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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Strip Malls Across the Fruited Plain
  • Date: Sun, 03 Oct 2004 05:54:39 -0600


Strip Malls Across the Fruited Plain
When landscape is destroyed, culture is imperiled.
http://www.amconmag.com/05_05_03/article2.html
By Arthur Versluis
May 5, 2003 issue

I grew up on, and still help on, our family's farm on the west side of Grand
Rapids, Mich. This past year, the last hundred acres of farmland within the
confines of the city, just down the highway from our fruit stand, was
destroyed to make way for a cheap subdivision. Now ours is the only farm left
even partially within the city limits.

As Russell Kirk, who lived two counties north of us, wrote, "This brutal
destruction . of the very landscape, in this age of the bulldozer,
constitutes a belligerent repudiation of what we call tradition. It is a
rejection of our civilized past-and a rejection out of which sharp characters
may make a good deal of money."

While the destruction of the natural world may be embraced by neoconservative
"sharp characters," such destruction cannot be accepted by the traditional
conservative. If one affirms and seeks to preserve what enriches human life,
then it is not possible to endorse the ruin of the natural world. Indeed,
historically as well as etymologically, conservatism and conservation go hand
in hand. What is a conservative if not one who seeks to conserve?

The traditional conservative identifies with a particular place, a particular
family, a particular region and landscape. The very idea of conserving what
has come to us from the past assumes that something has come to us from the
past and that something has to be actual-a place, language, cultural
inheritance, a particular forest, lake, orchard, vista. One's fundamental
impulse is to preserve what is actual, what has meaning and gives meaning.

By contrast, the ideologue affirms what is abstract. The corporate ideologue
is concerned with abstract profit. If that pursuit blows up mountains, lets
debris clog rivers, and digs out the exposed coal and minerals, so be it.
Consider Communist China's massive Three Gorges dam project, the largest in
the world. When such a project destroys farmland and ruins the ecosystem,
causes massive flooding and immense human suffering, the ideologue says this
does not matter; what matters is the ideology of the state that justifies it.
Or again, consider the Islamic religious ideologue who, as a terrorist, is
willing to blow up a nuclear reactor and ruin a countryside to punish
infidels and, as he thinks, to enter an abstract future paradise by
dynamiting the present. The impulses and self-justifications here are
disturbingly similar: abstract good justifies destruction of the immediate.

Traditional conservatism is significantly different from what has come to be
known as environmentalism, even though it shares many of the same
aspirations. Environmentalism includes perspectives from the ecological
vandalism of the Earth Liberation Front to the activism of Greenpeace to
corporate-sponsored ecotourism. But nearly all of these movements have at
their center an emphasis on preserving the natural world more or less free
from human intervention or use. To preserve wilderness is without question a
natural part of traditional conservatism, but the emphasis in traditional
conservatism is more on the human relationship to the land.

Historically, American traditional conservatives drew upon Thomas Jefferson's
legacy of encouraging an agrarian republic, and this reflects the fundamental
conservative impulse toward the preservation of culture and land in
relationship to each other. Arguably the most important American traditional
conservative works of the 20th century were the two Southern Agrarian
collections entitled I'll Take My Stand and Who Owns America?, which featured
essays by such seminal figures as Herbert Agar, Andrew Lytle, Frank Owsley,
John Crowe Ransom, and Allen Tate.

The Southern Agrarians were arguing chiefly against corporate hegemony and in
favor of the family farm and of living culture. In the first essay in I'll
Take My Stand, John Crowe Ransom wrote,

Ambitious men fight, first of all, against nature; they propose to put nature
under their heel; this is the dream of scientists burrowing in their cells,
and then of the industrial men who beg of their secret knowledge and go out
to trouble the earth. . It seems wiser to be moderate in our expectations of
nature, and respectful; and out of so simple a thing as respect for the
physical earth and its teeming life comes a primary joy, which is an
inexhaustible source of arts and religions and philosophies.

Striking in this passage is Ransom's hostility to the industrialist dogma of
perpetual progress and his emphasis on respect for the earth and for life.

The Southern Agrarians were in a unique position to see and oppose corporate
creep because they came from a region with cultural identity, traditions, and
agrarian roots. The Agrarians wanted to preserve family farms for the same
reasons that Jefferson did, but above all they recognized the immense
importance of developing and maintaining a human culture that corresponded to
and augmented the landscape rather than ruining it. The Agrarian vision was
of an American republic that cherished its regional variety and encouraged
responsible local governance.

The primary insight of the traditional conservative regarding conservation is
that just as corporate-industrialist hegemony eliminates individual freedom,
destroys the landscape, and wrecks culture, an agrarian republic is the
surest check against these because it is the surest preservation of culture,
without which life is leached of meaning. Culture, in all its forms-art,
literature, philosophy, and above all religion-is how we find relevance in
our lives. Without culture (in the classic meaning of the word), as the poet
Yeats recognized, things fall apart, the center does not hold, and mere
anarchy is loosed upon the world. Culture is what draws people to a region
and the reason that they love it; it is the bond between humanity and
landscape and the divine by which human life in a particular place has
lasting significance.

In this respect, environmentalism is the result of a society in which culture
has so bled away that only the final and extreme principle of preserving
wilderness is left. Radical environmentalism is the last desperate cry of
those who wish to preserve at least something of nature from human
depredation.

Historically, there are two reasons that conservatives have been antagonistic
toward environmentalists. First is the confusion of corporatism with
conservatism, for as soon as conservatism became allied with libertarianism
and opposed government regulation of corporations, it abandoned its roots in
rural and small-business America and became something akin to an arm of the
Chamber of Commerce with considerable hostility toward those who insist that
a representative republic must protect the good of people, not conglomerates.
Second is the natural conservative dislike of centralized government,
required for the enforcement of laws protecting land, water, and air.

But the truth is, from a traditional conservative perspective, federal and
state governments have one primary function that cannot be fulfilled as
effectively or fairly by any other organization: protection. The chief
function of government is to protect its citizens from foreign invasion or
interference and from domestic predators who, absent the policing power of
government, would prey upon citizens' possessions or destroy their common
inheritance. All other government functions are ancillary at best.

The libertarian and neoconservative view is that the "free market" and
corporations unfettered from inconvenient regulation would somehow arrive at
a balance that protects the natural world and citizens' health, but in fact
even a modicum of experience shows that this is nonsense. A corporation
exists primarily to avoid individual moral responsibility or legal liability,
so without the external check of government-enforced accountability,
corporations will do whatever garners the most profit the fastest.

If the traditional conservative's ideal polis suddenly came into being, there
would in fact be very little need for centralized government's environmental
regulation because that regulation exists largely to counterbalance the
centralized power of corporations. Were one suddenly in a world of family
farms, small businesses, regional culture, and a rich communal and cultural
life with a religious center, one would not need federal agencies to police
environmental laws: the capacity and appetite for massive destruction of the
natural world or human life simply would not be present. On a decentralized
local level, without the pressure of an artificially induced population
increase through immigration, and without the inhuman greed fostered by
corporate economism, caring for the natural world is simply a basic human
instinct.

That this is so is borne out in every landscape that has existed largely
unplundered since human settlement. I stayed for a week one summer in a
castle in Provençe, and the surrounding landscape was little changed from
when it was a troubadour's stronghold in the 13th century. To preserve the
castle and the landscape for all those centuries required no federal agency,
only the conservation of the landscape's beauty and meaning over the
centuries by the people who were born there and loved the place.

Alas, the United States has no such history of conserving ancestral lands. We
have numerous parks and preserves, but our record of conserving agricultural
and private open land is execrable. The 20th century saw the continuous loss
of farmers and the obliteration of small farms, the decline in open and
forested land near cities, and the higgeldy-piggeldy sprawl across the
countryside of suburbs and exurbs. Rare indeed is the family that owns
acreage for more than a generation. As a result, the United States has become
a nation of resident aliens located in placeless places with strip malls and
cookie-cutter subdivisions that resemble anywhere-everywhere-else in the
country.

My family has worked the same orchards and fields in Michigan since the 19th
century, but this became increasingly difficult as the 20th century turned
into the 21st. The advent of global free trade meant China could export its
cheap apple juice via multinational corporations, undercutting American
farmers and dragging the price of our fruit far below the cost of production.
What is more, American fruit co-operatives and packing and juice-producing
companies have been driven out of business so that American farmers no longer
have any venue to sell their fruit. Families that had farmed hundreds of
acres of orchards since the 19th century, good farmers, have been driven out
of business, and in the wake of their loss come subdivisions and shopping
centers.

The conservation of land cannot be separated from the conservation of
whatever is left of a local culture. Culture emerges out of a particular
landscape, and when that landscape is destroyed by consumerism in which
everything is rendered uniform and sterile, then culture itself is
obliterated. We have reached a point now where cultures of every variety are
rendered nearly extinct because the culture has no natural setting in which
to reside. There remain a few oases here and there, like Pennsylvania Dutch
country, but even there the monosociety undermines it by converting the
culture into a tourist spectacle, an object for consumption.

If American conservatism is to have a vital future, it must recognize its
roots in the land itself. There is nothing conservative in policies that
destroy farming families to line the pockets of globalist corporate
executives. The sooner that traditional conservatives and environmentalists
realize that they have at least one aim in common-conservation of
agricultural and wild land in order to maintain the quality of American life
and culture-the sooner a political coalition can emerge that will challenge
the globalist exploitation and destruction of the natural world.
_________________________________________________

Arthur Versluis is a Professor of American Thought and Language at Michigan
State University and author of numerous books including Island Farm.


May 5, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative




  • [Livingontheland] Strip Malls Across the Fruited Plain, Tradingpost, 10/03/2004

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