Not Just “Mr. Peanut”

Painting by Betsy Graves Reyneau

Give a word-association test to any middle-schooler in the U.S., ask the student what word first comes to mind when they hear "George Washington Carver," and hands down the most frequent answer will be the word "peanuts."  Many people think Carver invented peanut butter.  Although credit for that goes to someone else, the peanut connection is quite true.  In the early 20th century, George Washington Carver helped pioneer research into the chemistry of agriculture products.  As part of that work, he figured out how to synthesize 300 products from peanuts, all the way down to cheese, dyes, and linoleum.

It is another aspect of Carver's thought that interests me, however.  Not that the story of this African-American botanist's life isn't inspiring.  After all, he was disadvantaged by being born to slave parents near the end of the Civil War.  Within only a month, kidnappers stole George and his mother in order to profit from selling "property" in the form of slaves.  The young man Carver, growing up in a society with deep racial discrimination, became the first black scientist to become prominent even to whites.

It is, as I say, another aspect of Carver's thought that interests me. As I have read more and more books relating Nature and ecology to spirituality and religion, I have been surprised by the quotations I have encountered by him that speak of God.  What I sense in them is not any habitual, perfunctory religion, but a wise and vibrant life in and of a Higher Spirit.  Carver's work elevated agriculture as a whole, but his initial motive was to help the lowest in society: Specifically, poor black farmers, the soil of whose farms had been depleted from cotton having been grown on it for decades.  He published pamphlets to educate poor farmers in better practices.  Despite those accomplishments, he lived a modest life, turning down several opportunities to advance his personal wealth.  My favorite quotation by him is a modern updating of the traditional Christian idea of the Book of Nature:

"I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station,

 through which God speaks to us every hour if we will only tune in."

As to that matter of peanuts, I have one particular childhood memory.  The cub-scout pack I was in was on a half-day outing to an historical site a couple hours away from home.  In order to hold off our appetites until lunch, the pack's leader had brought along a large bag of unshelled peanuts.  How simple it was, and yet how pleasant it seemed to me, for us to sit on the ground together in a park area, breaking open and eating peanuts together, while a few of us chatted. At that age, I had little self-confidence among the other boys.  But at that peanut-eating moment, life seemed quite good.

In the future, as our human race tries to figure out how to wean itself off its dependence on finite, non-renewable, and diminishing petroleum, Carter's synthesizing hundreds of non-food products out of peanuts, sweet potatoes, and soybeans might prove inspirational.  So might his openness to hearing the voice of the sacred in Nature.

~~~

Have you read about, or do you find inspiring, a person whose life was related to Nature?

(The quotation by Carver is taken from

 The Mind of God & Other Musings, ed. Shirley A. Jones, © 1994.)