Sustaining a Simple Life

In 2014, researcher John Eicher interviewed Marlin Miller as part of Royden Loewen’s ambitious and magisterial project to understand twentieth century Mennonite farm communities at “Seven Points on Earth.” Miller lives in Washington County, Iowa as a member of the Beachy Amish congregation, and he is a climate change denier. Such matters, he believes, are in “God’s hands.” Yet, towards the end of Loewen’s book based on this project, Miller also provides a clear pronouncement about the relationship between religious faith, life as a farmer, and what it means to be sustainable. According to Miller, “whether you’re Amish, Mennonite, or whatever, or even non-believers,” farmers “should care for the land as if it was God’s. Leave it better than it was when we got hold of it” (224). Indeed, as Loewen argues, the Mennonite farmers from around the world featured in his study “aimed to farm sustainably” (13). Throughout the twentieth century, to farm sustainably has been the approach Mennonites have taken to survive global forces they could not control, particularly “the arrival of modern agriculture and its remaking of community and environment” (2). In this sense, then, Loewen’s book explores not only the colossal pressures to change experienced by farmers in seven countries, but simultaneously the impact of those changes on what it has meant to be Mennonite. But that’s only the half of it, because as Loewen demonstrates, to farm sustainably is an active, conscious, and deliberate effort on the part of Mennonites to resist global-scale processes that have worked to homogenize agriculture by practicing their faith in particularly local forms of farm life. By asking what makes for a sustainable farm life, Loewen explores key tenets of Mennonite life. And by asking what makes for a sustainable Mennonite life, he considers the central features of farm life. Frustratingly, for a book with sustainability in the title, Loewen does not provide a definition of the term, and only comes to what he thinks it means to farm sustainably in the last two pages. Like many before him, Loewen points out that “Sustainability is, of course, a complex term [emphasis in original]” (268). The very next sentence provides a critical framing for the book. Regarding agriculture, Loewen writes that sustainability “can mean an environment’s ability to sustain life, a system of production that seeks equitable relationships, and a religiously ordered community’s link to a common life-giving spirituality.” Throughout the book, Loewen suggests that the most sustainable features of Mennonite farming equate with “a simple way of life,” which serves as a heuristic term to articulate his focus on how the identity of the Mennonite farmer has changed over time and from place to place. Indeed, a simple life is a central tenet of Mennonite faith, along with nonviolence, communitarianism, and humility. Taken together, Loewen insists, these tenets “marked the very cultural requirements for a truly sustainable rural life” (6). The trouble is that there is no such thing as a truly sustainable rural life, nor any sustainable life for that matter. As I have written in my own work on sustainability and rural identity, sustainability is always a process, never a condition. It is the potential to maintain an identity and a way of life. And it is always comparative; “nothing is completely sustainable, only more or less sustainable.” For Loewen, the focus on living a simple life attains analytical power, because it reflects the malleability of the Mennonite farmer identity, which communities adjusted to accommodate pressures of change beyond their control. It might be stating the obvious to point out that the Mennonite farmer identity is primarily …