Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

Wendell Berry

IN DISTRUST OF MOVEMENTS
http://www.resurgence.org/resurgence/issues/berry198.htm

The movements which deal with single issues or single solutions are bound
to fail because they cannot control effects while leaving causes in place.

I  HAVE HAD WITH MY friend Wes Jackson a number of useful conversations
about the necessity of getting out of movements — even movements that
have seemed necessary and dear to us — when they have lapsed into
self-righteousness and self-betrayal, as movements seem almost invariably
to do. People in movements too readily learn to deny to others the rights
and privileges they demand for themselves. They too easily become unable to
mean their own language, as when a “peace movement” becomes violent.
They often become too specialized, as if finally they cannot help taking
refuge in the pinhole vision of the institutional intellectuals. They
almost always fail to be radical enough, dealing finally in effects rather
than causes. Or they deal with single issues or single solutions, as if to
assure themselves that they will not be radical enough.

And so I must declare my dissatisfaction with movements to promote soil
conservation or clean water or clean air or wilderness preservation or
sustainable agriculture or community health or the welfare of children.
Worthy as these and other goals may be, they cannot be achieved alone. I am
dissatisfied with such efforts because they are too specialized, they are
not comprehensive enough, they are not radical enough, they virtually
predict their own failure by implying that we can remedy or control effects
while leaving causes in place. Ultimately, I think, they are insincere;
they propose that the trouble is caused by other people; they would like to
change policy but not behaviour.

The worst danger may be that a movement will lose its language either to
its own confusion about meaning and practice, or to pre-emption by its
enemies. I remember, for example, my naïve confusion at learning that it
was possible for advocates of organic agriculture to look upon the
“organic method” as an end in itself. To me, organic farming was
attractive both as a way of conserving nature and as a strategy of survival
for small farmers.

Imagine my surprise in discovering that there could be huge “organic”
monocultures. And so I was not too surprised by the recent attempt of the
United States Department of Agriculture to appropriate the “organic”
label for food irradiation, genetic engineering, and other desecrations of
the corporate food economy. Once we allow our language to mean anything
that anybody wants it to mean, it becomes impossible to mean what we say.
When “homemade” ceases to mean neither more nor less than “made at
home”, then it means anything, which is to say that it means nothing.

AS YOU SEE, I have good reasons for declining to name the movement I think
I am a part of. I am reconciled to the likelihood that from time to time it
will name itself and have slogans, but I am not going to use its slogans or
call it by any of its names.

Let us suppose that we have a Nameless Movement for Better Land Use and
that we know we must try to keep it active, responsive and intelligent for
a long time. What must we do?

What we must do above all, I think, is try to see the problem in its full
size and difficulty. If we are concerned about land abuse, then we must see
that this is an economic problem. Every economy is, by definition, a
land-using economy. If we are using our land wrongly, then something is
wrong with our economy. This is difficult. It becomes more difficult when
we recognize that, in modern times, every one of us is a member of the
economy of everybody else.

But if we are concerned about land abuse, we have begun a profound work of
economic criticism. Study of the history of land use (and any local history
will do) informs us that we have had for a long time an economy that
thrives by undermining its own foundations. Industrialism, which is the
name of our economy, and which is now virtually the only economy of the
world, has been from its beginnings in a state of riot. It is based
squarely upon the principle of violence toward everything on which it
depends, and it has not mattered whether the form of industrialism was
communist or capitalist or whatever; the violence toward nature, human
communities, traditional agricultures and local economies has been
constant. The bad news is coming in, literally, from all over the world.
Can such an economy be fixed without being radically changed? I don’t
think it can.

The Captains of Industry have always counselled the rest of us to be
“realistic”. Let us, therefore, be realistic. Is it realistic to assume
that the present economy would be just fine if only it would stop poisoning
the air and water, or if only it would stop soil erosion, or if only it
would stop degrading watersheds and forest ecosystems, or if only it would
stop seducing children, or if only it would quit buying politicians, or if
only it would give women and favoured minorities an equitable share of the
loot? Realism, I think, is a very limited programme, but it informs us at
least that we should not look for bird eggs in a cuckoo clock.

OR WE CAN SHOW the hopelessness of single-issue causes and single-issue
movements by following a line of thought such as this: We need a continuous
supply of uncontaminated water. Therefore, we need (among other things)
soil-and-water-conserving ways of agriculture and forestry that are not
dependent on monoculture, toxic chemicals, or the indifference and violence
that always accompany big-scale industrial enterprises on the land.

Therefore, we need diversified, small-scale land economies that are
dependent on people. Therefore, we need people with the knowledge, skills,
motives and attitudes required by diversified, small-scale land economies.
And all this is clear and comfortable enough, until we recognize the
question we have come to: Where are the people?

Well, all of us who live in the suffering rural landscapes of the United
States know that most people are available to those landscapes only
recreationally. We see them bicycling or boating or hiking or camping or
hunting or fishing or driving along and looking around. They do not, in
Mary Austin’s phrase, “summer and winter with the land”. They are
unacquainted with the land’s human and natural economies. Though people
have not progressed beyond the need to eat food and drink water and wear
clothes and live in houses, most people have progressed beyond the domestic
arts — the husbandry and wifery of the world — by which those needful
things are produced and conserved. In fact, the comparative few who still
practise that necessary husbandry and wifery often are inclined to
apologize for doing so, having been carefully taught in our education
system that those arts are degrading and unworthy of people’s talents.
Educated minds, in the modern era, are unlikely to know anything about food
and drink, clothing and shelter. In merely taking these things for granted,
the modern educated mind reveals itself also to be as superstitious a mind
as ever has existed in the world. What could be more superstitious than the
idea that money brings forth food?

I AM NOT SUGGESTING, of course, that everybody ought to be a farmer or a
forester. Heaven forbid! I am suggesting that most people now are living on
the far side of a broken connection, and that this is potentially
catastrophic. Most people are now fed, clothed and sheltered from sources
toward which they feel no gratitude and exercise no responsibility. There
is no significant urban constituency, no formidable consumer lobby, no
noticeable political leadership, for good land-use practices, for good
farming and good forestry, for restoration of abused land, or for halting
the destruction of land by so-called “development”.

We are involved now in a profound failure of imagination. Most of us cannot
imagine the wheat beyond the bread, or the farmer beyond the wheat, or the
farm beyond the farmer, or the history beyond the farm. Most people cannot
imagine the forest and the forest economy that produced their houses and
furniture and paper; or the landscapes, the streams and the weather that
fill their pitchers and bathtubs and swimming pools with water. Most people
appear to assume that when they have paid their money for these things they
have entirely met their obligations.

Money does not bring forth food. Neither does the technology of the food
system. Food comes from nature and from the work of people. If the supply
of food is to be continuous for a long time, then people must work in
harmony with nature. That means that people must find the right answers to
a lot of hard practical questions. The same applies to forestry and the
possibility of a continuous supply of timber.

One way we could describe the task ahead of us is by saying that we need to
enlarge the consciousness and the conscience of the economy. Our economy
needs to know — and care — what it is doing. This is revolutionary, of
course, if you have a taste for revolution, but it is also a matter of
common sense.

Undoubtedly some people will want to start a movement to bring this about.
They probably will call it the Movement to Teach the Economy What It Is
Doing — the mtewiid. Despite my very considerable uneasiness, I will
agree to this, but on three conditions.

My first condition is that this movement should begin by giving up all hope
and belief in piecemeal, one-shot solutions. The present scientific quest
for odourless hog manure should give us sufficient proof that the
specialist is no longer with us. Even now, after centuries of reductionist
propaganda, the world is still intricate and vast, as dark as it is light,
a place of mystery, where we cannot do one thing without doing many things,
or put two things together without putting many things together. Water
quality, for example, cannot be improved without improving farming and
forestry, but farming and forestry cannot be improved without improving the
education of consumers — and so on.

The proper business of a human economy is to make one whole thing of
ourselves and this world. To make ourselves into a practical wholeness with
the land under our feet is maybe not altogether possible — how would we
know? — but, as a goal, it at least carries us beyond hubris, beyond the
utterly groundless assumption that we can subdivide our present great
failure into a thousand separate problems that can be fixed by a thousand
task forces of academic and bureaucratic specialists. That programme has
been given more than a fair chance to prove itself, and we ought to know by
now that it won’t work.

My second condition is that the people in this movement (the mtewiid)
should take full responsibility for themselves as members of the economy.
If we are going to teach the economy what it is doing, then we need to
learn what we are doing. This is going to have to be a private movement as
well as a public one. If it is unrealistic to expect wasteful industries to
be conservers, then obviously we must lead in part the public life of
complainers, petitioners, protesters, advocates and supporters of stricter
regulations and saner policies. But that is not enough.

If it is unreasonable to expect a bad economy to try to become a good one,
then we must go to work to build a good economy. It is appropriate that
this duty should fall to us, for good economic behaviour is more possible
for us than it is for the great corporations with their miseducated
managers and their greedy and oblivious stockholders. Because it is
possible for us, we must try in every way we can to make good economic
sense in our own lives, in our households, and in our communities. We must
do more for ourselves and our neighbours. We must learn to spend our money
with our friends and not with our enemies. But to do this it is necessary
to renew local economies and revive the domestic arts.

In seeking to change our economic use of the world, we are seeking
inescapably to change our lives. The outward harmony that we desire between
our economy and the world depends finally upon an inward harmony between
our own hearts and the originating spirit that is the life of all
creatures, a spirit as near us as our flesh and yet forever beyond the
measures of this obsessively measuring age. We can grow good wheat and make
good bread only if we understand that we do not live by bread alone.

My third condition is that this movement should content itself to be poor.
We need to find cheap solutions, solutions within the reach of everybody,
and the availability of a lot of money prevents the discovery of cheap
solutions. The solutions of modern medicine and modern agriculture are all
staggeringly expensive, and this is caused in part, and maybe altogether,
because of the availability of huge sums of money for medical and
agricultural research.
Too much money, moreover, attracts administrators and experts as sugar
attracts ants — look at what is happening in our universities. We should
not envy rich movements that are organized and led by an alternative
bureaucracy living on the problems it is supposed to solve. We want a
movement that is a movement because it is advanced by all its members in
their daily lives.

NOW, HAVING COMPLETED this very formidable list of the problems and
difficulties, fears and fearful hopes that lie ahead of us, I am relieved
to see that I have been preparing myself all along to end by saying
something cheerful. What I have been talking about is the possibility of
renewing human respect for this Earth and all the good, useful and
beautiful things that come from it. I have made it clear, I hope, that I
don’t think this respect can be adequately enacted or conveyed by tipping
our hats to nature or by representing natural loveliness in art or by
prayers of thanksgiving or by preserving tracts of wilderness — although
I recommend all those things. The respect I mean can be given only by using
well the world’s goods that are given to us. This good use, which renews
respect — which is the only currency, so to speak, of respect — also
renews our pleasure. The callings and disciplines that I have spoken of as
the domestic arts are stationed all along the way from the farm to the
prepared dinner, from the forest to the dinner table, from stewardship of
the land to hospitality to friends and strangers. These arts are as
demanding and gratifying, as instructive and as pleasing, as the so-called
“fine arts”. To learn them is, I believe, the work that is our
profoundest calling. Our reward is that they will enrich our lives and make
us glad.

    This article is reprinted from Orion magazine.
    Wendell Berry is a farmer, a poet and a novelist.

    from Resurgence issue 198 - January / February 2000

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