Wes Jackson: How to Respect One’s Tools

“I’m Robert Jensen. I’ll be your guide into the restless and relentless mind of Wes Jackson. I first bumped into Wes’ work more than three decades ago, and his ideas have had a profound influence on my thinking about society and ecology.”

Robert Jensen was joined by Wes Jackson as Mr. Jackson reflects on his life and career, with his new book Hogs Are Up: Stories of the Land, with Digressions scheduled to be published in March. Widely recognized as a leader in the sustainable agriculture movement, Mr. Jackson is a biologist and author who co-founded The Land Institute, a Kansas-based research organization dedicated to furthering sustainable agricultural practices. He previously served as a professor at Kansas Wesleyan University and at California State University, Sacramento, where he established the school’s environmental studies program. During the interview, Mr. Jackson chronicles his four decades of work in the sustainable agriculture movement, his own various jobs as a young man, and this idea of caring for one’s tools. (The audio of the conversation can be accessed here.)

In this conversation, we’re going to focus on specific jobs you’ve had, Wes, and what you learned from them. I’ll start by remembering a teacher of mine, who once responded to a fellow student’s question about career planning by saying, “Listen, kid, you don’t need a career plan. You need a job. The career is the story you tell about all the jobs you’ve had once you get old.” So, with a certain skepticism in regard to talking about careers, let’s talk about the jobs you’ve held. You grew up on a farm, and you worked on farms and a ranch in the 1940s and 1950s. Did you ever want to be a farmer or a rancher yourself?

I thought ranch life—once I had spent time on that ranch in South Dakota near White River—was the good life. Lots of space, beautiful prairie—that seemed idyllic. Farming I liked well enough, especially if the scale was sufficiently small, and where I grew up in the Kansas River Valley near Topeka, the farming was small scale. I don’t know that I would like having to farm a square mile of wheat, or a square mile of corn, or a square mile of whatever. But farming is wonderful when you have lots of diversity with the crops and with the animals.