Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>]

We got lucky and managed to speak with Wendell twice in Santa Fe, but
that's not nearly enough. THIS is Old Ways.

paul, tradingpost@gilanet.com
http://medicinehill.net

The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all
our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to
foster its renewal is our only hope.
   - Wendell Berry
----------------------------


The Work of Local Culture, by Wendell Berry
1988 Iowa Humanities Lecture
http://www.schumachersociety.org/publications/essay_work_of_local.html

Each year the Iowa Humanities Board offers a talk by a distinguished
humanities scholar focusing on a theme important to the people of Iowa.
Under the theme of the Exemplary Project, "A Sense of Place," the 1988 Iowa
Humanities Lecture featured Wendell Berry.

Mr. Berry was born in Henry County, Kentucky, and received both his
bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Kentucky. He has
taught at many colleges and universities. Mr. Berry has received numerous
awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship; a
Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship; the American Academy of Arts & Letters
Jean Stein Award; and the Kentucky Governor's Milner Award in the Arts.
Currently Mr. Berry is a professor at the University of Kentucky, and
continues to farm 125 acres in the county of his birth.

A prolific writer, Wendell Berry is the author of ten books of poetry, nine
collections of essays, and four novels, including Remembering, published in
the fall of 1988. He is a frequent, popular lecturer, including both the
1980 and 1986 Annual E.F. Schumacher Society Lectures. Mr. Berry is
considered to be the foremost advocate for rural culture in America.
----------

FOR MANY YEARS MY WALKS HAVE TAKEN ME down an old fencerow in a wooded
hollow on what was once my grandfather's farm. A battered galvanized bucket
is hanging on a fence post near the head of the hollow, and I never go by
it without stopping to look inside. For what is going on in that bucket is
the most momentous thing I know, the greatest miracle that I have ever
heard of: it is making earth. The old bucket has hung there through many
autumns, and the leaves have fallen around it and some have fallen into it.
Rain and snow have fallen into it, and the fallen leaves have held the
moisture and so have rotted. Nuts have fallen into it, or been carried into
it by squirrels; mice and squirrels have eaten the meat of the nuts and
left the shells; they and other animals have left their droppings; insects
have flown into the bucket and died and decayed; birds have scratched in it
and left their droppings or perhaps a feather or two. This slow work of
growth and death , gravity and decay, which is the chief work of the world,
has by now produced in the bottom of the bucket several inches of black
humus. I look into that bucket with fascination because I am a farmer of
sorts and an artist of sorts, and I recognize there an artistry and a
farming far superior to mine, or to that of any human. I have seen the same
process at work on the tops of boulders in a forest, and it has been at
work immemorially over most of the land-surface of the world. All creatures
die into it, and they live by it.

The old bucket started out a far better one than you can buy now. I think
it has been hanging on that post for something like fifty years. I think so
because I remember hearing, when I was just a small boy, a story about a
bucket that must have been this one. Several of my grandfather's black
hired hands went out on an early spring day to burn a tobacco plantbed, and
they took along some eggs to boil and eat with their dinner. When dinner
came time and they look around for something to boil the eggs in, they
could find only an old bucket that at one time had been filled with tar.
The boiling water softened the residue of tar, and one of the eggs came out
of the water black. The hands made much sport of seeing who would have to
eat the black egg, welcoming their laughter in the midst of their days
work. The man who had to eat the black egg was Floyd Scott, whom I remember
well. Dry scales of tar still adhere to the inside of the bucket.

However small a landmark the old bucket is, it is not trivial. It is one of
the signs by which I know my country and myself. And to me it is
irresistibly suggestive in the way it collects leaves and other woodland
sheddings as they fall through time. It collects stories too as they fall
through time. It is irresistibly metaphorical. It is doing in a passive way
what a human community must do actively and thoughtfully. A human community
too must collect leaves and stories, and turn them into an account. It must
build soil, and build that memory of itself – in lore and story and song
– which will be its culture. And these two kinds of accumulation, of
local soil and local culture, are intimately related.

IN THE WOODS, THE BUCKET IS NO METAPHOR; it simply reveals what is always
happening in the woods, if the woods is let alone. Of course, in most
places in my part of the country, the human community did not leave the
woods alone. It felled the trees, and replaced them with pastures and
crops. But this did not revoke the law of the woods, which is that the
ground must be protected by a cover of vegetation, and that the growth of
the years must return – or be returned – to the ground to rot and build
soil. A good local culture, in one of its most important functions, is a
collection of the memories, ways, and skills necessary for the observance,
within the bounds of domesticity, of this natural law. If the local culture
cannot preserve and improve the local soil, then, as both reason and
history inform us, the local community will decay and perish, and the work
of soil-building will be resumed by nature.

A human community, then, if it is to last long, must exert a sort of
centripetal force, holding local soil and local memory in place.
Practically speaking, human society has no work more important than this.
Once we have acknowledged this principle, we can only be alarmed at the
extent to which it has been ignored. For though our present society does
generate a centripetal force of great power, this is not a local force, but
one centered almost exclusively in our great commercial and industrial
cities, which have drawn irresistibly into themselves both the products of
the countryside and the people and talents of the country communities.

There is, as one assumes there must be, a countervailing or centrifugal
force that also operates in our society, but this returns to the
countryside, not the residue of the land's growth to refertilize the
fields, not the learning and experience of the greater world ready to go to
work locally, and not, or not often, even a just monetary compensation.
What are returned, instead, are overpriced manufactured goods, pollution in
various forms, and garbage. A landfill on the edge of my own rural county
in Kentucky, for example, daily receives about eighty truckloads of
garbage. About fifty of these loads come from cities in New York, New
Jersey and Pennsylvania. Thus, the end result of the phenomenal modern
productivity of the countryside is a debased countryside, which becomes
daily less pleasant, and which will inevitably become less productive.

The cities, which have imposed this inversion of forces upon the
countryside, have been unable to preserve themselves from it. The typical
modern city is surrounded by a circle of affluent suburbs, eating its way
outward, like ringworm, leaving the so-called "inner city" desolate,
filthy, ugly, and dangerous.

MY WALKS IN THE HILLS AND HOLLOWS around my home have inevitably produced
in my mind the awareness that I live in a diminished country. The country
has been and is being reduced by the great centralizing process that is our
national economy. As I walk, I am always reminded of the slow, patient
building of soil in the woods. And I am reminded of the events and
companions of my life – for my walks, after so long, are cultural events.
But under the trees and in the fields I see also the gullies and scars,
healed or healing or fresh, left by careless logging and bad farming. I see
the crumbling stone walls, and the wire fences that have been rusting out
ever since the 1930's. In the returning woods growth out of the hollows, I
see the sagging and the fallen barns, the empty and ruining houses, the
houseless chimneys and foundations. As I look at this evidence of human
life poorly founded, played out, and gone, I try to recover some
understanding, some vision, of what this country was at the beginning: the
great oaks and beeches and hickories, walnuts and maples, lindens and
ashes, tulip poplars, standing in beauty and dignity now unimaginable,
lying deep at their feet – an incalculable birthright sold for money,
most of which we do not receive. Most of the money made on the products of
this place has gone to fill the pockets of people in distant cities who did
not produce the products.

If my walks take me along the roads and streams, I see also the trash and
the junk, carelessly manufactured and carelessly thrown away, the glass and
the broken glass and the plastic and the aluminum that will lie here longer
than the lifetime of the trees – longer than the lifetime of our species,
perhaps. And I know that this also is what we have to show for our
participation in the American economy, for most of the money made on these
things too has been made elsewhere.

It would be somewhat more pleasant for country people if they could blame
all this on city people. But the old opposition of country versus city –
though still true, and truer than ever economically, for the country is
more than ever the colony of the city – is far too simple to explain our
problem. For country people more and more live like city people, and so
connive in their own ruin. More and more country people, like city people,
allow their economic and social standards to be set by television and
salesmen and outside experts. Our garbage mingles with New Jersey garbage
in our local landfill, and it would be hard to tell which is which.

As local community decays along with local economy, a vast amnesia settles
over the countryside. As the exposed and disregarded soil departs with the
rains, so local knowledge and local memory move away to the cities, or are
forgotten under the influence of homogenized salestalk, entertainment, and
education. This loss of local knowledge and local memory – that is, of
local culture – has been ignored, or written off as one of the cheaper
"prices of progress", or made the business of folklorists. Nevertheless,
local culture has a value, and part of its value is economic. This can be
demonstrated readily enough.

For example, when a community loses its memory, its members no longer know
each other. How can they know each other if they have forgotten or have
never learned each other's stories? If they do not know each other's
stories, how can they know whether or not to trust each other? People who
do not trust each other do not help each other, and moreover they fear each
other. And this is our predicament now. Because of a general distrust and
suspicion, we not only lose one another's help and companionship, but we
are all now living in jeopardy of being sued.

We don't trust our "public servants" because we know that they don't
respect us. They don't respect us, as we understand, because they don't
know us; they don't know our stories. They expect us to sue them if they
make mistakes, and so they must insure themselves, at great expense to them
and to us. Doctors in a country community must send their patients to
specialists in the city, not necessarily because they believe that they are
wrong in their diagnoses, but because they know that they are not
infallible, and they must protect themselves against lawsuits, at great
expense to us.

The government of my home county, which has a population of about 10,000
people, pays an annual liability insurance premium of about $34,000. Add to
this the liability premiums that are paid by every professional person who
is "at risk" in the county, and you get some idea of the load we are
carrying. Many decent family livelihoods are annually paid out of the
county to insurance companies for a service that is only negative and
provisional.

All of this money is lost to us by the failure of the community. A good
community, as we know, insures itself by trust, by good faith and good
will, by mutual help. A good community, in other words, is a good local
economy. It depends upon itself for many of its essential needs and is thus
shaped, so to speak, from the inside – unlike most modern populations
that depend upon distant purchases for almost everything, and are thus
shaped from the outside by the purposes and the influence of salesmen.

I WAS WALKING ONE SUNDAY AFTERNOON several years ago with an older friend.
We went by the ruining log house that had belonged to his grandparents and
great-grandparents. The house stirred my friend's memory, and he told how
the oldtime people used to visit each other in the evenings, especially in
the long evenings of winter. There used to be a sort of institution in our
part of the country known as "sitting till bedtime." After supper, when
they weren't too tired, neighbors would walk across the fields to visit
each other. They popped corn, my friend said, and ate apples and talked.
They told each other stories. They told each other stories, as I knew
myself, that they had all heard before. Sometimes they told stories about
each other, about themselves, living again in their own memories, and thus
keeping their memories alive. Among the hearers of these stories were
always the children. When bedtime came, the visitors lit their lanterns and
went home. My friend talked about this, and thought about it, and then he
said, "They had everything but money."

They were poor, as country people often have been, but they had each other,
they had their local economy in which they helped each other, they had each
other's comfort when they needed it, and they had their stories, their
history together in that place. To have everything but money is to have
much. And most people of the present can only marvel to think of neighbors
entertaining themselves for a whole evening without a single imported
pleasure and without listening to a single minute of salestalk.

Most of the descendents of those people have now moved away, partly because
of the cultural and economic failures that I mentioned earlier, and most of
them no longer sit in the evenings and talk to anyone. Most of them now sit
until bedtime, watching TV, submitting every few minutes to a salestalk.
The message of both the TV programs and the salestalks is that the watchers
should spend whatever is necessary to be like everybody else.

By television and other public means, we are encouraged to imagine that we
are far advanced beyond sitting till bedtime with the neighbors on a
Kentucky ridgetop, and indeed beyond anything we ever were before. But if,
for example, there should occur a forty-eight hour power failure, we would
find ourselves in much more backward circumstances than our ancestors.
What, for starters, would we do for entertainment? Tell each other stories?
But most of us no longer talk with each other, much less tell each other
stories. We tell our stories now mostly to doctors or lawyers or
psychiatrists or insurance adjusters or the police, not to our neighbors
for their (and our) entertainment. The stories that now entertain us are
made up for us in New York or Los Angeles or other centers of such
commerce.

But a forty-eight hour power failure would involve almost unimaginable
deprivations. It would be difficult to travel, especially in cities. Most
of the essential work could not be done. Our windowless modern schools and
other such buildings that depend on air conditioning could not be used.
Refrigeration would be impossible; food would spoil. It would be difficult
or impossible to prepare meals. If it was winter, heating systems would
fail. At the end of forty-eight hours many of us would be hungry.

Such a calamity – and it is a modest one among those that our time has
made possible – would thus reveal how far most of us are now living from
our cultural and economic sources, and how extensively we have destroyed
the foundations of local life. It would show us how far we have strayed
from the locally centered life of such neighborhoods as the one my friend
described – a life based to considerable extent upon what we now call
solar energy, which is decentralized, democratic, clean and free. If we
note that much of the difference we are talking about can be accounted for
as an increasing dependence upon energy sources that are centralized,
undemocratic, filthy and expensive, we will have completed a sort of
historical parable.

HOW HAS THIS HAPPENED? There are many reasons for it. One of the chief
reasons is that everywhere in our country the local succession of the
generations has been broken. We can trace this change through a series of
stories that we may think of as cultural landmarks.

Throughout most of our literature the normal thing was for the generations
to succeed one another in place. The memorable stories occurred when this
succession became difficult or was threatened in one way or another. The
norm is given in Psalm 128, in which succession is seen as one of the
rewards of righteousness: "thou shalt see thy children's children, and
peace upon Israel."

The longing for this result seems to have been universal. It presides also
over the Odyssey, in which Odysseus' desire to return home is certainly
regarded as normal. And this story is much concerned with the psychology of
family succession. Telemachus, Odysseus' son, comes of age in preparing for
the return of his long-absent father. And it seems almost that Odysseus is
enabled to return home by his son's achievement of enough manhood to go in
search of him. Long after the return of both father and son, Odysseus' life
will complete itself, as we know from Teiresias' prophecy in Book XI, much
in the spirit of Psalm 128:



"a seaborn death

soft as this hand of mist will come upon you

when you are wearied out with sick old age,

your country folk in blessed peace around you."

The Bible makes much of what it sees as the normal succession – in such
stories as those of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, David and Solomon – in
which the son completes the work or the destiny of the father. The parable
of the Prodigal Son is prepared for by such Old Testament stories as that
of Jacob, who errs, wanders, returns, is forgiven, and takes his place in
the family lineage.

Shakespeare was concerned throughout his working life with the theme of the
separation and rejoining of parents and children. It is there at the
beginning in The Comedy of Errors, and he is still thinking about it when
he gets to King Lear and Pericles and The Tempest. When Lear walks onstage
with Cordelia dead in his arms, the theme of return is fulfilled, only this
time in the way of tragedy.

Wordsworth's poem, "Michael," written in 1800, is in the same line of
descent. It is the story of a prodigal son, and return is still understood
as the norm; before the boy's departure, he and his father make a
"covenant" that he will return home and carry on his father's life as a
shepherd on their ancestral pastures. But the ancient theme here has two
significant differences; the son leaves home for an economic reason, and he
does not return. Old Michael, the father, was long ago "bound/ In surety
for his brother's son." This nephew has failed in his business, and Michael
is "summoned to discharge the forfeiture." Rather than do this by selling a
portion of their patrimony, the aged parents decide that they must send
their son to work for another kinsman in the city in order to earn the
necessary money. The country people all are poor; there is no money to be
earned at home. When the son has cleared the debt from the land, he will
return to it to "possess it, free as the wind/ That passes over it." But
the son goes to the city, is corrupted by it, eventually commits a crime,
and is forced "To seek a hiding place beyond the seas."

"Michael" is a sort of cultural watershed. It carries on the theme of
return that goes back to the beginnings of Western culture, but that return
now is only a desire and a memory; in the poem it fails to happen. Because
of that failure, we see in "Michael," not just a local story of the Lake
District in England, which it is, but the story of rural families in the
industrial nations from Wordsworth's time until today. The children go to
the cities, for reasons imposed by the external economy, and they do not
return; eventually the parents die and the family land, like Michael's, is
sold to a stranger. By now it has happened millions of times.

And by now the transformation of the ancient story is nearly complete. Our
society, on the whole, has forgot or repudiated the theme of return. Young
people still grow up in rural families, and go off to the cities, not to
return. But now it is felt that this is what they should do. Now the norm
is to leave and not return. And this applies as much to urban families as
to rural ones. In the present urban economy the parent-child succession is
possible only among the economically privileged. The children of industrial
underlings are not likely to succeed their parents at work, and there is
not reason for them to wish to do so. We are not going to have an
industrial "Michael" in which it is perceived as tragic that a son fails to
succeed his father on an assembly line.

According to the new norm, the child's destiny is not to succeed the
parents, but to outmode them; succession has given way to supersession. And
this norm is institutionalized, not in great communal stories, but in the
education system. The schools are no longer oriented to a cultural
inheritance which it is their duty to pass on unimpaired, but to the
career, which is to the future, of the child. The orientation is thus
necessarily theoretical, speculative, and central. The child is not
educated to return home and be of use to the place and community; he or she
is educated to leave home and earn money in a provisional future that has
nothing to do with place or community. And parents with children in school
are likely to find themselves immediately separated from their children,
and made useless to them, by the intervention of new educational
techniques, technologies, methods and languages. School systems innovate as
compulsively and eagerly as factories. It is no wonder that, under these
circumstances, "educators" tend to look upon the parents as a bad
influence, and wish to take the children away from home as early as
possible. And many parents, in truth, are now finding their children an
encumbrance at home – where there is no useful work for them to do –
and are glad enough to turn them over to the state for the use of the
future. The extent to which this order of things is now dominant is
suggested by a recent magazine article on the discovery of what purports to
be a new idea:

The idea that a parent can be a teacher at home has caught the attention

of educators... Parents don't have to be graduates of Harvard or Yale to
help

their kids learn and achieve...

Thus the home as a place where a child can learn has become an idea of the
professional "educator," who retains control of the idea. The home, as the
article makes clear, is not to be a place where children may learn on their
own, but a place where they are taught by parents according to the
instructions of professional "educators." In fact, "The Home and School
Institute, Inc., of Washington, D.C." (known, of cours, as "The HSI") has
been "founded to show... how to involve families in their kids'
educations."

In such ways as this, the nuclei of home and community have been invaded by
the organizations, just as have the nuclei of cells and atoms. And we must
be careful to see that the old cultural centers of home and community were
made vulnerable to this invasion by their failure as economies. If there is
no household or community economy, then family members and neighbors are no
longer useful to each other. When people are no longer useful to each
other, then the centripetal force of family and community fails, and people
fall into dependence upon exterior economies and organizations. The
hegemony of professionals and professionalism erects itself upon local
failure. And from then on the locality exists merely as a market for
consumer goods as a source of "raw material," human and natural. The local
schools no longer serve the local community; they serve the government's
economy and the economy's government. Unlike the local community, the
government and the economy cannot be served with affection, but only with
professional zeal or professional boredom. Professionalism means more
interest in salary and less interest in what used to be known as
disciplines. And so we arrive at the idea, endlessly reiterated in the news
media, that education can be improved by bigger salaries for teachers –
which may be true, but not, as the proponents too often imply, by bigger
salaries alone. There must also be love of learning and of the cultural
tradition and of excellence. And this love cannot exist, because it makes
no sense, apart from the love of a place and community. Without this love,
education is only the importation into a local community of centrally
prescribed "career preparation" designed to facilitate the export of young
careerists.

Our children are educated, then, to leave home, not to stay home, and the
costs of this have been far too little acknowledged. One of the costs is
psychological, and the other is at once cultural and ecological

The natural or normal course of human growing-up must begin with some sort
of rebellion against one's parents, for it is clearly impossible to grow up
if one remains a child. But the child, in the process of rebellion and of
achieving the emotional and economic independence that rebellion ought to
lead to, finally comes to understand the parents as fellow humans and
fellow sufferers, and in some manner returns to them as their friend,
forgiven and forgiving the inevitable wrongs of family life. That is the
old norm, of which the story of the Prodigal son is an example.

The new norm, according to which the child leaves home as a student and
never lives at home again, interrupts the old course of coming of age at
the point of rebellion, so that the child is apt to remain stalled in
adolescence, never achieving any kind of reconciliation or friendship with
the parents. Of course, such a return and reconciliation cannot be achieved
without the recognition of mutual practical need. However, in the present
economy where individual dependences are so much exterior to both household
and community, family members often have no practical need or use for one
another. Hence, the frequent futility of attempts at a purely psychological
or emotional reconciliation.

And this interposition of rebellion and then of geographical and
occupational distance between parents and children may account for the
peculiar emotional intensity that our society attaches to innovation. We
appear to hate whatever went before, very much as an adolescent hates
parental rule, and to look upon its obsolescence as a kind of vengeance.
Thus we may explain industry's obsessive emphasis upon "this year's model,"
or the preoccupation of the professional "educators" with theoretical and
methodological innovation. And thus, in modern literature we have had for
many years an emphasis upon "originality" and the "anxiety of influence"
(an adolescent critical theory), as opposed, say, to Spenser's filial
admiration for Chaucer, or Dante's for Virgil.

But if the norm interrupts the development of the relation between children
and parents, that same interruption, ramifying through a community,
destroys the continuity and so the integrity of local life. As the children
depart, generation after generation, the place loses its memory of itself,
which is its history and its culture. And the local history, if it survives
at all, loses its place. It does no good for historians, folklorists, and
anthropologists to collect the songs and the stories and the lore that
comprise local culture and store them in books and archives. They cannot
collect and store, because they cannot know, the pattern of reminding that
can survive only in the living human community in its place. It is this
pattern that is the life of the local culture, and that brings it usefully
or pleasurably to mind. Apart from its local landmarks and occasions, the
local culture may be the subject of curiosity or of study, but it is also
dead.

THE LOSS OF LOCAL CULTURES IS, IN PART, A PRACTICAL LOSS and an economic
one. For one thing, such a culture contains, and conveys to succeeding
generations, the history of the use of the place and the knowledge of how
the place may be lived in and used. For another, the pattern of reminding
implies affection for the place and respect for it, and so, finally, the
local culture will carry the knowledge of how the place may be well and
lovingly used, and moreover the implicit command to use it only well and
lovingly. The only true and effective "operator's manual for spaceship
earth" is not a book that any human will ever write; it is hundreds of
thousands of local cultures.

Lacking an authentic local culture, a place is open to exploitation, and
ultimately destruction, from the center. Recently, for example, I heard the
dean of a prominent college of agriculture interviewed on the radio. What
have we learned, he was asked, from last summer's drouth? And he replied
that "we" need to breed more drouth resistance into plants, and that "we"
need a government "safety net" for farmers. He might have said that farmers
need to reexamine their farms and their circumstances in light of the
drouth, and to think again on such subjects as diversification, scale, and
the mutual helpfulness of neighbors. But he did not say that. To him, the
drouth was merely an opportunity for agribusiness corporations and the
government, by which the farmers and rural communities could only become
more dependent on the economy that is destroying them. This is as good an
example as any of the centralized thinking of a centralized economy – to
which the only effective answer that I know is a strong local economy and a
strong local culture.

For a long time now, the prevailing assumption has been that if the nation
is all right, then all the localities within it will be all right also. I
see little reason to believe that this is true. At present, in fact, both
the nation and the local economy are living at the expense of localities
and local communities – as all small town and country people have reason
to know. In rural America, which is in many ways a colony of what the
government and the corporations think of as a nation, most of us have
experienced the losses that I have been talking about; the departure of
young people, of soil and other so-called natural resources, and of local
memory. We feel ourselves crowded more and more into a dimensionless
present, in which the past is forgotten, and the future, even in our most
optimistic "projections," is forbidding and fearful. Who can desire a
future that is determined entirely by the purposes of the most wealthy and
the most powerful, and by the capacities of machines?

Two questions, then, remain: Is a change for the better possible? And who
has the power to make such a change? I still believe that a change for the
better is possible, but I confess that my belief is partly hope and partly
faith. No one who hopes for improvement should fail to see and respect the
signs that we may be approaching some sort of historical waterfall, past
which we will not, by changing our minds, be able to change anything else.
We know that at any time an ecological or a technological or a political
event that we will have allowed may remove from us the power to make change
and leave us with the mere necessity to submit to it. Beyond that, the two
questions are one: the possibility of change depends upon the existence of
people who have the power to change.

Does this power reside at present in the national government? That seems to
me extremely doubtful. To anyone who has read the papers during the recent
presidential campaign, it must be clear that at the highest level of
government there is, properly speaking, no political discussion. Are the
corporations likely to help us? We know, from long experience, that the
corporations will assume no responsibility that is not forcibly imposed
upon them by government. The record of the corporations is written too
plainly in verifiable damage to permit us to expect much from them. May we
look for help to the universities? Well, the universities are more and more
the servants of government and the corporations.

Most urban people evidently assume that all is well. They live too far from
the exploited and endangered sources of their economy to need to assume
otherwise. Some urban people are becoming disturbed about the contamination
of air, water, and food and that is promising, but there are not enough of
them yet to make much difference. There is enough trouble in the "inner
cities" to make them likely places of change, and evidently change is in
them, but it is desperate and destructive change. As if to perfect their
exploitation by other people, the people of the "inner cities" are
destroying both themselves and their places.

My feeling is that, if improvement is going to begin anywhere, it will have
to begin out in the country and in the country towns. This is not because
of any intrinsic virtue that can be ascribed to country people, but because
of their circumstances. Rural people are living, and have lived for a long
time, at the site of the trouble. They see all around them, every day, the
marks and scars of an exploitive national economy. They have much reason,
by now, to know how little real help is to be expected from somewhere else.
They still have, moreover, the remnants of local memory and local
community. And in rural communities there are still farms and small
businesses that can be changed according to the will and the desire of
individual people.

In this difficult time of failed public expectations, when thoughtful
people wonder where to look for hope, I keep returning in my own mind to
the thought of the renewal of the rural communities. I know that one
resurrected rural community would be more convincing and more encouraging
than all the government and university programs of the last fifty years,
and I think that it could be the beginning of the renewal of our country,
for the renewal of rural communities ultimately implies the renewal of
urban ones. But to be authentic, a true encouragement and a true beginning,
this would have to be a resurrection accomplished mainly by the community
itself. It would have to be done, not from the outside by the instruction
of visiting experts, but from the inside by the ancient rule of
neighborliness, by the love of precious things, and by the wish to be at
home.