Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

paul, tradingpost@riseup.net
---------------

"Without prosperous local economies, the people have no power and the land
no voice."
--  Wendell Berry


The Idea of a Local Economy part 2 by Wendell Berry
http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/archive_om/Berry/Local_Economy.html


These assumptions clearly prefigure a condition of total economy. A total
economy is one in which everything - "life forms," for instance, or the
"right to pollute" - is "private property" and has a price and is for sale.
In a total economy significant and sometimes critical choices that once
belonged to individuals or communities become the property of corporations.
A total economy, operating internationally, necessarily shrinks the powers
of state and national governments, not only because those governments have
signed over significant powers to an international bureaucracy or because
political leaders become the paid hacks of the corporations but also
because political processes - and especially democratic processes - are too
slow to react to unrestrained economic and technological development on a
global scale. And when state and national governments begin to act in
effect as agents of the global economy, selling their people for low wages
and their people's products for low prices, then the rights and liberties
of citizenship must necessarily shrink. A total economy is an unrestrained
taking of profits from the disintegration of nations, communities,
households, landscapes, and ecosystems. It licenses symbolic or artificial
wealth to "grow" by means of the destruction of the real wealth of all the
world.

Among the many costs of the total economy, the loss of the principle of
vocation is probably the most symptomatic and, from a cultural standpoint,
the most critical. It is by the replacement of vocation with economic
determinism that the exterior workings of a total economy destroy the
character and culture also from the inside.

In an essay on the origin of civilization in traditional cultures, Ananda
K. Coomaraswamy wrote that "the principle of justice is the same
throughout...[it is] that each member of the community should perform the
task for which he is fitted by nature..." The two ideas, justice and
vocation, are inseparable. That is why Coomaraswamy spoke of industrialism
as "the mammon of injustice," incompatible with civilization. It is by way
of the principle and practice of vocation that sanctity and reverence enter
into the human economy. It was thus possible for traditional cultures to
conceive that "to work is to pray."

A viable neighborhood is a community; and a viable community is made up of
neighbors who cherish and protect what they have in common.

AWARE OF INDUSTRIALISM'S potential for destruction, as well as the
considerable political danger of great concentrations of wealth and power
in industrial corporations, American leaders developed, and for a while
used, the means of limiting and restraining such concentrations, and of
somewhat equitably distributing wealth and property. The means were: laws
against trusts and monopolies, the principle of collective bargaining, the
concept of one-hundred-percent parity between the land-using and the
manufacturing economies, and the progressive income tax. And to protect
domestic producers and production capacities it is possible for governments
to impose tariffs on cheap imported goods. These means are justified by the
government's obligation to protect the lives, livelihoods, and freedoms of
its citizens. There is, then, no necessity or inevitability requiring our
government to sacrifice the livelihoods of our small farmers, small
business people, and workers, along with our domestic economic independence
to the global "free market." But now all of these means are either weakened
or in disuse. The global economy is intended as a means of subverting them.

In default of government protections against the total economy of the
supranational corporations, people are where they have been many times
before: in danger of losing their economic security and their freedom, both
at once. But at the same time the means of defending themselves belongs to
them in the form of a venerable principle: powers not exercised by
government return to the people. If the government does not propose to
protect the lives, livelihoods, and freedoms of its people, then the people
must think about protecting themselves.

How are they to protect themselves? There seems, really, to be only one
way, and that is to develop and put into practice the idea of a local
economy - something that growing numbers of people are now doing. For
several good reasons, they are beginning with the idea of a local food
economy. People are trying to find ways to shorten the distance between
producers and consumers, to make the connections between the two more
direct, and to make this local economic activity a benefit to the local
community. They are trying to learn to use the consumer economies of local
towns and cities to preserve the livelihoods of local farm families and
farm communities. They want to use the local economy to give consumers an
influence over the kind and quality of their food, and to preserve and
enhance the local landscapes. They want to give everybody in the local
community a direct, long-term interest in the prosperity, health, and
beauty of their homeland. This is the only way presently available to make
the total economy less total. It was once, I believe, the only way to make
a national or a colonial economy less total. But now the necessity is
greater.

I am assuming that there is a valid line of thought leading from the idea
of the total economy to the idea of a local economy. I assume that the
first thought may be a recognition of one's ignorance and vulnerability as
a consumer in the total economy. As such a consumer, one does not know the
history of the products that one uses. Where, exactly, did they come from?
Who produced them? What toxins were used in their production? What were the
human and ecological costs of producing them and then of disposing of them?
One sees that such questions cannot be answered easily, and perhaps not at
all. Though one is shopping amid an astonishing variety of products, one is
denied certain significant choices. In such a state of economic ignorance
it is not possible to choose products that were produced locally or with
reasonable kindness toward people and toward nature. Nor is it possible for
such consumers to influence production for the better. Consumers who feel a
prompting toward land stewardship find that in this economy they can have
no stewardly practice. To be a consumer in the total economy, one must
agree to be totally ignorant, totally passive, and totally dependent on
distant supplies and self-interested suppliers.

And then, perhaps, one begins to see from a local point of view. One begins
to ask, What is here, what is in me, that can lead to something better?
>From a local point of view, one can see that a global "free market" economy
is possible only if nations and localities accept or ignore the inherent
instability of a production economy based on exports and a consumer economy
based on imports. An export economy is beyond local influence, and so is an
import economy. And cheap long-distance transport is possible only if
granted cheap fuel, international peace, control of terrorism, prevention
of sabotage, and the solvency of the international economy.

Perhaps one also begins to see the difference between a small local
business that must share the fate of the local community and a large
absentee corporation that is set up to escape the fate of the local
community by ruining the local community.

SO FAR AS I CAN SEE, the idea of a local economy rests upon only two
principles: neighborhood and subsistence. In a viable neighborhood,
neighbors ask themselves what they can do or provide for one another, and
they find answers that they and their place can afford. This, and nothing
else, is the practice of neighborhood. This practice must be, in part,
charitable, but it must also be economic, and the economic part must be
equitable; there is a significant charity in just prices.

Of course, everything needed locally cannot be produced locally. But a
viable neighborhood is a community; and a viable community is made up of
neighbors who cherish and protect what they have in common. This is the
principle of subsistence. A viable community, like a viable farm, protects
its own production capacities. It does not import products that it can
produce for itself. And it does not export local products until local needs
have been met. The economic products of a viable community are understood
either as belonging to the community's subsistence or as surplus, and only
the surplus is considered to be marketable abroad. A community, if it is to
be viable, cannot think of producing solely for export, and it cannot
permit importers to use cheaper labor and goods from other places to
destroy the local capacity to produce goods that are needed locally. In
charity, moreover, it must refuse to import goods that are produced at the
cost of human or ecological degradation elsewhere. This principle applies
not just to localities, but to regions and nations as well.



The principles of neighborhood and subsistence will be disparaged by the
globalists as "protectionism" - and that is exactly what it is. It is a
protectionism that is just and sound, because it protects local producers
and is the best assurance of adequate supplies to local consumers. And the
idea that local needs should be met first and only surpluses exported does
not imply any prejudice against charity toward people in other places or
trade with them. The principle of neighborhood at home always implies the
principle of charity abroad. And the principle of subsistence is in fact
the best guarantee of giveable or marketable surpluses. This kind of
protection is not "isolationism."

Albert Schweitzer, who knew well the economic situation in the colonies of
Africa, wrote nearly sixty years ago: "Whenever the timber trade is good,
permanent famine reigns in the Ogowe region because the villagers abandon
their farms to fell as many trees as possible." We should notice especially
that the goal of production was "as many...as possible." And Schweitzer
makes my point exactly: "These people could achieve true wealth if they
could develop their agriculture and trade to meet their own needs." Instead
they produced timber for export to "the world economy," which made them
dependent upon imported goods that they bought with money earned from their
exports. They gave up their local means of subsistence, and imposed the
false standard of a foreign demand ("as many trees as possible") upon their
forests. They thus became helplessly dependent on an economy over which
they had no control.

Such was the fate of the native people under the African colonialism of
Schweitzer¹s time. Such is, and can only be, the fate of everybody under
the global colonialism of our time. Schweitzer's description of the
colonial economy of the Ogowe region is in principle not different from the
rural economy now in Kentucky or Iowa or Wyoming. A total economy for all
practical purposes is a total government. The "free trade" which from the
standpoint of the corporate economy brings "unprecedented economic growth,"
from the standpoint of the land and its local populations, and ultimately
from the standpoint of the cities, is destruction and slavery. Without
prosperous local economies, the people have no power and the land no voice.

end