Yesterday I rode my brother’s old bike over country roads to the farmhouse where I grew up near Shippensburg, Pennsylvania. The rolling hills and Appalachian ridges were splendidly sunbathed in unusually dry and clear air. Over the years, Amish families have bought many of the farms along these roads. A tranquility has descended upon this part of the country because the Amish do not use gasoline-powered machinery. Amidst all the hand-wringing about climate change, this good folk consume the least natural resources and emit the fewest toxins into our air and water. They have never driven a car or flown in a jet-fueled aircraft. While the global warming experts officiously fly to and fro between important international conferences, luxuriate in carbon-consuming hotels, and pump position papers into the environment, the Amish quietly till the land with horse and human muscle. The Amish are, if you will permit me, the true “experts” in climate change. They know how to live with less and respect mother earth.
The one room schoolhouse across the fields from where I grew up So the country roads in rural Pennsylvania are exceptionally peaceful. On a three-mile stretch I passed only one boy in a straw hat (no synthetic fibers for them!), quietly pedaling his bike. We waved at each other, the only humans within shouting distance under the wide blue sky. People are more friendly on bikes than in cars. I came upon a farmyard where a young father was leading a prancing horse in one hand and a tottering foal in the other. A little boy leapt excitedly beside the foal, with the family dog running along for the sheer joy of it. Two girls in ankle-length calicoes bolted from the house to catch up with the parade, sunbonnets flapping behind their flaxen hair. I waved to the father, who nodded gaily from under his straw hat, as both his hands were occupied with equine attentions.
An Amish farm with calico dresses drying in the wind My older brother, whose old bike I borrowed, is not Amish. But he works quietly to feed his family, spending only what he needs of this old earth’s bounty. When he and his wife came out to visit me in California a few years ago, it was their first ride in a jet plane. It was in a jet plane that I watched part of Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth. I gave up halfway through because, while Al Gore made some good points about our consumption of petrochemicals, he did so by using vast amounts of petrochemicals. In every other scene he was boarding a personal jet or riding a snow cat through Antarctica. The inconvenient truth, it seems to me, is that those who shout loudest about climate change are also offenders.
I think we can learn a lot from simple people. The Amish are a small community of Christians that few notice, but I think they, and people like them, will inherit the earth.
I think we can learn a lot from simple people. The Amish are a small community of Christians that few notice, but I think they, and people like them, will inherit the earth.
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