THE AMISH ANSWER

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Ultimately, no matter where the Amish draw their cultural lines, there will be places along the boundary that appear contradictory. The point, though, is drawing a line at all : using values to make cultural choices.

Reframe the same question from another point of view and this spiritual query becomes a very important environmental one: How do you control technology instead of having it control you? As Kentucky farmer-essayist Wendell Berry has written, "The Amish are the truest geniuses of technology, for they understand the necessity of limiting it, and they know how to limit it."

Mainstream American culture has never dared address the possibility of choosing between which new technologies will have positive environmental impacts and which won't. If someone invents it—from an electric hair dryer to the nuclear bomb—we use it. Occasionally, after a choice has already caused great damage, we ban or limit it (RIP, DDT). But have we ever shown the cultural foresight or courage to close the door on a possibility beforehand?

The Amish are thus not a backward, antiquated culture (as the thriving English tourist industries portray them) but a traditional-modern hybrid that is fully aware of the outside world and chooses carefully from its offerings. Amish children are not kept ignorant of the lures and luxuries of the outside world. Indeed, some teenage Amish experiment with driving, drinking and more. (Jonathan told me of some Amish boys who "like to sow their wild oats, then pray for a crop failure.") They then feel that they know enough of both worlds to, when mature, make their own choices. And not all of them remain Amish: for instance, only two of Hannah's six siblings had.

The archetypal example of the difference between Amish and mainstream American thinking is agriculture. Conventional farms are often chemical addicts, with soil that gets high (yields) on drugs (chemical fertilizers and pesticides). The agribusiness credo: Bigger is better. So what if topsoil erodes by the truckload? If ever-increasing water usage drains eons-old aquifers? If family farmers and farm communities become extinct?

Now, look at the Yoder farm. Amos uses four-year crop rotation on his fields; corn to oats to wheat to hay. This rotation provides rich soil fertility (no chemical fertilizers) and keeps down weeds (almost no herbicides) and harmful insects (no insecticides). Yoder, along with most of his farming neighbors, is thus, while not entirely organic, a low-chemical farmer. He has low expenses, too; he grows much of his own fuel—the hay and grain for his draft horses.

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