Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Pete Vukovich <pvukovic1@yahoo.com>]

They were just talking about this on the Wendell Berry list - in and of itself a strange thing to have developed for a guy who doesn't want anything to do with computers.

BTW his new book 'What Matters?' is highly recommendable. Pretty much the same themes as in his other essays, but using examples which are current since it was just published. One interesting point he brought up (and this I believe applies to mountain destruction as well), is that this sort of thinking has been present since the dawn of the industrial age.

 He points out that in England in the late 1700's large unemployment was created when the industrial loom was introduced , along with the destruction of weaving/fiber communities  the quality of material (work) decreased. This lead not only to more poverty , but a quite a bit of protest regarding mechanization. These dissidents called themselves 'luddites'. The recipients of this progress were some of englands early 'mobile' class and as every mobile class is expected to do many moved into the first slums they could find in the cities in order to bask in the glory of their new found unemployment.

Fast forward to today's mountain top removal and the overlap is worth noting. The reason mountain tops are being removed as opposed to  tunneled into , is that modern mechanization permits fewer people (one or two guys in a steamshovel) to extract more coal the a couple dozen miners could previously with a greater profit margin for the shovel owner.  Whatever is left of the local mining communities (and farming ones) are further erroded to the benefit of the fewer, and the protestors are being called variably 'anti-progress' and 'luddites' this time by the industrialists. Of course the coal is the same quality , but the quantity of the damage is further reaching. One can only assume the folks who can no longer drink their water or use their land will be expected to take advantage of their mobility and settle in a suitable zone of urban blight.

I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that even after a couple hundred years the machines get bigger but the thinking seems to stay pretty much the same....



--- On Wed, 7/7/10, Tradingpost <tradingpost@lobo.net> wrote:

From: Tradingpost <tradingpost@lobo.net>
Subject: [Livingontheland] We Went to the Mountaintop But It Wasn't There
To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
Date: Wednesday, July 7, 2010, 6:12 PM

We Went to the Mountaintop But It Wasn't There
http://www.utne.com/Wild-Green/Wendell-Berry-Takes-His-Papers-and-Leaves\.aspx

Wendell Berry is truly a man of letters: The famously computer-hating
http://home.btconnect.com/tipiglen/berrynot.html  agrarian writer
still pens all his essays and books by hand. So it's got to hurt the
University of Kentucky to hear that it won't be getting his
voluminous archives as it had expected. Why? Because Berry, a man of
rock-hard principle, is offended that the university is naming a new
dorm for basketball players the Wildcat Coal Lodge in order to please
coal-friendly donors.

The Lexington Herald-Leader got its hands on the acid letter Berry sent
to the university regarding the matter. "It is now obviously wrong,
unjust and unfair," he wrote, "for your space and work to be
encumbered by a collection of papers that I no longer can consider
donating to the University."

The papers measure 60 cubic feet in volume and would fill about 100
boxes, the Herald-Leader reports. They remain at the school while Berry
negotiates their transfer to the Kentucky Historical Society in
Frankfort.

Are university officials surprised? They wouldn't be if they looked
back to this passage in a 2005 essay by Berry, which originally appeared
in the book Missing Mountains: We Went to the Mountaintop But It
Wasn't There: Kentuckians Write Against Mountaintop Removal
<http://www.amazon.com/Missing-Mountains-went-mountaintop-there/dp/18932\
39497/sr=8-1/qid=1157950242/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-5799459-3516852?ie=UTF8&s=b\
ooks>  (Wind Publications):





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