Ecopsychology in the Dust Bowl

I was talking with a friend who works on local fair trade—helping establish structures for greater availability of locally produced food and raising awareness of the importance of eating locally. He had been in Mexico, where the focus of most activism around food was on trying to preserve subsistence and small market farming in an economy that was driving people off the land at the rate of hundreds every week.

We agreed that the concerns are different in countries like Mexico, where this process is under way today, and the US, where the majority of people have already left farming and so many of us are that much further removed from direct connection with the land. Although family farms are still being foreclosed every day in this country, the last big eviction of people from the land was 70 years ago during the Dust Bowl, when several hundred thousand small landowners and tenant farmers were forced to leave their homes by banks and owners who decided to mechanize and by a long drought that made the land unproductive. At the time my friend and I had this conversation, I was reading Steinbeck’s masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath, a quasi-journalistic chronicle of that event.

As an English major back in the day, I read The Grapes of Wrath but certainly lacked the perspective I now have on how Steinbeck told the story. Back in American Lit classes, I noticed the political viewpoints he expressed, but I would never have identified ecopsychology in Steinbeck’s view of the world. This time through, I couldn’t help but see ecopsychology in the way the characters felt about their farms and the countryside, and how interwoven their lives were with the land.

Steinbeck’s mouthpiece for the spiritual sense of connection to the land (and for the political solution to the problems of the times) is former preacher Jim Casy, who “lost his faith” in the traditional sense as he watched the people forced to move and the communities decimated, the heartlessness of the banks and the money men beating down of the spirit of the people he had shepherded. When Grampa, the patriarch of the Joad clan, dies of a stroke the first day on the road from Oklahoma to California, Casy tries to help the family understand.

“It’s just the same thing,” Casy said. “Grampa an’ the old place, they was jus’ the same thing. Grampa didn’ die tonight. He died the minute you took ‘im off the place. He was that place, an’ he knowed it.”

And when they worry that if they’d only known he was dying, they could have done something to help him, Casy replies, “You couldn’ a done nothin’. Your way was fixed an’ Grampa didn’ have no part in it. He didn’ suffer none. Not after fust thing this mornin’. He’s just stayin’ with the lan’. He couldn’ leave it.”

A little before this scene, Casy gives the clearest articulation of the spiritual connection of people to the land. The family asks him to say grace over a final meal before they load up the truck and head for California. He tells them he can’t pray like a preacher anymore, but they insist. Normally a man of few words, this gives him the opportunity for a speech, putting together some thoughts he has had in recent days.

He begins by talking about Jesus going into the wilderness to think things over, and says he himself did the same thing.

"I ain't sayin' I'm like Jesus," the preacher went on. "But I got tired like Him, an’ I got mixed up like Him, an’ I went into the wilderness like Him, without no campin’ stuff. Nighttime I'd lay on my back an’ look up at the stars; morning I'd set an’ watch the sun come up; midday I'd look out from a hill at the rollin’ dry country; evenin’ I'd foller the sun down. Sometimes I'd pray like I always done. On’y I couldn' figure what I was prayin’ to or for. There was the hills an’ there was me, an’ we wasn't separate no more. We was one thing. An’ that one thing was holy.

And I got thinkin’, on’y it wasn't thinkin’, it was deeper down than thinkin’. I got thinkin’ how we was holy when we was one thing, an’ mankin’ was holy when it was one thing. An’ it on’y got unholy when one mis’able little fella got the bit in his teeth and run off his own way, kickin’ and draggin’ and fightin’. Fella like that bust the holiness. But when they're all workin’ together, not one fella for another fella, but one fella kind of harnessed to the whole shebang -- that's right, that's holy. And then I got thinkin’ I don't even know what I mean by holy." He paused, but the bowed heads stayed down, for they had been trained like dogs to rise at the "amen" signal. "I can't say no grace like I use’ ta say. I'm glad of the holiness of breakfast. I'm glad there's love here. That's all."

Steinbeck’s idea of the politics that goes with this sense of “everything is one thing, and it’s all holy” is probably obvious from this second part of the quote. For next time.