Heaven on Earth: George Washington Carver’s Life and Vision

In the first two paragraphs of Heaven on Earth: The Life and Vision of George Washington Carver, we meet the adult Carver in his simple lab attire, carrying out his vision. We learn the intent behind his famous peanut products and the agricultural work and humanitarian work for which he is also known.

 
“Let’s talk about something important,” George Washington Carver said when asked about his life story. “To talk about myself… is a waste of time.” In a rummage-sale suit jacket with its arms shielded from corrosive chemicals by cut-off sleeves and a lab apron he had fashioned from a flour sack, tall, the stoop-shouldered scientist worked for concerns much bigger than what he termed his “small I.” On his first sight at age thirty-two of the desolation of devastated forests and emaciated farms that was the southeastern U.S., he had received a vision of the region as a land of plenty for all. For the rest of his life, he bent all his efforts to showing the way to a “heaven on earth”—there and everywhere—which he said “would be so easy to make” in place of what he called humanity’s “pitiful condition.”

He made his famous 300-plus products out of peanut plants, for example, to call attention to possibilities of a plant that helps feed topsoil, which in turn feeds, clothes and shelters humanity. In his vision, poor farmers—powerless pawns of the international cotton market—were happily self-reliant, leading to his years of teaching his people’s farmers to grow not only cotton but also vegetables for food and flowers for beauty. A pile of plants on a table in his classroom told his vision of school gardens teaching nature’s ways and uses outside classroom doors. To further his vision of humanity looking past complexion to see God in everyone, he thawed prejudice in thousands of whites through talks as the first-ever black speaker at their colleges. Younger chemists later came to see his plant products as a prototype of their vision—and his—of renewable fuel and factory feedstocks from plants, putting petroleum and ore extraction in the past. A museum housing his hundreds of useful products from so-called “industrial waste” and “noxious weeds” spelled out his vision of humanity wasting nothing. His position as a beloved public figure even had a place in his vision of a world that celebrates its selfless souls.





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