau's critique of utilitarianism, his critique of voting and majoritarianism, his demand for moral courage when faced with injustice, or his brief for individual conscience. Instead, I think the most important ongoing appeal of civil disobedience is actually represented by an obscure and usually overlooked comment that Thoreau makes at the end of the discussion of his arrest, which is right towards the end of the second third of the essay. This brings us back to the Huckleberry Party. This is the sentence. It goes like this. When I was let out of jail the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and having put on my mended shoe, I joined a Huckleberry Party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct, and in half an hour for the horses were soon tackled, we got to tackle on the horses, was in the midst of a Huckleberry field on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the state was nowhere to be seen. After his confrontation with the state, Thoreau retreats to the countryside with others whom he leads, he is the naturalist who knows where the berries are, to gather wild fruit. There are both literal and symbolic meanings to this comment, of course. Literally the village is out of sight, along with all the institutions of governance and economy that Thoreau objects to so stridently. He's in a space uncorrupted by slavery and selfishness, a place that's friendly, that's free, and represents a kind of natural abundance. Symbolically there's just a hint that such natural places produce a healthy, educative, liberating fruit. Huckleberries play that role in this text. In many other Thoreau texts, the wild apple plays the same role. The village of Concord makes Thoreau think of historically ancient and corrupt European institutions. The contrast with the Huckleberry field is the contrast between unjust conventional society and a free, just society, between custom and nature, with the former corrupt and the latter pure and free. The Huckleberry, a fruit freely given by nature, symbolizes this freedom. It's nourishing, it's both freely growing and free to gather. The group of people that gathers is also free. It's a purely spontaneous voluntary group which has leadership but no coercion. There are no jails or poll taxes or constables or slavery or imperial war among them. Now in this single sentence that nobody pays any attention to in civil disobedience, it seems to me that Thoreau lays the foundation for a tradition of environmental thinking that continues to flourish, even if only as a minority position within the environmental movement as a whole. I've distinguished elsewhere between what I call the pastoral and the progressive traditions of American environmentalism. The progressive grounded in the history of the progressive era in Teddy Roosevelt's and his allies' conservationism has blossomed into the modern concerns with sustainability, environmental management and public health. And this is by far the dominant political tradition of environmentalism, much less concerned with transforming American democracy than with effectively managing the natural resources and public health necessary to maintain it. The pastoral tradition with deep Jeffersonian roots finds its first genius in Thoreau and we find in this obscure comment from civil disobedience some of the guiding principles that would become his greatest book, Walden. Now I haven't sufficient time today to tease out this whole tradition but I do believe that it has grown and flourished as the more radical strain of American environmentalism than that found in conservation and resource management. It's represented more by the back to the land movements by the way we have the great historian of the black land movements with us today, Donna Brown. If you haven't read her book, it's your assignment. You should all read her fabulous book on these movements. The Thoreauian tradition is represented more by this tradition than it is by for example the EPA it seems to me. Thoreau's thesis in this obscure passage from civil disobedience as well as in Walden and other writings is that living closer to the natural world helps us focus on truly important parts of life rather than being seduced by wealth in the marketplace. It teaches a kind of modesty in our relationship with the rest of creation, a modesty that is sorely missing in modern industrial society. It helps us to promote the well-being of others by not requiring goods and status built on exploitation and injustice. These would be the consequence Thoreau believes of taking his advice in Walden to simplify, simplify, simplify. Living closer to nature or to what he calls wildness in his essay, his great essay, Walking can guide us in this simplification process and to an alternative local and neighborly democratic practice. Now we're in a position to understand what I identify as the fourth criticism and its final line of criticism of Thoreau's work and why I find this fourth line of argument the most poignant of all and most powerful of all and most disturbing of all. More than half a century ago one of the great American intellectual historians, Perry Miller, published an essay reflecting on what he called the responsibility of mind in a civilization of machines. As the world becomes increasingly mechanized and technologies come to drive society in such powerful ways, how are we to maintain control of our individual lives? Our economies and ways of life now come to seem much more given than chosen and the dynamism of our society seems outside our control. Miller reflects in the 1960s on those writers like Thoreau in the 19th century who distrusted and resisted the development of the machine. Those who rejected modern commercial and industrial life and hoped to cultivate instead a pastoral simplicity and self-sufficiency. In the time since Miller published his essay in 1961, countless readers have been drawn to Walden's vision of an alternative and less alienating, if less affluent economy to his promotion of what we might think of as an alternative neighborly community. Miller's judgment about this vision however is damning. Thoreau, he argues, was irrelevant in his own day given the overwhelming course of support for the machine in Jacksonian America and he and like-minded writers like Thoreau, quote, provide us today with no usable programs of resistance, end quote. Rejecting the modern age outright is simply not in the cards. The only grown up or realistic attitude is to consider ways of controlling rather than rejecting or avoiding what Miller is calling the machine and what we may simply call the modern world. From this perspective civil disobedience like Walden is best understood not as democratic or undemocratic, not as coherent or incoherent. It's best understood to be simply irrelevant. If Miller is right that Thoreau's recommendation was romantic and unrealistic in Jacksonian America, consider how much less connected to social and political reality it may be in the 21st century. What I'm suggesting is I suppose not very surprising in this sense. It's that Thoreau continues to claim our attention by being what we might call an environmental writer of a certain type. I don't think his contributions to more general categories of liberal and democratic theory, his use of the idea of consent for example or his theory of conscience, I don't think that his discussion of those things rise to the level that continue to profoundly teach and inform us. He was led in his own rebellions however to think about how our relationship to nature informs our relationship to other people and our own practices of freedom and independence. His personal rebellion led him to begin developing a set of claims that would inform what I am calling the pastoral tradition of American environmentalism. This tradition continues to, that Thoreau inspired, continues to speak to those who want to withdraw, which was Thoreau's instinct as well. Those who want to focus on personal and local reform as a task prior to engagement with broader currents of political and economic life. Consider as an example the work of Wendell Berry, our great contemporary conservationist, novelist, poet, essayist and farmer. Like Thoreau, Berry believes and these are his words, quote, that the great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power and wealth, end quote. Like Thoreau, he argues for an agrarian economic simplicity and independence and that we need to resist the most extreme versions of the enlightenment project of making nature conform to human will. In language that resonates with Thoreauvian themes, he writes quote, the problem that ought to concern us first is the fairly recent dismantling of our old understanding and acceptance of human limits. Berry has inherited from Thoreau and many others of course, a distrust of capitalism and market society and even to a greater degree of development than Thoreau, he promotes an agrarian vision of relative self-sufficiency. He explicitly suggests that we need to learn to live with less, that our freedom depends upon this and that without a return to economically productive, that is for Berry significantly self-sufficient households, we will lose our capacity for neighborliness and a strong commitment to place, to the health of both the natural and social worlds around us. Thoreau is often stridently individualistic, but he nonetheless gives us reason to believe that with proper care and commitment, we can build meaningful personal and collective lives slowly and carefully. He calls these collective lives neighborliness is the term he uses for it. Berry is a contemporary thinker and writer and farmer who has developed and promoted these ideas to great effect for well over half a century. In fact, we might think of Berry as one of the grand inspirations for the modern movement that we might also think most closely reflects or captures Thoreau's spirit and that is the local food movement. We currently have a small army of very smart, hard-working organic farmers out there building forms of agriculture well instructed by modern science, but committed to living more harmoniously and respectfully and carefully with land than does industrial agriculture. This movement is young and evolving but inspiring from a Thoreauian perspective nonetheless. Read Bill McKibbin's account of the local economy in his walk through the Champlain Valley and wandering home or read Kristen Kimball's lovely account of her and her husband's incredible farm on the other side of Lake Champlain right over there, 15 miles from here or so. The book is called The Dirty Life, which I think is a lovely title for a book about a farm. What Thoreau and his legacy has to teach us is less about direct political engagement than it is with personal and local reform with a long, slow building of the kind of lives that resists the wealth and comfort and temptations of power in the modern world. The hope is to cultivate a moderation to challenge the excesses of modern life. The faith is at such moderation is a necessary first step in freeing ourselves from institutions built on the kind of wealth requiring economic, political and ecological exploitation. The plan is to lay the foundations for a more restrained and locally grounded democratic society. Now I'm simply reporting this afternoon that I find much to love and admire in this vision. We might believe with modern Thoreauvians like Barry that this tradition has great promise for building enclaves of human decency and ecological decency, communities committed to political and environmental values at the human scale, communities that attempt to disengage from unjust institutions and relationships in the broader political universe and from the worst commercial and market pressures of modern consumerism. We might also believe that only with the cultivation of more moderate sensibilities in such communities is there any reason to hope for significant challenges to what are thought by people in this tradition of being the unpromising values and prejudices of the broader civilization. This Thoreauvian position has always been the minority and dissenting position in the broader American society, but the hope always remains even contrary to experience. The cultivating alternative models of humane living will keep some basic human democratic and environmental commitments alive in a world always pushing against them, drowning them out in the broader cacophony of conventional political, economic, religious and social life. For all my attraction to this tradition, I have real doubts about it as well. Among these doubts are the fear that Miller's critique from more than a half a century ago continues to resonate. It's stating the obvious to observe that global market society and modern technology are remarkably hard to resist. How long can thrifty organic farmers, for example, hold out against the advantages of Amazon Prime? It's also obvious that many of the challenges facing the global community simply overwhelm local human scale. Consider here a blog entry that my daughter-in-law provided for her and my son's farm this past summer. This was on July 26th at the height of the convention season. Well, maybe I'm done. No, not. She writes on her blog, we feel deep gratitude for every new crop, every new taste, every new harvest, but we're feeling pretty worn down and distracted by the news these days. And it's a big part of why I've been avoiding more regular updates about our seasonal bounty. It would be easy for us, safely nestled in our little isolated patch of land, in our little rural town, in our liberal little northern state, to lose touch with the terrifying, painful, unthinkable things happening in our country's political system and justice system. But we can't, and we won't, and we don't want to. So instead we find ourselves sitting around the dinner table reading the news late every evening after long, dusty, sweaty days of harvest and field work and asking each other, how can this be happening? Can he really do that? What happens next? What can we do? Now of course these questions aren't unique to local vegetable farmers, like my son and my daughter-in-law. I actually had exactly the same conversation with one of my colleagues. I discovered on exactly the same day. But it does suggest that those looking to the Therovian tradition as an antidote to the tribulations and injustices of the modern world will find themselves with incomplete tools and strategies. It's hard to see how more conventional politics and engagement with the globalized economy are to be avoided. A politics of withdrawal and the creation of alternative institutions was an incomplete politics in Therov's lifetime and it continues to be incomplete today. It's hard to know how to build the alternative sensibilities required to challenge these forces, however, without at least partial withdrawal. In Barry's, Wendell Barry's words, the sensibilities have to come from the margins. I'm deeply aware, by the way, that this is not a profound or original observation that I'm making, but it's a sobering and to me a sad one and one that I have not been able to get past, particularly in this kind of distressing and anxious political season that we're living through. And it's one which my study of Therov has continually brought me back to over the last couple of years. So thank you for your attention.