Commonplacing: Wendell Berry on the Land

Wendell Berry, for those of who may have never had the pleasure, is one of the greatest living human beings, a modern prophet who is also a wonderful poet and a fantastic storyteller. Every time I read something that he wrote I learn something and am tempted to try and figure out how to farm. Plus, his style is inimitable. 

I bought Clara one of his essay collections for her birthday and have been perusing it myself recently. The following is from an essay from 1989 called "Nature as Measure." In this article, Berry is seeking both to dispel the focus of the modern environmental movement on merely protecting virgin wilderness and shift the conversation to sustainable, small-scale farming, as well as writing to argue that capitalism, while doing many things well, of itself cannot understand something like preservation and traditional ways of agriculture. Here is a quote:

"For many years, as a nation, we have asked our land only to produce, and we have asked our farmers only to produce. We have believed that this single economic standard not only guaranteed good performance but also preserved the ultimate truth and rightness of our aims. We have bought unconditionally the economists' line that competition and innovation would solve all problems, and that we would finally accomplish a technological end-run around biological reality and the human condition.

Competition and innovation have indeed solved, for the time being, the problem of production. But the solution has been extravagant, thoughtless, and far too expensive. We have been winning, to our inestimable loss, a competition against our own land and our own people."

The whole article is worth reading, but I resonate with his point here. Capitalism requires innovation and growth for its fuel, and innovation and growth are not necessarily good things. Sometimes they are, but sometimes they are bad. Capitalism of itself does not possess the tools to make this moral judgment. 

The advances in farming technology in the recent past are stunning. But Berry is right to note that yield, rather than the goodness of the land and its people, have been the primary drive (with most of the grains going to feed all of those cows we love so much to eat and not people anyway) for the crop technology folk. This can have beneficial effects, but our system does not allow us the time to find out whether this new technology will be worth it in the long-term. That will be someone else's problem.