byChrisWhite – 2025

I’ll Take My Land—and Keep My Mouth Full

I’ll warn you now, this ain’t one of my usual wandering essays about ancestral barns or the eternal mystery of gas station boiled peanuts. No, this one’s something else, something itchier and scratchier. Something splintered off from the country spine of me. It’s about the land. And about the South. And about the fine tradition of being described, by every overpriced coffee-drinker with a PhD and a Twitter account, that we’re too dumb to know what’s good for either.

You see, I live in Tennessee, what the media refers to as a red state. That makes me and everyone else who lives here, according to the clergy of à la carte subscription news and the neo-puritans of academia, somewhere between cousin-kissing swamp trash and the last surviving Confederate infantryman. My boots have a little mud on ‘em. My vocabulary contains the word “reckon.” I prefer barbecue to arugula. Therefore, I am deemed unfit to contribute to polite conversations about climate change, COVID, or anything requiring khaki pants.

And yet, yet—I am a simple county planner. Not a sexy title, I admit. I don’t give TED Talks or host climate roundtables in rooms with sleek Scandinavian furniture. What I do instead is write technical stuff. I write long-term land-use plans. Growth strategies. Zoning ordinances. Transportation plans. I sketch out the bones of future towns for a living, while half the country assumes I’m still drawing in the dirt with a stick.

Lately, I’ve found myself thinking a lot more about land, farms, rivers and permanence. The Duck River, to be exact, one of the most biologically rich rivers in the world, God bless it, and a drinking source for over a quarter million Tennesseans. I serve on a Planning Partnership now, thanks to the grace of our governor, and we’re trying, against all odds and outside interest, to keep that river drinkable, alive, and unmolested by the usual suspects, as well as viable for economic development, and functionally sustainable for existing wastewater systems. 

I’ll bet most of you hadn’t thought about that part. The part that requires water, not just for flushing, but for the part where new water is also required for waste treatment, before it can be treated and re-introduced into the river again. Yep, you need water for that too. But it’s not just the developers causing problems, it’s also the bureaucrats, the opportunists, the farmers (I hate to say it), and the environmentalists.

I like to read, and write, so naturally, this journey I’m on has led me back to an old book, I’ll Take My Stand, a 1930 collection of essays by twelve Southern writers who had the gall to question the religion of progress. It ain’t a book that gets much love in the faculty lounges these days. It commits the unforgivable sins of being Southern, rural, and suspicious of industry. And God forbid a modern reader should find value in a book written before 1960. The horror.

I read it anyway. I read it as a planner and as a farmer’s husband and as someone who thinks the land has a voice that doesn’t come from microphones or computer models. And I’ll be damned if I didn’t find something beautiful in it, something true. So naturally, I did what one does when truth is found in the wrong place, I got scolded.

You see, a freshly minted PhD ecocritic (yes, that’s a real job title, apparently) I won’t name, declared the book irredeemably racist. Not parts of it—all of it. And by extension, anyone who admits to finding it insightful is probably plotting to bring back segregation. These are not subtle critiques. They are not careful or intellectually curious. They are bludgeons wrapped in graduate thesis paper.

Now, let me be perfectly clear, because some readers squint real hard for scandal: racism is real. It has poisoned much of our past. Some of the Twelve Southerners were born into it, and like many of us, took way too long to recognize the rot of it. But Robert Penn Warren, one of the twelve, later wrote entire books against racism. That kind of moral evolution used to be called growth. Today, it’s called not enough.

What strikes me most about the whole affair—this business of cultural excommunication—is not the accusation itself, but the ritual purity of its accusers. There’s a sanctimony to it, a white-gloved righteousness that refuses to look in its own mirror. The ecocritic, much like the modern scientist who assures us that COVID wasn’t man-made in a Chinese lab, but came down on a sunbeam and climate change can be fixed with new taxes, stands on holy ground. And if you dare question the sermon, well, you’re a heretic. Or worse—one of those southerners.

It seems that in 2025, one cannot be both skeptical and moral. One cannot question the motives behind billion-dollar pandemics or climate crusades without being labeled ignorant, or dangerous, or hopelessly entangled in the orange shadow of Trump. Seventy percent of us here voted for him, which means, according to the consensus of NPR and several tightly wound professors, one-hundred percent of us need to be rehabilitated, reeducated, or bulldozed altogether.

You’ll forgive me if I don’t submit myself to that sort of liberal baptism. Despite the rumors, I can think for myself, without a party to attach to, can you? 

I got my agrarianism not from Robert Penn Warren or John Crowe Ransom but from the red dirt beneath my cowboy boots. I was born in its clay, married a woman who can birth calves and fix fences in the same afternoon, and I’ve spent more Saturdays than I care to admit hauling hay, fixing busted bush hogs, and trying to keep the coyotes off the edge of the field. My respect for the land wasn’t assigned by a curriculum. It was earned the long way.

And yet, when I read, I’ll Take My Stand, I found my thoughts echoed in its pages. Yes, it carries the shadows of its time. But racism is not its argument. Agrarianism is. And those principles: care for the soil, love of work, reverence for community—are not only defensible, they’re essential. Especially now.

The truth is, more Yankees and Californians are moving to Tennessee than ever before, and they’re coming not in spite of our values, but because of them. They want what we’ve preserved: slower rhythms, neighborly ties, land that hasn’t yet been buried beneath glass and steel and the promises of some think tank from Boston.

But no one on the university payroll wants to hear that.

They’ve forgotten—or maybe never knew—that Homer and Scripture both hold up shepherds as heroes, that the nobility of labor has long been the marrow of civilization. Instead, we’ve traded in the sowers of seed for sowers of policy, men and women whose hands have never turned a clod of dirt but whose mouths drip with climate wisdom.

Meanwhile, Tennessee has lost 1.5 million acres of farmland in two decades—237 acres a day. That’s not just soil. That’s history, identity, inheritance, and food security for everyone. Gone, in the name of jobs and tiny homes, which themselves will be gone once the subsidies dry up and the tax incentives are spent.

What we’ve got now is a “big picture” problem that nobody’s actually looking at. Because no one really sees the big picture, not in politics, not in science. What we get are small pictures, curated by whichever bureaucrat has the most grant money or media reach. And wouldn’t you know it? The small pictures that involve humility, patience, and actual stewardship never make it to the top of the pile of pictures.

But maybe—just maybe—that’s beginning to change. Our governor saw fit to elevate the Duck River, to put real attention and money behind its preservation and resources. That matters. It gives me hope that maybe us “ignorant racists” down here can surprise the lot of them, and do something beautiful.

A Theory of Everything but Common Sense

Now, I don’t mind admitting that sometimes I get a little tangled in thoughts that ain’t exactly county fair material. Call it a side effect of marrying a woman who owns cattle and having a granddaughter I’d fight angels over. Lately, I’ve been losing sleep over the future. Not in the anxious, stock-market-panicking, where’s-my-pension kind of way. More like, what sort of world are we dragging Joani Louise into while the smart folks in lab coats try to explain away God using algebra?

I came across this slim little tonic of a book called A World of Propensities, written by Karl Popper—now there’s a man who could hold his liquor and his logic. Popper had this funny old idea that the future is unwritten. That life, real life, has rough edges and can’t be boxed up into a flow chart. I read that, sitting on my wooden rocking chair with the foul scent of muck boots next to me, cut hay in my nose, and a busted weed eater at my feet, and I said out loud: “Well thank God somebody still remembers what it means to not know everything.”

We’ve been told for years now, by the same voices that sold us Y2K panic and genderless math, that the future is a thing we can model, predict, and buy insurance against. They hold their fancy degrees like crucifixes against the unknown, offering us salvation in the form of predictive algorithms and federal grants. But if you live long enough, and especially if you grow you’re your own corn, you’ll learn that “the future” is mostly a smug, well-funded lie. And its prophets have tenure.

Popper, to his credit, wasn’t trying to hustle anyone. He wrote in plain sentences, which is already an act of rebellion in the modern academy. He suggested—hold your hats—that maybe we can’t see everything coming. That maybe life is made up of “propensities”—little leanings and likely turns, but not certainties. That maybe, just maybe, the world is a living place full of squirrels who don’t know which way they’re gonna dart across the road until the car is upon them.

Now that’s a theory I can believe in. Because I have lived with squirrels. I have tried to outsmart them. And I have never, not once, successfully predicted their next move. Same goes for weather, children, and women named Kamala.

But, with everything, there’s the good and bad. Sometimes we take a good thing and take it too far. We might “project” by assuming that if new kids at school have increased at the rate of 5 percent a year for five years, it will increase by 5 percent next year and the next and the next, therefore we need to be building another school. Sometimes projections are useful, sometimes not. Finally, every projection will run into some absurdity, as Mark Twain demonstrated some time ago in Life on the Mississippi: 

“In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years, the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles… Any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three quarters long…”

Projection can become absurd, apparently when an unconsidered limit falls upon it from ambush. Projection moves toward certainty or “truth” by counting repetitions and by further processes of reasoning. Because the sun has come up on millions of mornings, we can confidently expect it in the morning; if the same experiment produces the same result an endless number of times, and the result to the extent of that assumption is true. But again, we have the limit-in-ambush: The sun is burning and so it will burn out, though we don’t know when. 

Popper’s argument is essentially this: machines can be predicted; living things cannot. Try telling that to Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, who in their book The Grand Design proclaimed that we are all just fancy meat robots, no soul, no free will, no mystery. Just twitching, predictable, heat-producing carcasses on a preordained cosmic conveyor belt. Their answer to the question of why we feel like we have free will was essentially: “We don’t. But let’s pretend we do anyway so we don’t lose our minds.”

How very scientific. Build an “effective theory” that no one actually believes but everyone agrees to pretend is real. That sounds more like Congress than cosmology. I’ve seen better logic on bar napkins.

Hawking and Mlodinow want us to believe that the universe created itself out of nothing. Nothing preceded something. Except something—called physical law—preceded nothing. Which would be… something.

“M-theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing. Their creation does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or god. Rather, these universes arise naturally from physical law.”

M-theory proposes, with religion, that nothing preceded creation, but also, more religiously, that nature and physical law preceded nothing. This clearly is a kind of faith, and a faith moreover that is here earnestly recommended by two scientists who are aggressively contemptuous of faith. 

They say this with the straight-faced arrogance of two men who’ve never had to explain to a five-year-old why it’s raining on their birthday. I don’t care how many PhDs are on the dust jacket, that’s not science. That’s mysticism dressed up in a lab coat.

And yet, these are the people who tell us the Duck River—our blessed, endangered Duck—can be saved by equations. That if we plug in enough variables and monitor enough flows, the water will behave, the fish will come back, the endangered muscles kept safe, and all will be made whole. But the Duck River, like every river worth its name, is more than H2O. It is memory. It is tension. It is miracle and error and sediment and life. And no model will ever capture it, no matter how many thermodynamic regressions you slap on top of it.

Back to Popper, who, I’d wager, would have liked the Duck River. He believed in emergence, in the idea that new things can show up in the world without being mechanically deduced from what came before. He believed in surprise. In mystery. In that old-fashioned thing called wonder, which has long since been bulldozed in favor of “deliverables.”

Now, don’t mistake me. I don’t hate science. I just don’t worship it. And I’ve seen what happens when you give priests too much power, whether they wear vestments or white coats. That’s what we did during COVID, handed the keys to the castle to men and women who couldn’t fix a lawnmower but swore they could fix the world.

We let them decide whose jobs were essential, whose businesses could die, and who could sing in church. All in the name of “the science,” which somehow always aligned perfectly with the politics of the people shouting the loudest. And when those of us down South asked simple, reasonable questions—Are you sure? Have you considered?—we were labeled ignorant, reckless, unworthy of inclusion in grown-up conversations.

Well, I’ll tell you what. I trust a farmer’s hunch more than a federal model. Because the farmer lives in the world he’s trying to understand. And because the consequences of being wrong fall squarely on his own land.

Popper understood that. His book reads like a love letter to living things. It suggests—radically—that our world is not a closed circuit but an open song. That history is not a code being deciphered by the most expensive computer in Switzerland, but a story, told in fits and starts, by people and plants and wind and water and blood.

I believe the future belongs to those who plant trees and mend fences and know the names of their neighbor’s cows. Not to the ones who think a “theory of everything” is worth having, much less believing. Because once you know everything, you’ve killed surprise. And surprise, friends, is just another name for grace.

Now, I’ll stop here before I wander too far into the third section of this sermon. But if you’re still with me, still curious, still open to the radical possibility that maybe the world is richer and wilder than a spreadsheet can hold, then bless you. And bless Joani Louise White, waking up in Bell Buckle this morning. I want her to grow up in a world where she doesn’t have to fake certainty to get published.

Fear, Fire Ants, and the Business of Science

Now we come to the final offense, the true sacrament of modern gospel: climate change, that great swollen deity of the Church of Fear, praised in every public school science fair and worshiped by every smug TED Talk evangelist who thinks the world began in 2007 with a Google search and a recycling bin.

The charge against us is simple. We red state hillbillies, with our ball caps and biscuits, our Trump bumper stickers and churchgoing ways, are told we refuse to accept climate change. But that ain’t quite right. What we don’t accept is being talked to like cattle by people who can’t patch a roof, grow a tomato, or survive more than 72 hours without power or DoorDash.

Let me say this clear: I believe the climate has changed. I live in Tennessee, where I now swat fire ants in July and armadillos in December. The winters used to be real winters. I’ve lost a boot in the mud and found it again months later. We played in snow that stayed a while, even got tired of it. So yes, something’s shifted. But you’ll have to forgive me for not selling the farm just yet because the models say we’ve got eight years left to live unless we ban straws and put solar panels on every outhouse in Alabama.

The science, if we can still call it that without offending its handlers, isn’t wrong for asking the question. It’s wrong for demanding we accept the answer before the question’s even tested. I was taught that a hypothesis is a maybe, not a mandate. It’s where science starts—not where it plants the flag. But nowadays, if you question the prevailing dogma, you’re not just wrong, you’re dangerous. If you’re Southern, you’re both dangerous and stupid—basically a walking racist thermometer.

The thing is, I thought skepticism was the whole point. I thought science was supposed to argue with itself, prove and disprove, refine and revise. But down here, if we ask, “Are you sure?” the Ivy League sets catch fire and the Southern Poverty Law Center files a report. It’s not the pursuit of knowledge anymore. It’s a performance art. A very lucrative one.

And that’s the rub, isn’t it? Follow the money. There is nothing more profitable in this country than a well-dressed apocalypse. Back in my day, it was nuclear war. My classmates and I were told to duck under our desks in case of Soviet missiles, because surely laminated particleboard was the key to survival. Then it was the Population Bomb. Then AIDS. Then acid rain. Then global cooling. Then Y2K. Then terrorism. Then COVID. And now the planet itself is dying—again—but this time it means it.

The fear industry runs on subscription funding now. Climate change is the front-runner, and the grant checks come in faster than melting glaciers. Solving the problem? No, that’s not in the business model. Because if you solve climate change, you dry up the funding, cancel the conferences, and ruin the careers of half the world’s professional worriers.

And the solutions, if you can call them that, are as uninspiring as the alarms. I’ve read white papers that suggest carbon taxes, mandated bug-eating, and geoengineering projects involving giant mirrors in space. You’ll excuse me for suggesting we might instead start with fixing leaky water lines, cleaning up our rivers, and growing food within driving distance. But no, there’s no funding in common sense.

The movement has become a fad. You can feel it. It hums with fashion and burns with tribal anger. It does not love the Earth. It does not know the Earth. It merely fears its own extinction and resents anyone who doesn’t fear it quite enough. This is not stewardship. This is a secular sermon on damnation, minus the forgiveness.

Fear does not build. It destroys. And every movement built on fear ends the same way: with boredom. Nuclear annihilation gave way to sitcoms. Overpopulation died in the shadow of Costco. AIDS became a fundraising gala. COVID lost its teeth the moment people started asking for their church back. Now we face climate change, and already the edges are fraying, because after so many cries of wolf, even a real howl sounds like background noise.

Down here, we still go to work. We fix things that break. We get calluses and sunburns. And we know the difference between a problem and a performance. Real work is quiet. It happens without hashtags or picket signs. It does not burn buildings or DOX people just trying to make a living. It actually builds things and mends fences.

Good work, as I’ve come to know it, is born of love. Not love of a good slogan, but the love of labor. It’s a sweat-stained hat and a perfectly weeded fence row. It’s raising a grandchild not to need therapy just because the Wi-Fi went out. It’s getting up every day and saying: “This is the piece of earth God gave me. I’ll take care of it best I can.”

And the irony—so rich it could butter cornbread—is that most of what needs to be done doesn’t require scientists in white coats at all. It requires people in dirty jeans. It requires agrarians. That old, embarrassing word. People who know the smell of good soil. People who raise chickens not for their politics, but for their eggs and fried breaded legs.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Science has its place. But it has become a place too high up to be useful. A tower. A business. A temple to certainty built by people who wouldn’t know a carburetor from a can opener. Even Stephen Hawking, who once mystified the world, lost his shine when he turned preacher instead of explorer, peddling cosmic determinism with the same blind faith he claimed to oppose.

Who then, I ask, will be the first scientist to give up the grant money and just solve the problem?

Don’t hold your breath.

And still—still—there’s this stubborn thing called hope. Hope not in theories or trends, but in people. In gardens. In rivers. In unsensational, unmarketable work. There may yet be ways to live well that require no grant, no slogan, and no machine. Maybe, just maybe, the world can be made better by returning to things instead of inventing new ones.

We have to remember that every global crisis starts with local causes. Every honest solution begins with a person who stops blaming and starts fixing. That’s not a conservative thing, nor a liberal thing. Maybe we don’t need to “fix the planet” from the top down. Maybe we just need to stop breaking it from the bottom up.

But what do I know? I’m just a Southerner. A man with dirt under his nails and love in his heart. A man with doubts. And a granddaughter to answer to.

And Lord willing, I’ll plant something tomorrow.