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["Toni Hawryluk" <tonihawr AT msn.com>]

http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/04-6om/Berry.html<http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/04-6om/Berry.html>

 

WENDELL BERRY

 

COMPROMISE, HELL !

 

Economic WMDs are being used against our own people in a version of "freedom" 
that makes greed the dominant economic virtue

 

WE ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY -- I mean our country itself, our land. This is 
a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide 
to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that 
will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not 
necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it 
so.

We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course 
we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would 
we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all -- by proxies we have 
given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians -- be participating in 
its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, 
but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so 
well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest 
of us.

 

How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough 
enough, which is the same thing.

Since the beginning of the conservation effort in our country, 
conservationists have too often believed that we could protect the land 
without protecting the people. This has begun to change, but for a while yet 
we will have to reckon with the old assumption that we can preserve the 
natural world by protecting wilderness areas while we neglect or destroy the 
economic landscapes -- the farms and ranches and working forests -- and the 
people who use them. That assumption is understandable in view of the 
worsening threats to wilderness areas, but it is wrong. If conservationists 
hope to save even the wild lands and wild creatures, they are going to have 
to address issues of economy, which is to say issues of the health of the 
landscapes and the towns and cities where we do our work, and the quality of 
that work, and the well-being of the people who do the work.

 

IF CONSERVATIONISTS HOPE TO SAVE EVEN THE WILD LANDS AND WILD CREATURES, THEY 
ARE GOING TO HAVE TO ADDRESS ISSUES OF ECONOMY

Governments seem to be making the opposite error, believing that the people 
can be adequately protected without protecting the land. And here I am not 
talking about parties or party doctrines, but about the dominant political 
assumption. Sooner or later, governments will have to recognize that if the 
land does not prosper, nothing else can prosper for very long. We can have no 
industry or trade or wealth or security if we don't uphold the health of the 
land and the people and the people's work.

It is merely a fact that the land, here and everywhere, is suffering. We have 
the "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico and undrinkable water to attest to the 
toxicity of our agriculture. We know that we are carelessly and wastefully 
logging our forests. We know that soil erosion, air and water pollution, 
urban sprawl, the proliferation of highways and garbage are making our lives 
always less pleasant, less healthful, less sustainable, and our dwelling 
places more ugly.

Nearly forty years ago my state of Kentucky, like other coal-producing 
states, began an effort to regulate strip mining. While that effort has 
continued, and has imposed certain requirements of "reclamation," strip 
mining has become steadily more destructive of the land and the land's 
future. We are now permitting the destruction of entire mountains and entire 
watersheds. No war, so far, has done such extensive or such permanent damage. 
If we know that coal is an exhaustible resource, whereas the forests over it 
are with proper use inexhaustible, and that strip mining destroys the forest 
virtually forever, how can we permit this destruction? If we honor at all 
that fragile creature the topsoil, so long in the making, so miraculously 
made, so indispensable to all life, how can we destroy it? If we believe, as 
so many of us profess to do, that the Earth is God's property and is full of 
His glory, how can we do harm to any part of it?

In Kentucky, as in other unfortunate states, and again at great public cost, 
we have allowed -- in fact we have officially encouraged -- the establishment 
of the confined animal-feeding industry, which exploits and abuses everything 
involved: the land, the people, the animals, and the consumers. If we love 
our country, as so many of us profess to do, how can we so desecrate it? 

But the economic damage is not confined just to our farms and forests. For 
the sake of "job creation," in Kentucky, and in other backward states, we 
have lavished public money on corporations that come in and stay only so long 
as they can exploit people here more cheaply than elsewhere. The general 
purpose of the present economy is to exploit, not to foster or conserve. 

Look carefully, if you doubt me, at the centers of the larger towns in 
virtually every part of our country. You will find that they are economically 
dead or dying. Good buildings that used to house needful, useful, locally 
owned small businesses of all kinds are now empty or have evolved into junk 
stores or antique shops. But look at the houses, the churches, the commercial 
buildings, the courthouse, and you will see that more often than not they are 
comely and well made. And then go look at the corporate outskirts: the chain 
stores, the fast-food joints, the food-and-fuel stores that no longer can be 
called service stations, the motels. Try to find something comely or well 
made there.

 

What is the difference? The difference is that the old town centers were 
built by people who were proud of their place and who realized a particular 
value in living there. The old buildings look good because they were built by 
people who respected themselves and wanted the respect of their neighbors. 
The corporate outskirts, on the contrary, were built by people who manifestly 
take no pride in the place, see no value in lives lived there, and recognize 
no neighbors. The only value they see in the place is the money that can be 
siphoned out of it to more fortunate places -- that is, to the wealthier 
suburbs of the larger cities.



THERE ARE SUCH ThINGS AS ECONOMIC WEAPONS OF MASSIVE DESTRUCTION, AND WE HAVE 
ALLOWED THEM TO BE USED AGAINST US


Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this 
beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some 
of us would like to think so, but in fact this destruction is taking place 
because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of 
economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the 
market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed 
over to the great corporations.

We citizens have a large responsibility for our delusion and our 
destructiveness, and I don't want to minimize that. But I don't want to 
minimize, either, the large responsibility that is borne by government.

 

It is commonly understood that governments are instituted to provide certain 
protections that citizens individually cannot provide for themselves. But 
governments have tended to assume that this responsibility can be fulfilled 
mainly by the police and the military. They have used their regulatory powers 
reluctantly and often poorly. Our governments have only occasionally 
recognized the need of land and people to be protected against economic 
violence. It is true that economic violence is not always as swift, and is 
rarely as bloody, as the violence of war, but it can be devastating 
nonetheless. Acts of economic aggression can destroy a landscape or a 
community or the center of a town or city, and they routinely do so.

 

Such damage is justified by its corporate perpetrators and their political 
abettors in the name of the "free market" and "free enterprise," but this is 
a freedom that makes greed the dominant economic virtue, and it destroys the 
freedom of other people along with their communities and livelihoods. There 
are such things as economic weapons of massive destruction. We have allowed 
them to be used against us, not just by public submission and regulatory 
malfeasance, but also by public subsidies, incentives, and sufferances 
impossible to justify.

 

We have failed to acknowledge this threat and to act in our own defense. As a 
result, our once-beautiful and bountiful countryside has long been a colony 
of the coal, timber, and agribusiness corporations, yielding an immense 
wealth of energy and raw materials at an immense cost to our land and our 
land's people. Because of that failure also, our towns and cities have been 
gutted by the likes of Wal-Mart, which have had the permitted luxury of 
destroying locally owned small businesses by means of volume discounts.

Because as individuals or even as communities we cannot protect ourselves 
against these aggressions, we need our state and national governments to 
protect us. As the poor deserve as much justice from our courts as the rich, 
so the small farmer and the small merchant deserve the same economic justice, 
the same freedom in the market, as big farmers and chain stores. They should 
not suffer ruin merely because their rich competitors can afford (for a 
while) to undersell them.



SOMEHOW WE HAVE LOST OR DISCARDED ANY CONTROLLING SENSE OF THE 
INTERDEPENDENCE OF THE EARTH AND THE HUMAN CAPACITY TO USE IT WELL.


Furthermore, to permit the smaller enterprises always to be ruined by false 
advantages, either at home or in the global economy, is ultimately to destroy 
local, regional, and even national capabilities of producing vital supplies 
such as food and textiles. It is impossible to understand, let alone justify, 
a government's willingness to allow the human sources of necessary goods to 
be destroyed by the "freedom" of this corporate anarchy. It is equally 
impossible to understand how a government can permit, and even subsidize, the 
destruction of the land and the land's productivity. Somehow we have lost or 
discarded any controlling sense of the interdependence of the Earth and the 
human capacity to use it well. The governmental obligation to protect these 
economic resources, inseparably human and natural, is the same as the 
obligation to protect us from hunger or from foreign invaders. In result, 
there is no difference between a domestic threat to the sources of our life 
and a foreign one. 

 

It appears that we have fallen into the habit of compromising on issues that 
should not, and in fact cannot, be compromised. I have an idea that a large 
number of us, including even a large number of politicians, believe that it 
is wrong to destroy the Earth. But we have powerful political opponents who 
insist that an Earth-destroying economy is justified by freedom and profit. 
And so we compromise by agreeing to permit the destruction only of parts of 
the Earth, or to permit the Earth to be destroyed a little at a time -- like 
the famous three-legged pig that was too well loved to be slaughtered all at 
once.

 

The logic of this sort of compromising is clear, and it is clearly fatal. If 
we continue to be economically dependent on destroying parts of the Earth, 
then eventually we will destroy it all.

So long a complaint accumulates a debt to hope, and I would like to end with 
hope. To do so I need only repeat something I said at the beginning: Our 
destructiveness has not been, and it is not, inevitable. People who use that 
excuse are morally incompetent, they are cowardly, and they are lazy. Humans 
don't have to live by destroying the sources of their life. People can 
change; they can learn to do better. All of us, regardless of party, can be 
moved by love of our land to rise above the greed and contempt of our land's 
exploiters. This of course leads to practical problems, and I will offer a 
short list of practical suggestions. 

 

We have got to learn better to respect ourselves and our dwelling places. We 
need to quit thinking of rural America as a colony. Too much of the economic 
history of our land has been that of the export of fuel, food, and raw 
materials that have been destructively and too cheaply produced. We must 
reaffirm the economic value of good stewardship and good work. For that we 
will need better accounting than we have had so far.

 

We need to reconsider the idea of solving our economic problems by "bringing 
in industry." Every state government appears to be scheming to lure in a 
large corporation from somewhere else by "tax incentives" and other 
squanderings of the people's money. We ought to suspend that practice until 
we are sure that in every state we have made the most and the best of what is 
already there. We need to build the local economies of our communities and 
regions by adding value to local products and marketing them locally before 
we seek markets elsewhere.

 

We need to confront honestly the issue of scale. Bigness has a charm and a 
drama that are seductive, especially to politicians and financiers; but 
bigness promotes greed, indifference, and damage, and often bigness is not 
necessary. You may need a large corporation to run an airline or to 
manufacture cars, but you don't need a large corporation to raise a chicken 
or a hog. You don't need a large corporation to process local food or local 
timber and market it locally.

 

And, finally, we need to give an absolute priority to caring well for our 
land -- for every bit of it. There should be no compromise with the 
destruction of the land or of anything else that we cannot replace. We have 
been too tolerant of politicians who, entrusted with our country's defense, 
become the agents of our country's destroyers, compromising on its ruin. 

 

And so I will end this by quoting my fellow Kentuckian, a great patriot and 
an indomitable foe of strip mining, Joe Begley of Blackey: "Compromise, hell!"

 

WENDELL BERRY farms in Port Royal, Kentucky, with his family. He is the 
author of more than thirty books of fiction, essays, and poetry, including 
Citizen Papers, The Unsettling of America, and Another Turn of the Crank 
(essays); That Distant 
Land<http://www.booksense.com/product/info.jsp?isbn=1593760272> 
<http://www.booksense.com/product/info.jsp?isbn=1593760272>(stories); and A 
Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997. His new novel, Hannah Coulter, 
will be published this fall by Shoemaker & Hoard.