Planting Trees Without a Pension

Or, a Life in the Woods

Like almost everybody else, I am hooked to the energy corporations, which I do not admire. I hope to become less hooked to them. In my work, I try to be as little hooked to them as possible. As a farmer, I do almost all of my work with horses. As a writer, I work with a pencil or a pen and a piece of paper.

Wendell Berry — Why I am Not Going to Buy a Computer

Last month, I reached two major adult milestones: I paid income tax for the first time, and a pension pot was opened in my name. For something that’s allegedly as inevitable as death, I’m (not-so) secretly quite smug that I’ve managed to avoid income tax for this long. I’ve had a few near death experiences, I thought to myself, I could have avoided it entirely! But alas, at 27 years old, this is the first year that I will earn over the £12,000 tax-free threshold. Income tax has arrived, and I’m not too upset.

With the pension pot, however, I’m not so sure how I feel. Perhaps a bit of context is necessary. Alongside being a budding young organic farmer, nascent Wendell Berry impersonator, heritage grain pioneer, scathing and perspicacious cultural critic, bloody good-looking, and incredibly humble, I also work as a teacher. Alas, organic farming, such as things currently stand, isn’t lucrative enough to dispense away with the day job. The teaching is fairly new, I started at about the same time that I started farming at home. The school represents, in a sense, a meaningful step from rootless idealism to a negotiated pragmatism: this affords me the freedom to do the things that I care about most, this gets the project off the ground.

And it is the school that has opened the pension in my name. But this fact has been sitting uneasily with me.

The first reason is perhaps most easily understood, but perhaps not so easily dismissed, as a remnant of my angry intellectual anarchic tendencies. Put bluntly: I don’t like big anonymous globalised pension funds, and I don’t like what they do with people’s money. It’s these pension funds that are buying up vast tracts of UK farmland, to become institutional Landlords. It’s these pension funds that are building the gentrified apartments blocks, where no flats are for sale, such that people can never own the place in which they live. And they do all of this not because they revel in evil, in some grand conspiratorial sense, but because it works: these decisions, agreeable or otherwise, create reliable income for the millions of people who depend on pension funds. In much the same way that BP continues to drill for oil only because we continue to buy it, pension funds continue to offer “their expert strategic wealth management services” because we continue to pay them every month.

And if there is any moral ill here, it is only that which is endemic to all complex (read: industrial) societies: that we depend on decisions that we would not choose to make ourselves, and that this dependence is obfuscated from us. Most people think that housing is a fundamental human right; most people also depend on the decisions of others that view housing as an asset class in order to be able to retire. To paraphrase Jacques Ellul, it is not through force that these technologies come to dominate our lives, but through dependence. If you don’t like the system, then don’t depend on it.

The next reason is perhaps an extension of the first, with a slight doomer inflection. Again, to speak bluntly: infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible. That which is impossible cannot last. It is my belief that the reality of this statement will become more pronounced in the next few years, well before my pension “matures”. This is not an original claim; it has guided the modern environmental since its inception in the 1960s. It is also not particularly controversial. Deep down, most of us have the feeling that this way of life cannot last forever, but perhaps we all hope that we might just be the last generation to get away with it. To speak almost tautologically, pension funds only work if they continue to grow each year; this, in turn, is only possible if the economy, that nebulous site of modern worship, continues to grow; it is my belief that this is already becoming harder to achieve with each ensuing year — at this current moment, and not in some abstracted future.

I’m not the only person who looks on at the variously unfolding crises of this age — species loss, and rapid climatic change, and intense wealth inequality, to name but a few — and worries for the future of our world, let alone the future of “the economy”. In fact, I can’t help but feel that we’re starting to see the truth of that key environmentalist claim rearing its head, in real time. Despite all of the apocalyptic training we receive through the culture at large, the inevitable end of the industrial economy will not be a singular off-switch. Instead, it will be a steady unfurling, a general worsening, and the most vulnerable people will be blamed: hospital waiting lists that no government can bring down, or a persistent inflation that defies official sanctioned explanations, or random food shortages. To quote Louise Perry:

The Ponzi scheme of the old age pension is already collapsing, and it will almost certainly have collapsed entirely by the time I reach my sixty-eighth birthday. What can’t go on, won’t go on. The status quo has proved ­unsustainable.

In the end, we will have to revert to the system that prevailed for all of human history, up until a century ago. The elderly will be cared for privately, mostly within the extended family, and mostly by women. Healthcare for the old will be mostly palliative, and the only safety net for the poor and lonely will be provided by charities. Lifespans will shorten.

Until we get there, the only policy solution that is permissible within the dominant ideological framework is legalized euthanasia. We should expect governments to embrace this policy route as they scramble to save their dying welfare systems. For a period, the elderly will be offered a state pension, but they will also be offered state-administered death. A bitter and ­increasingly impoverished younger generation will be more than happy to push them towards the latter route.

I’m not thrilled about this prediction, but equally I don’t think it salient to fight it, or try to blame someone. In my mind, there’s a degree of inevitability, and I simply want to respond honestly.

With any long term commitment, be it a life-partner or a pension, one must place one’s faith in the solidity of the conditions that make such a commitment possible: when you commit to a life-partner, you put faith in the idea that you will still want, and still be able to be, a life-partner in forty-odd years’ time — otherwise, why commit! In much the same way, a pension feels like a commitment to the solidity of the industrial economy throughout the next forty years. And I'm just not sure I have such faith.

This brings me nicely to my final reason. I’ve just finished reading The New Testament. Like most, I’d read bits of it before, but I’d never read it cover to cover. I’ll spare you another unsolicited book review — God knows it will be many years before I have anything noteworthy to say on that front. But I will offer something of an impression. The teachings of Jesus are unapologetically radical. They are also unapologetically dualistic: the life of the “flesh” and the life of the “spirit”; this life, and the life of the Age to Come. By placing my faith in this world, invariably I distance myself from God. Or to quote Jesus himself:¹

Do not store up treasures for yourself on the earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves dig their way in and steal; rather, store up for yourself treasure in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves neither dig their way in nor steal; for where your treasure is, there your heart will also be.

And these injunctions are everywhere. Crucially, they’re not just against wealth in excess, or wealth poorly managed. Again and again, Jesus condemns personal wealth not merely as a moral danger, but as an intrinsic evil. To quote someone much more comfortable in talking about these things, David Bentley Hart says of the early followers of Christ:²

Most of us would find Christians truly cast in the New Testament told fairly obnoxious: civically reprobate, ideologically unsound, economically destructive, politically irresponsible, socially discreditable, and really just a bit indecent. Or, if not that, we would at least be bemused by the sheer, unembellished, unremitting otherworldliness of their understanding of the gospel.

This extremism is not merely an occasional hyperbolic presence in the texts or an infrequent intonation sounded only in their most urgent moments; it is their entire cultural and spiritual atmosphere.

Again, to take another quote of Jesus:³

But alas for you who are rich, for you have your comfort. Alas for you who are now replete, for you will be hungry. Alas for those now laughing, for you will mourn and lament… But to you who listen I say, Love your enemies, do well by those who hate you, bless those cursing you, pray for those reviling you.

Or to take another quote, this time from the Book of James:⁴

Come now, you who are rich, weep, howling out at the miseries that are coming for you: your riches have spoiled and your garments have become moth-eaten; your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will serve as testimony against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have kept treasure in the last days. Look: the wages of the workers who have reaped your lands, which have been unfairly held back by you, clamour aloud, and the outcries of those who have reaped have entered the east of the Lord Sabaoth. You lived on the earth in dainty luxury and self indulgence.

I could go on like this, but I won’t. The message is abundantly clear: faith in this life, or faith in the Age to Come. There is no negotiating with Christ. How blissful the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

None of this is to say that I am remotely close to realising any of this. At all. I have a job, and I only a few paragraphs ago, I justified it as a “negotiated pragmatism”. In truth, I can feel that since I've started earning more, I have become less generous with my money. I’ve worked hard for this, the voice in my head says, this is mine. I’m a long way from fully living by Christ’s teaching. But if I’m being honest, not having a pension feels like a good place to start.

Of course, I could be wrong about all of this. What if I find a “more ethical” pension provider, one whose institutional raison d’être isn’t to become an institutional Landlord? Or what if the industrial economy will continue to grow merrily, until long after my pension has matured? Or what if I’m wrong to heed the teaching of Christ, what if it’s just a load of nonsense from 2000 years ago, from a time before we really understood how the world worked? All of this is fair, and reasonable. It’s the voice of my own self-doubt. But at this point, after writing and thinking through all of this, it feels more like a question of faith than a rational decision. More about a system of beliefs than hedging my bets intelligently. Where do I want to store my treasures: on earth, or in heaven? Or, perhaps less terrifyingly, what future can I put my faith in?

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A few weeks ago, I was explaining this to a friend. He was probing in the way that a good friend does. Playing devil’s advocate. Speaking like an economist, he asked about the opportunity cost: what would I do with the money instead of a pension? Initially, when he asked, I couldn’t think of anything, which seemed to justify an inertia: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But I liked his question, and slept on it. If I don’t believe in the future of a pension, what future do I believe in? And as with all thoughts that I think are my own, Wendell Berry has got there first:⁵

Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mould.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Put my faith in two inches of humus. I like that. And so, at least for now, instead of a pension, I will use that money to plant trees. I’ve just bought three more for the garden, weird apple varieties that you can’t find in any markets. Next month, I’ll walk down the river Medway and plant some oaks and alders. It’s not quite the perfection demanded by Christ, far from it. But who says that the destitute and the abject of spirit shouldn’t include the natural world?

1. The Gospel According Matthew, Chapter 6, Verses 19-21. All quotes taken from David Bentley Hart’s translation of The New Testament.

2. Taken from the introductory essay to Hart’s translation.

3. The Gospel According to Luke, Chapter 6, Verses 24-25.

4. The Letter of James, Chapter 5, Verses 1-6.

5. A section of his poem Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front. (What a great name for a poem.)