Homestead mailing list

[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

> http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/05-5om/Berry.html

Classic Wendell Berry material but written more simply with short, 
declarative sentences and therefore more eloquent and more powerful than 
some of his earlier essays. Happy to see the adjustment. Where I was 
earlier put off by the English professorshippiness, here I am enchanted by 
the flow.

Alas, I find Berry still a provincial romantic disconnected from national 
and international economic reality. With the exception of a tiny percentage 
of food produced by ecologically sensitive growers able to sell to upscale 
markets, the preponderance of world food is produced for volume profit and 
ecology and energy input be damned. I wish it were otherwise and I, like so 
many members of this list, strive to be the husband and steward of my land. 
But agribusiness will have no truck with such uneconomic should-dos until 
it is forced by governmental regulation or energy shortages.

In my lifetime I hope to see Jim Hightower, Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry and 
similars on an advisory committee to the Secretary of Agriculture that has 
real clout. I am breathing freely.