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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Faustian economics: Hell hath no limits
  • Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2008 20:09:14 -0600


Market growers are local and low tech. And that's what it's all coming to.
This is why WE are the future of food. Nothing the supermarket chains can do
about it.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net
-----------------------------------------
"People of intelligence and ability seem now to be genuinely embarrassed by
any solution to any problem that does not involve high technology, a great
expenditure of energy, or a big machine."

Faustian economics: Hell hath no limits
by Wendell Berry, Harpers
http://www.energybulletin.net/42840.html

The general reaction to the apparent end of the era of cheap fossil fuel, as
to other readily forseeable curtailments, has been to delay any sort of
reckoning. The strategies of delay have been a sort of willed oblivion, or
visions of large profits to the manufacturers of such "biofuels" as ethanol
from corn or switchgrass, or the familiar unscientific faith that "science
will find an answer." The dominant response, in short, is a dogged belief
that what we call the American Way of Life will prove somehow indestructible.
We will keep on consuming, spending, wasting, and driving, as before, at any
cost to anything and everybody but ourselves.

... Our national faith so far has been: "There's always more." Our true
religion is a sort of autistic industrialism. People of intelligence and
ability seem now to be genuinely embarrassed by any solution to any problem
that does not involve high technology, a great expenditure of energy, or a
big machine.

... It is this economy of community destruction that, wittingly or
unwittingly, most scientists and technicians have served for the past two
hundred years. These scientists and technicians have justified themselves by
the proposition that they are the vanguard of progress, enlarging human
knowledge and power, and thus they have romanticized both themselves and the
predatory enterprises that they have served.

As a consequence, our great need now is for sciences and technologies of
limits, of domesticity, of what Wes Jackson of the Land Institute in Salina,
Kansas, has called "homecoming." These would be specifically human sciences
and technologies, working, as the best humans have always worked, within
self-imposed limits. The limits would be the accepted contexts of places,
communities, and neighborhoods, both natural and human.

... perhaps our most serious cultural loss in recent centuries is the
knowledge that some things, though limited, are inexhaustible. For example,
an ecosystem, even that of a working forest or farm, so long as it remains
ecologically intact, is inexhaustible. A small place, as I know from my own
experience, can provide opportunities of work and learning, and a fund of
beauty, solace, and pleasure -- in addition to its difficulties -- that
cannot be exhausted in a lifetime or in generations.

... And so, in confronting the phenomenon of "peak oil," we are really
confronting the end of our customary delusion of "more." Whichever way we
turn, from now on, we are going to find a limit beyond which there will be no
more. To hit these limits at top speed is not a rational choice. To start
slowing down, with the idea of avoiding catastrophe, is a rational choice,
and a viable one if we can recover the necessary political sanity. Of course
it makes sense to consider alternative energy sources, provided they make
sense. But we will have to re-examine the economic structures of our lives,
and conform them to the tolerances and limits of our earthly places. Where
there is no more, our one choice is to make the most and the best of what we
have. (END)





  • [Livingontheland] Faustian economics: Hell hath no limits, Tradingpost, 04/16/2008

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