Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

Wendell Berry's The Idea of a Local Economy was, I believe, the single most 
important and helpful essay of our time. It was originally published in the 
Winter 2001 issue of Orion magazine. Since then it has generated a 
groundswell of discussion and ignited widespread movement away from corporate 
culture. The localization movement is one sign of this. It also shows we are 
far from helpless in the face of climate change, peak oil, and terminal 
economic decline. I passed that essay on to our lists a few years ago yet it 
seems more timely now than ever.  But when I first met Wendell in Santa Fe I 
had no clue who he was, and no idea his agrarian philosophy - this very 
article in fact - would affect my own philosophy of living and prompt me in 
retirement to move to the land and take up the unglamorous labor of a local 
market grower.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net
------------------------------------------

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


The Idea of a Local Economy by Wendell Berry
http://www.relocalize.net/node/4770
Originally published in the Winter 2001 issue of Orion magazine

Let us begin by assuming what appears to be true: that the so-called
"environmental crisis" is now pretty well established as a fact of our age.
The problems of pollution, species extinction, loss of wilderness, loss of
farmland, loss of topsoil may still be ignored or scoffed at, but they are
not denied. Concern for these problems has acquired a certain standing, a
measure of discussability, in the media and in some scientific, academic,
and religious institutions.

This is good, of course; obviously, we can't hope to solve these problems
without an increase of public awareness and concern. But in an age burdened
with "publicity," we have to be aware also that as issues rise into
popularity they rise also into the danger of oversimplification. To speak of
this danger is especially necessary in confronting the destructiveness of
our relationship to nature, which is the result, in the first place, of
gross oversimplification.

The "environmental crisis" has happened because the human household or
economy is in conflict at almost every point with the household of nature.
We have built our household on the assumption that the natural household is
simple and can be simply used. We have assumed increasingly over the last
five hundred years that nature is merely a supply of "raw materials," and
that we may safely possess those materials merely by taking them. This
taking, as our technical means have increased, has involved always less
reverence or respect, less gratitude, less local knowledge, and less skill.
Our methodologies of land use have strayed from our old sympathetic attempts
to imitate natural processes, and have come more and more to resemble the
methodology of mining, even as mining itself has become more technologically
powerful and more brutal.

And so we will be wrong if we attempt to correct what we perceive as
"environmental" problems without correcting the economic oversimplification
that caused them. This oversimplification is now either a matter of
corporate behavior or of behavior under the influence of corporate behavior.
This is sufficiently clear to many of us. What is not sufficiently clear,
perhaps to any of us, is the extent of our complicity, as individuals and
especially as individual consumers, in the behavior of the corporations.

What has happened is that most people in our country, and apparently most
people in the "developed" world, have given proxies to the corporations to
produce and provide all of their food, clothing, and shelter. Moreover, they
are rapidly giving proxies to corporations or governments to provide
entertainment, education, child care, care of the sick and the elderly, and
many other kinds of "service" that once were carried on informally and
inexpensively by individuals or households or communities. Our major
economic practice, in short, is to delegate the practice to others.

The danger now is that those who are concerned will believe that the
solution to the "environmental crisis" can be merely political - that the
problems, being large, can be solved by large solutions generated by a few
people to whom we will give our proxies to police the economic proxies that
we have already given. The danger, in other words, is that people will think
they have made a sufficient change if they have altered their "values," or
had a "change of heart," or experienced a "spiritual awakening," and that
such a change in passive consumers will cause appropriate changes in the
public experts, politicians, and corporate executives to whom they have
granted their political and economic proxies.

The trouble with this is that a proper concern for nature and our use of
nature must be practiced not by our proxy-holders, but by ourselves. A
change of heart or of values without a practice is only another pointless
luxury of a passively consumptive way of life. The "environmental crisis,"
in fact, can be solved only if people, individually and in their
communities, recover responsibility for their thoughtlessly given proxies.
If people begin the effort to take back into their own power a significant
portion of their economic responsibility, then their inevitable first
discovery is that the "environmental crisis" is no such thing; it is not a
crisis of our environs or surroundings; it is a crisis of our lives as
individuals, as family members, as community members, and as citizens. We
have an "environmental crisis" because we have consented to an economy in
which by eating, drinking, working, resting, traveling, and enjoying
ourselves we are destroying the natural, theGod-given world.

We live, as we must sooner or later recognize, in an era of sentimental
economics and, consequently, of sentimental politics. Sentimental communism
holds in effect that everybody and everything should suffer for the good of
"the many" who, though miserable in the present, will be happy in the future
for exactly the same reasons that they are miserable in the present.

Sentimental capitalism is not so different from sentimental communism as the
corporate and political powers claim. Sentimental capitalism holds in effect
that everything small, local, private, personal, natural, good, and
beautiful must be sacrificed in the interest of the "free market" and the
great corporations, which will bring unprecedented security and happiness to
"the many" - in, of course, the future.

These forms of political economy may be described as sentimental because
they depend absolutely upon a political faith for which there is no
justification, and because they issue a cold check on the virtue of
political and/or economic rulers. They seek, that is, to preserve the
gullibility of the people by appealing to a fund of political virtue that
does not exist. Communism and "free-market" capitalism both are modern
versions of oligarchy. In their propaganda, both justify violent means by
good ends, which always are put beyond reach by the violence of the means.
The trick is to define the end vaguely - "the greatest good of the greatest
number" or "the benefit of the many" - and keep it at a distance.

The fraudulence of these oligarchic forms of economy is in their principle
of displacing whatever good they recognize (as well as their debts) from the
present to the future. Their success depends upon persuading people, first,
that whatever they have now is no good, and second, that the promised good
is certain to be achieved in the future. This obviously contradicts the
principle - common, I believe, to all the religious traditions - that if
ever we are going to do good to one another, then the time to do it is now;
we are to receive no reward for promising to do it in the future. And both
communism and capitalism have found such principles to be a great
embarrassment. If you are presently occupied in destroying every good thing
in sight in order to do good in the future, it is inconvenient to have
people saying things like "Love thy neighbor as thyself" or "Sentient beings
are numberless, I vow to save them." Communists and capitalists alike,
"liberal" and "conservative" capitalists alike have needed to replace
religion with some form of determinism, so that they can say to their
victims, "I am doing this because I can’t do otherwise. It is not my fault.
It is inevitable." The wonder is how often organized religion has gone along
with this lie.

The idea of an economy based upon several kinds of ruin may seem a
contradiction in terms, but in fact such an economy is possible, as we see.
It is possible however, on one implacable condition: the only future good
that it assuredly leads to is that it will destroy itself. And how does it
disguise this outcome from its subjects, its short-term beneficiaries, and
its victims? It does so by false accounting. It substitutes for the real
economy, by which we build and maintain (or do not maintain) our household,
a symbolic economy of money, which in the long run, because of the
self-interested manipulations of the "controlling interests," cannot
symbolize or account for anything but itself. And so we have before us the
spectacle of unprecedented "prosperity" and "economic growth" in a land of
degraded farms, forests, ecosystems, and watersheds, polluted air, failing
families, and perishing communities.

This moral and economic absurdity exists for the sake of the allegedly
"free" market, the single principle of which is this: commodities will be
produced wherever they can be produced at the lowest cost, and consumed
wherever they will bring the highest price. To make too cheap and sell too
high has always been the program of industrial capitalism. The idea of the
global "free market" is merely capitalism's so-far-successful attempt to
enlarge the geographic scope of its greed, and moreover to give to its greed
the status of a "right" within its presumptive territory. The global "free
market" is free to the corporations precisely because it dissolves the
boundaries of the old national colonialisms, and replaces them with a new
colonialism without restraints or boundaries. It is pretty much as if all
the rabbits have now been forbidden to have holes, thereby "freeing" the
hounds.

The "right" of a corporation to exercise its economic power without
restraint is construed, by the partisans of the "free market," as a form of
freedom, a political liberty implied presumably by the right of individual
citizens to own and use property.

But the "free market" idea introduces into government a sanction of an
inequality that is not implicit in any idea of democratic liberty: namely
that the "free market" is freest to those who have the most money, and is
not free at all to those with little or no money. Wal-Mart, for example, as
a large corporation "freely" competing against local, privately owned
businesses has virtually all the freedom, and its small competitors
virtually none.

To make too cheap and sell too high, there are two requirements. One is that
you must have a lot of consumers with surplus money and unlimited wants. For
the time being, there are plenty of these consumers in the "developed"
countries. The problem, for the time being easily solved, is simply to keep
them relatively affluent and dependent on purchased supplies.

The other requirement is that the market for labor and raw materials should
remain depressed relative to the market for retail commodities. This means
that the supply of workers should exceed demand, and that the land-using
economy should be allowed or encouraged to overproduce.

To keep the cost of labor low, it is necessary first to entice or force
country people everywhere in the world to move into the cities - in the
manner prescribed by the United States' Committee for Economic Development
after World War II - and second, to continue to introduce labor-replacing
technology. In this way it is possible to maintain a "pool" of people who
are in the threatening position of being mere consumers, landless and also
poor, and who therefore are eager to go to work for low wages - precisely
the condition of migrant farm workersin the United States.

To cause the land-using economies to overproduce is even simpler. The
farmers and other workers in the world's land-using economies, by and large,
are not organized. They are therefore unable to control production in order
to secure just prices. Individual producers must go individually to the
market and take for their produce simply whatever they are paid. They have
no power to bargain or make demands. Increasingly, they must sell, not to
neighbors or to neighboring towns and cities, but to large and remote
corporations. There is no competition among the buyers (supposing there is
more than one), who are organized, and are "free" to exploit the advantage
of low prices. Low prices encourage overproduction as producers attempt to
make up their losses "on volume," and overproduction inevitably makes for
low prices. The land-using economies thus spiral downward as the money
economy of the exploiters spirals upward. If economic attrition in the
land-using population becomes so severe as to threaten production, then
governments can subsidize production without production controls, which
necessarily will encourage overproduction, which will lower prices - and so
the subsidy to rural producers becomes, in effect, a subsidy to the
purchasing corporations. In the land-using economies production is further
cheapened by destroying, with low prices and low standards of quality, the
cultural imperatives for good work and land stewardship.

This sort of exploitation, long familiar in the foreign and domestic
economies and the colonialism of modern nations, has now become "the global
economy," which is the property of a few supranational corporations. The
economic theory used to justify the global economy in its "free market"
version is again perfectly groundless and sentimental. The idea is that what
is good for the corporations will sooner or later - though not of course
immediately - be good for everybody.

That sentimentality is based in turn, upon a fantasy: the proposition that
the great corporations, in "freely" competing with one another for raw
materials, labor, and marketshare, will drive each other indefinitely, not
only toward greater "efficiencies" of manufacture, but also toward higher
bids for raw materials and labor and lower prices to consumers. As a result,
all the world's people will be economically secure - in the future. It would
be hard to object to such a proposition if only it were true.

But one knows, in the first place, that "efficiency" in manufacture always
means reducing labor costs by replacing workers with cheaper workers or with
machines.

In the second place, the "law of competition" does not imply that many
competitors will compete indefinitely. The law of competition is a simple
paradox: Competition destroys competition. The law of competition implies
that many competitors, competing on the "free market" will ultimately and
inevitably reduce the number of competitors to one. The law of competition,
in short, is the law of war.

In the third place, the global economy is based upon cheap long-distance
transportation, without which it is not possible to move goods from the
point of cheapest origin to the point of highest sale. And cheap
long-distance transportation is the basis of the idea that regions and
nations should abandon any measure of economic self-sufficiency in order to
specialize in production for export of the few commodities or the single
commodity that can be most cheaply produced. Whatever may be said for the
"efficiency" of such a system, its result (and I assume, its purpose) is to
destroy local production capacities, local diversity, and local economic
independence.

This idea of a global "free market" economy, despite its obvious moral flaws
and its dangerous practical weaknesses, is now the ruling orthodoxy of the
age. Its propaganda is subscribed to and distributed by most political
leaders, editorial writers, and other "opinion makers." The powers that be,
while continuing to budget huge sums for "national defense," have apparently
abandoned any idea of national or local self-sufficiency, even in food. They
also have given up the idea that a national or local government might justly
place restraints upon economic activity in order to protect its land and its
people.

The global economy is now institutionalized in the World Trade Organization,
which was set up, without election anywhere, to rule international trade on
behalf of the "free market" - which is to say on behalf of the supranational
corporations - and to overrule, in secret sessions, any national or regional
law that conflicts with the "free market." The corporate program of global
free trade and the presence of the World Trade Organization have legitimized
extreme forms of expert thought. We are told confidently that if Kentucky
loses its milk-producing capacity to Wisconsin, that will be a "success
story." Experts such as Stephen C. Blank, of the University of California,
Davis, have proposed that "developed" countries, such as the United States
and the United Kingdom, where food can no longer be produced cheaply enough,
should give up agriculture altogether.

The folly at the root of this foolish economy began with the idea that a
corporation should be regarded, legally, as "a person." But the limitless
destructiveness of this economy comes about precisely because a corporation
is not a person. A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a
number of persons have sold their moral allegiance. As such, unlike a
person, a corporation does not age. It does not arrive, as most persons
finally do, at a realization of the shortness and smallness of human lives;
it does not come to see the future as the lifetime of the children and
grandchildren of anybody in particular. It can experience no personal hope
or remorse, no change of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its
business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a
bigger pile of money. The stockholders essentially are usurers, people who
"let their money work for them," expecting high pay in return for causing
others to work for low pay. The World Trade Organization enlarges the old
idea of the corporation-as-person by giving the global corporate economy the
status of a super government with the power to overrule nations. I don¹t
mean to say, of course, that all corporate executives and stockholders are
bad people. I am only saying that all of them are very seriously implicated
in a bad economy.

Unsurprisingly, among people who wish to preserve things other than money -
for instance, every region's native capacity to produce essential goods -
there is a growing perception that the global "free market" economy is
inherently an enemy to the natural world, to human health and freedom, to
industrial workers, and to farmers and others in the land-use economies; and
furthermore, that it is inherently an enemy to good work and good economic
practice. I believe that this perception is correct and that it can be shown
to be correct merely by listing the assumptions implicit in the idea that
corporations should be "free" to buy low and sell high in the world at
large. These assumptions, so far as I can make them out, are as follows:

1. That stable and preserving relationships among people, places, and things
do not matter and are of no worth.
2. That cultures and religions have no legitimate practical or economic
concerns.
3. That there is no conflict between the "free market" and political
freedom, and no connection between political democracy and economic
democracy.
4. That there can be no conflict between economic advantage and economic
justice.
5. That there is no conflict between greed and ecological or bodily health.
6. That there is no conflict between self-interest and public service.
7. That the loss or destruction of the capacity anywhere to produce
necessary goods does not matter and involves no cost.
8. That it is all right for a nation's or a region's subsistence to be
foreign based, dependent on long-distance transport, and entirely controlled
by corporations.
9. That, therefore, wars over commodities - our recent Gulf War, for example
- are legitimate and permanent economic functions.
10. That this sort of sanctioned violence is justified also by the
predominance of centralized systems of production supply, communications,
and transportation, which are extremely vulnerable not only to acts of war
between nations, but also to sabotage and terrorism.
11. That it is all right for poor people in poor countries to work at poor
wages to produce goods for export to affluent people in rich countries.
12. That there is no danger and no cost in the proliferation of exotic
pests, weeds, and diseases that accompany international trade and that
increase with the volume of trade.
13. That an economy is a machine, of which people are merely the
interchangeable parts. One has no choice but to do the work (if any) that
the economy prescribes, and to accept the prescribed wage.
14. That, therefore, vocation is a dead issue. One does not do the work that
one chooses to do because one is called to it by Heaven or by one's natural
or God-given abilities, but does instead the work that is determined and
imposed by the economy. Any work is all right as long as one gets paid for
it.

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."

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, brings destruction and slavery. Without
prosperous local economies, the people have no power and the land no voice.
-------