Introduction by John Baden, Chairman, FREE

In last week's FREE Insight Mary Roloff wrote of her family farm and the culture in which it is embedded.   "My grandfather ... carried a gun to protect himself from those that would do him harm, take what didn’t belong to them, hurt his family, or to kill animals for food or for self-defense.... That isn’t the reason most of these people don’t steal though. The reason is because they have a God who has taught them to love their neighbor, and they do." 

I introduced her column with this: "My rural culture was much the same, although in the Midwest, not Montana, and German not Irish.  I wonder, can those from an urban culture understand her perspective?"

Mary's Insight generated several comments regarding the diferences between rural and urban perspectives.  Here is one by Allen Johnson, head of Christians for the Mountains, an organization that fights mountain top removal coal mining in West Virginia.  The title is: "Confessions of a Backcountry Peace-loving Rural Environmentalist".   The keyword in his title is Rural.

One of Allen's urban friends called him a hypocrite for cutting trees Allen used to heat his house.   Here is Allen's response to urban fantasies about living in an environmentally responsible manner.    Although I no longer work in the wood and haven't for decades, I can't imagine living without a professional chainsaw.  In good hands it's a precision instrument.  In others a menace to all. 

Likewise with guns.  To some people 1911 is a near sacred number and John Moses Browning nearly a patron saint.   Guns and chain saws are hard to explain.  Culture matters.  A great deal.

Confessions of a Backcountry Peace-loving Rural Environmentalist, by Allen Johnson

The gun rack photo caught my eye. I had opened up Mary Roloff’s essay in a recent FREE Insight column, “My Guns and My God.” Her dad’s 3-gun rack looked like the 3-gun rack perched over our clothes dresser in our bedroom. For me, it’s a single shot 12 gauge shotgun, a scoped bolt action 30-06, and a semi-automatic .22. The rack is simple, cheap, handy.  And from what I’ve just said, millions of people would shake their heads and scold, “Just another gun nut.”

Gun Rack 1.jpg

Yet I’m so used to the rack of guns as a permanent fixture that I don’t even pay attention to it in the early morning as my bleary eyes pull out underwear from the dresser below, or when I read in bed before retiring at night. Sometimes years go by without one or the others of the guns being fired. Decades ago my wife and I had put the gun rack in our bedroom for safety reasons while we were raising our small children. A locked safe was beyond our means and space. And bullets have always been kept in other rooms. It is my deficiency that too often I neglect to clean and oil the guns and target practice to stay in form.

If asked I tell folks that I own guns but not weapons. We live in sparsely-populated rural farm country where houses, barns, sheds, and churches are often left unlocked. Cat burglars are not so foolhardy as to slip inside a rural house, for they know most folks have guns and know how to shoot. For us, our Shepherd and Labrador dogs bark when someone drives up our lane, although they are more apt to lick a stranger’s face than bite his ankles. Anyway, we feel safe here in our rural neighborhood. Yes, there is violence, but the violence is invariably related to personal quarrels gone badly, not to muggings or break-ins.

I believe the current conversation is important on why America has such a comparatively high rate of gun violence. Yet urban people often misunderstand why rural folks have guns. Living here in the country, we have tools. Tools are necessary in rural quarters for building, repairing, growing, raising, harvesting, and disposing.  Guns are tools, too. I shoot the occasional varmint that would swipe a chicken or munch our newly planted corn. During hunting season I might slip out of my house into our backwoods and shoot a deer for its lean, nutritious meat. I taught our sons how to shoot safely and with respect for nature (don’t shoot an animal without justification).

We live with nature and occasionally harvest or modify some of it.  Some of my Green friends don't understand the underlying ethical logic. Last month I whacked down a half-dozen large trees adjacent to my house to make space for a satellite receiver to receive an Internet signal from the southern sky. A city friend of mine, hearing about the chain-saw massacre, tweaked me for being a hypocrite. After all, I have a reputation or notoriety as an environmental advocate. How could I destroy such magnificent creatures for such frivolity?

Oh dear! Another gap in misunderstanding rural life! I work at home, and that work involves extensive communications including much research and running three websites. Our telephone company is the sole Internet provider in our area. It runs DSL on antiquated copper lines, and since I live in low density farm country, on economic justifications they will not upgrade the lines to fiber or pack in more relays. So I max out at 1 Mb/s download and 0.15 Mb/s upload. That is, from time to time.

 With its monopolistic hold in our territory, the company tends to oversubscribe by adding customers without increasing the broadband flow. The upshot is that the majority of time my download Internet speed [sic] is throttled back to 300 Kb/s or so. Having cajoled and pushed and written letters and attended meetings, I also know that an eager competitor willing to provide fiber with fast Internet service is being shut out through political maneuverings. Federal dollars were appropriated to the states to upgrade Internet service to deep rural pockets. Need I say anything more about state politics? 

So I found out about recent improvements in satellite Internet technology and decided to give it a go. But first I had to get a clear view of the sky at about 238° SW and 30° from the horizontal. When we had built our house 35 years ago, we had kept the hardwood trees on our south and western exposures to shade us during the summer while allowing sunlight in during the winter when the trees’ leaves were off. Here in the East, forest fire danger is minimal. We’ve never had or needed air conditioning.

To position the satellite dish, I had to cut a small swath of trees. Now I get 12 to 18 Mb/s download and 3 Mb/s upload, or about 20 times my former Internet speed. My city friend probably can choose from several local providers that can offer that speed at a considerably lower cost. But as we country people often say, “We’ll make do.” Despite rumors to the contrary, not everything about country living costs less.

For example, we pay a lot less for our heating bill than most city folk. Maybe $500 a year, and that is here in higher mountains where we have a lot of snow, cold weather, and a long winter. Sounds low? Like many of my neighbors we heat with an outdoor wood furnace. I buy a load of logs (the $500).  I spend many long hours cutting, splitting, and stacking wood. For example, the wood from the trees in the aforementioned chain-saw massacre is headed for our home heating.

Typically during the heating season I load wood early in the morning, later in the afternoon, and then at night before retiring for bed. And finally I have that ol’ nasty chain saw that I’ve got to keep in running condition. So if I figure out my “sweat equity,” maybe a higher heating-related electric or gas bill isn’t all that different. But then, my neighborhood is simply a swath of farms in the midst of a massive forest. Trees here are an abundant, renewable source of energy. Our several acres adjoin the Monongahela National forest. My wife, an avid gardener, often pressures a reluctant me to cut down more of our own trees to reduce shade on our gardens. And we raise a lot of our own vegetables, eggs, and meat, as well as trade and buy from other neighbors. Again, a lot of sweat equity along with some tools. We love country living but realize it isn’t for everyone.

I’m not worried about whether I measure up to someone else’s standard of an environmentalist. “You crossed the line, Allen, you’re expelled from the fold.” Personally, I don’t particularly like the term “environmentalist” anyway, being baggage-heavy. For one thing, all of us can and must use and manipulate the environment. Ethical questions include whether our use incurs permanent degradation. But a second point is about “an environmentalist” having to prove his or her integrity with some sort of pseudo-purity.

I’m really glad for my chain saw!!! I can look outside my window and see a pile of logs to cut and split for our winter’s heat. Were I an environmental purist, I might sit home all winter in a cold house. A house, I suppose, that shouldn’t have any wood in its structure… 

Allen R. Johnson is the coordinator and co-founder of Christians For The Mountains (CFTM), an initiative to summon Christians to act responsibly to God’s creation.