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July 2002
America in progress
IT was a strange sight.
I was walking with friends through a vegetable field when we suddenly
came upon a group of about a dozen people, sitting around a table. It
seemed like they were preparing a meal but when we asked, they said they
were making medicines – out of yarrow leaves and deer bile.
I'm describing something that happened just last week, and the place was
a town in California.
I was in the United States for meetings with the Public Health
Institute, but my hosts had arranged a rather interesting Sunday that
included a tour of Camp Joy, an organic farm out in the mountains of
Santa Cruz. It was in Camp Joy where our group "stumbled" upon
the medicine-makers.
My American readers are probably going, "Nothing new. What do you
expect? That's California."
Sure, but it is another side of America, even California, that we rarely
see. The America Filipinos know is a country of mega malls and mega
stars, of fast bucks and fast foods. It is a system that grew out of
America's experience with industrial capitalism. After all, it was the
Americans who perfected mass production, even developing a science of
time and motion studies to find ways to produce more goods in less time.
This economic ethos has spilled over into all facets of American life,
for example, in their fast-food joints with express service and jumbo
servings. On freeways (in California, at least), slowpokes should know
there's also a minimum speed limit. Even American compliments has always
been one of superlatives, everything being great, superb, super,
followed by several exclamation points!!!!
It's a system that has promoted efficiency and prosperity. But over the
years, Americans have come to recognize there are trade-offs too.
Affluence easily becomes excess. The mega servings of food have
produced, literally and figuratively, a heavyweight public health
problem.
The idea is simple: agriculture does not need to involve super-harvests
using pesticides and fertilizers. Organic agriculture is only part of an
emerging counter-culture that talks of slowing down consumption, of
considering recycling and renewal.
Again, some of you may scoff and say, oh, this organic thing is just a
holdover from the flower power and hippie era. Yet what actually struck
me on this last trip was not so much Camp Joy than the way so much of
the "hippie" counter-culture has become mainstreamed.
I spent time too with the Packard Foundation, which was set up by David
Packard, yes, the "P" in the HP brand of computers. The
Packard Foundation is one of the largest philanthropies today in the
world, supporting many causes, including environmental conservation, the
arts, humanities, public health, and family planning. Although it is a
foundation, it operates pretty much like a corporation, with a large
staff dispersed in several buildings in Silicon Valley.
Foundation staff talk about "values," but not in the
conservative sense of flag-waving and performed piety. They talk of
respect for the individual, of the need to be gracious, the need to dare
to think, and to think big. It's an interesting mixture reflecting the
American ethos, both the past and the present.
What's most important is that all this isn't just rhetoric. You don't
find posters in the office declaring the foundation's vision, mission,
goals like you do here in the Philippines, but you find the values are
lived out. The atmosphere in the office is egalitarian-no sir's, no
ma'ams, only an occasional "Boss" or "Bossing"
coming from Filipino staff, but said half in jest.
Again, you could argue that this is a non-profit organization and they
are an exception. But the day we went to Camp Joy we also visited the
Big Basin national park, where we had an impressive docent (guide) who
knew everything about redwoods, from their ages (some two or three
thousand years) to why they thrive in the Bay Area (they love fog). Even
learned how one of California's towns, Palo Alto, got its name:
Settlers, awed by the redwoods, gasped in Spanish, "What tall
trees!"
So, was Jonathan, the docent, a forest ranger? Nope. A botanist? Nope.
An environmental activist? Sort of. He does these tours as a public
service, on his free weekends. On weekdays, he has another life, working
with Adobe, the computer company.
Sarah Clark, who heads the population program at Packard, explained to
me that in California, people don't necessarily wake up and go to bed
with the same identity. You don't have to be Packard 24 hours a day,
seven days a week. The passion for your work you can transfer to a
passion for particular causes, like the redwoods, or organic gardening,
or doing a Website (www.bigbasin.org) for the park, as Jonathan does.
This is a side of America that seems almost strange because it isn't
about targets and deadlines and return-on-investment ratios.
Only in California? I don't think so. This counter-culture may actually
draw from an older ethos that accompanied the creation of America. It's
the spirit of settlers fleeing the Old World because of religious and
political persecution, one that emphasized individual freedom and
autonomy. Those values provided fertile ground for free enterprise. Yet
this individuality is in constant tension with notions, sacred for many
Americans, of fairness and equity, of giving people, and nature, a
fighting chance.
It's not easy figuring out all these faces of America, but then that's
what makes that country so fascinating. In trying to emulate the America
that is Disneyland and Hollywood and Balikatan, we miss out on the
America that is a work in progress.
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