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  • From: Bill Jones <billj AT harborside.com>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Wendell Berry article in Orion mag
  • Date: Thu, 15 Sep 2005 16:41:04 -0700

Funny, I had a completely different take on this, one having no relation to whether I get to control what other people do.

I see the end of the gadget culture as being something mostly of their own making. Nothing is ever what it's cracked up to be, it's always three times the real price. And worst of all, it matters more nowadays whether you can be duped into buying something, than whether the widget really functions as it should.

When people get to be our age or older, they come to where they can look at, say, a guinea pig cage, and spot exactly where it will break. I hope we can instill the younger generation with the same level of cynicism toward the retail menace, so that they can throw less money down a hole than I have.

Bill

Gene GeRue wrote:

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.


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