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The Green Guide

Wendell Berry Criticizes Tunnel Vision
of Sustainable Ag Movement

[The current discussion on the list about sellouts and hypocrisy and
corruption among Big Greens made me think about this essay, which came out a
few years ago. I post it now for those who may have missed it, and for those
who might care to re-read and re-ponder it. --FB]

http://www.gn.apc.org/resurgence/issues/berry198.htm

IN DISTRUST OF MOVEMENTS
by Wendell Berry

I HAVE HAD WITH MY friend Wes Jackson a number of useful conversations about
the necessity of getting out of movements - even movements that have seemed
necessary and dear to us - when they have lapsed into self-righteousness and
self-betrayal, as movements seem almost invariably to do. People in movements
too readily learn to deny to others the rights and privileges they demand for
themselves. They too easily become unable to mean their own language, as when
a "peace movement" becomes violent. They often become too specialized, as if
finally they cannot help taking refuge in the pinhole vision of the
institutional intellectuals. They almost always fail to be radical enough,
dealing finally in effects rather than causes. Or they deal with single issues
or single solutions, as if to assure themselves that they will not be radical
enough.

And so I must declare my dissatisfaction with movements to promote soil
conservation or clean water or clean air or wilderness preservation or
sustainable agriculture or community health or the welfare of children. Worthy
as these and other goals may be, they cannot be achieved alone. I am
dissatisfied with such efforts because they are too specialized, they are not
comprehensive enough, they are not radical enough, they virtually predict
their own failure by implying that we can remedy or control effects while
leaving causes in place. Ultimately, I think, they are insincere; they propose
that the trouble is caused by other people; they would like to change policy
but not behavior.

The worst danger may be that a movement will lose its language either to its
own confusion about meaning and practice, or to pre-emption by its enemies. I
remember, for example, my naïve confusion at learning that it was possible for
advocates of organic agriculture to look upon the "organic method" as an end
in itself. To me, organic farming was attractive both as a way of conserving
nature and as a strategy of survival for small farmers.
>
Imagine my surprise in discovering that there could be huge "organic"
monocultures. And so I was not too surprised by the recent attempt of the
United States Department of Agriculture to appropriate the "organic" label for
food irradiation, genetic engineering, and other desecrations of the corporate
food economy. Once we allow our language to mean anything that anybody wants
it to mean, it becomes impossible to mean what we say. When "homemade" ceases
to mean neither more nor less than "made at home", then it means anything,
which is to say that it means nothing.

AS YOU SEE, I have good reasons for declining to name the movement I think I
am a part of. I am reconciled to the likelihood that from time to time it will
name itself and have slogans, but I am not going to use its slogans or call it
by any of its names.

Let us suppose that we have a Nameless Movement for Better Land Use and that
we know we must try to keep it active, responsive, and intelligent for a long
time. What must we do?

What we must do above all, I think, is try to see the problem in its full size
and difficulty. If we are concerned about land abuse, then we must see that
this is an economic problem. Every economy is, by definition, a land-using
economy. If we are using our land wrongly, then something is wrong with our
economy. This is difficult. It becomes more difficult when we recognize that,
in modern times, every one of us is a member of the economy of everybody else.

But if we are concerned about land abuse, we have begun a profound work of
economic criticism. Study of the history of land use (and any local history
will do) informs us that we have had for a long time an economy that thrives
by undermining its own foundations. Industrialism, which is the name of our
economy, and which is now virtually the only economy of the world, has been
from its beginnings in a state of riot. It is based squarely upon the
principle of violence toward everything on which it depends, and it has not
mattered whether the form of industrialism was communist or capitalist or
whatever; the violence toward nature, human communities, traditional
agricultures and local economies has been constant. The bad news is coming in,
literally, from all over the world. Can such an economy be fixed without being
radically changed? I don't think it can.

The Captains of Industry have always counselled the rest of us to be
"realistic". Let us, therefore, be realistic. Is it realistic to assume that
the present economy would be just fine if only it would stop poisoning the air
and water, or if only it would stop soil erosion, or if only it would stop
degrading watersheds and forest ecosystems, or if only it would stop seducing
children, or if only it would quit buying politicians, or if only it would
give women and favored minorities an equitable share of the loot? Realism, I
think, is a very limited program, but it informs us at least that we should
not look for bird eggs in a cuckoo clock.

OR WE CAN SHOW the hopelessness of single-issue causes and single-issue
movements by following a line of thought such as this: We need a continuous
supply of uncontaminated water. Therefore, we need (among other things)
soil-and-water-conserving ways of agriculture and forestry that are not
dependent on monoculture, toxic chemicals, or the indifference and violence
that always accompany big-scale industrial enterprises on the land.

Therefore, we need diversified, small-scale land economies that are dependent
on people. Therefore, we need people with the knowledge, skills, motives and
attitudes required by diversified, small-scale land economies. And all this is
clear and comfortable enough, until we recognize the question we have come to:
Where are the people?

Well, all of us who live in the suffering rural landscapes of the United
States know that most people are available to those landscapes only
recreationally. We see them bicycling or boating or hiking or camping or
hunting or fishing or driving along and looking around. They do not, in Mary
Austin's phrase, "summer and winter with the land". They are unacquainted with
the land's human and natural economies. Though people have not progressed
beyond the need to eat food and drink water and wear clothes and live in
houses, most people have progressed beyond the domestic arts - the husbandry
and wifery of the world - by which those needful things are produced and
conserved. In fact, the comparative few who still practice that necessary
husbandry and wifery often are inclined to apologize for doing so, having been
carefully taught in our education system that those arts are degrading and
unworthy of people's talents. Educated minds, in the modern era, are unlikely
to know anything about food and drink, clothing and shelter. In merely taking
these things for granted, the modern educated mind reveals itself also to be
as superstitious a mind as ever has existed in the world. What could be more
superstitious than the idea that money brings forth food?

I AM NOT SUGGESTING, of course, that everybody ought to be a farmer or a
forester. Heaven forbid! I am suggesting that most people now are living on
the far side of a broken connection, and that this is potentially
catastrophic. Most people are now fed, clothed, and sheltered from sources
toward which they feel no gratitude and exercise no responsibility. There is
no significant urban constituency, no formidable consumer lobby, no noticeable
political leadership, for good land-use practices, for good farming and good
forestry, for restoration of abused land, or for halting the destruction of
land by so-called "development".

We are involved now in a profound failure of imagination. Most of us cannot
imagine the wheat beyond the bread, or the farmer beyond the wheat, or the
farm beyond the farmer, or the history beyond the farm. Most people cannot
imagine the forest and the forest economy that produced their houses and
furniture and paper; or the landscapes, the streams, and the weather that fill
their pitchers and bathtubs and swimming pools with water. Most people appear
to assume that when they have paid their money for these things they have
entirely met their obligations.

Money does not bring forth food. Neither does the technology of the food
system. Food comes from nature and from the work of people. If the supply of
food is to be continuous for a long time, then people must work in harmony
with nature. That means that people must find the right answers to a lot of
hard practical questions. The same applies to forestry and the possibility of
a continuous supply of timber.

One way we could describe the task ahead of us is by saying that we need to
enlarge the consciousness and the conscience of the economy. Our economy needs
to know - and care - what it is doing. This is revolutionary, of course, if
you have a taste for revolution, but it is also a matter of common sense.

Undoubtedly some people will want to start a movement to bring this about.
They probably will call it the Movement to Teach the Economy What It Is Doing
- the MTEWIID. Despite my very considerable uneasiness, I will agree to this,
but on three conditions.

My first condition is that this movement should begin by giving up all hope
and belief in piecemeal, one-shot solutions. The present scientific quest for
odorless hog manure should give us sufficient proof that the specialist is no
longer with us. Even now, after centuries of reductionist propaganda, the
world is still intricate and vast, as dark as it is light, a place of mystery,
where we cannot do one thing without doing many things, or put two things
together without putting many things together. Water quality, for example,
cannot be improved without improving farming and forestry, but farming and
forestry cannot be improved without improving the education of consumers - and
so on.

The proper business of a human economy is to make one whole thing of ourselves
and this world. To make ourselves into a practical wholeness with the land
under our feet is maybe not altogether possible - how would we know? - but, as
a goal, it at least carries us beyond hubris, beyond the utterly groundless
assumption that we can subdivide our present great failure into a thousand
separate problems that can be fixed by a thousand task forces of academic and
bureaucratic specialists. That program has been given more than a fair chance
to prove itself, and we ought to know by now that it won't work.

My second condition is that the people in this movement (the MTEWIID) should
take full responsibility for themselves as members of the economy. If we are
going to teach the economy what it is doing, then we need to learn what we are
doing. This is going to have to be a private movement as well as a public one.
If it is unrealistic to expect wasteful industries to be conservers, then
obviously we must lead in part the public life of complainers, petitioners,
protesters, advocates, and supporters of stricter regulations and saner
policies. But that is not enough.

If it is unreasonable to expect a bad economy to try to become a good one,
then we must go to work to build a good economy. It is appropriate that this
duty should fall to us, for good economic behavior is more possible for us
than it is for the great corporations with their miseducated managers and
their greedy and oblivious stockholders. Because it is possible for us, we
must try in every way we can to make good economic sense in our own lives, in
our households, and in our communities. We must do more for ourselves and our
neighbors. We must learn to spend our money with our friends and not with our
enemies. But to do this it is necessary to renew local economies and revive
the domestic arts.

In seeking to change our economic use of the world, we are seeking inescapably
to change our lives. The outward harmony that we desire between our economy
and the world depends finally upon an inward harmony between our own hearts
and the originating spirit that is the life of all creatures, a spirit as near
us as our flesh and yet forever beyond the measures of this obsessively
measuring age. We can grow good wheat and make good bread only if we
understand that we do not live by bread alone.

My third condition is that this movement should content itself to be poor. We
need to find cheap solutions, solutions within the reach of everybody, and the
availability of a lot of money prevents the discovery of cheap solutions. The
solutions of modern medicine and modern agriculture are all staggeringly
expensive, and this is caused in part, and maybe altogether, because of the
availability of huge sums of money for medical and agricultural research.

Too much money, moreover, attracts administrators and experts as sugar
attracts ants - look at what is happening in our universities. We should not
envy rich movements that are organized and led by an alternative bureaucracy
living on the problems it is supposed to solve. We want a movement that is a
movement because it is advanced by all its members in their daily lives.

NOW, HAVING COMPLETED this very formidable list of the problems and
difficulties, fears and fearful hopes that lie ahead of us, I am relieved to
see that I have been preparing myself all along to end by saying something
cheerful. What I have been talking about is the possibility of renewing human
respect for this Earth and all the good, useful, and beautiful things that
come from it. I have made it clear, I hope, that I don't think this respect
can be adequately enacted or conveyed by tipping our hats to nature or by
representing natural loveliness in art or by prayers of thanksgiving or by
preserving tracts of wilderness - although I recommend all those things. The
respect I mean can be given only by using well the world's goods that are
given to us. This good use, which renews respect - which is the only currency,
so to speak, of respect - also renews our pleasure. The callings and
disciplines that I have spoken of as the domestic arts are stationed all along
the way from the farm to the prepared dinner, from the forest to the dinner
table, from stewardship of the land to hospitality to friends and strangers.
These arts are as demanding and gratifying, as instructive and as pleasing, as
the so-called "fine arts". To learn them is, I believe, the work that is our
profoundest calling. Our reward is that they will enrich our lives and make us
glad.

--------------
Wendell Berry is a farmer, a poet, and a novelist.

From Resurgence issue 198 - January/February 2000. Reprinted from Orion
magazine. For further information ring 01803 865934.

====================================================================

Tim Hermach
Native Forest Council
PO Box 2190
Eugene, OR 97402
541.688.2600; fax 689.9835 or 461.2156

web page: http://www.forestcouncil.org

Defending Liberty Through Education
* Saving What's Left And Recovering What's Lost Of Our Forest,
* Protecting Land, Air, Soil & Water Is An Issue of Liberty & National
Security
* Working Together for Real Protection For PUBLICLY OWNED Land, all 650
MILLION Acres

THE ANSWER? SAVE WHAT'S LEFT, ZERO CUT, ZERO EXTRACTION, & FOREVER WILD