Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

What Else? By Wendell Berry Jul 15, 2010
http://thesolutionsjournal.com/node/669

For more than 100 years the coal-producing counties of eastern Kentucky have 
been dependent on the coal industry, which has dominated them politically 
and, submitting only to the limits of technology, has come near to ruining 
them. The legacy of the coal economy in the Kentucky mountains will be 
immense and lasting damage to the land and to the people. Much of the damage 
to the land and the streams, and to water quality downstream, will be 
irreparable within historical time. The lastingness of the damage to the 
people will, to a considerable extent, be determined by the people.

The future of the people will, in turn, be determined by the kind of economy 
that may come to supplement and finally to replace the economy of coal. 
Contrary to my own prejudice and sense of caution, I am going to yield here, 
briefly, to the temptation to talk about the future.

In talking about the future, wishes have a certain standing. My wish for 
eastern Kentucky, as for the rest of the state, is that the economies of the 
future might originate in the local use of local intelligence. The coal 
economy, by contrast, has been an imposed economy, coming in from the outside 
and also coming down from the high perches of wealth and power. It is the 
product of an abstracting industrial and mercenary intelligence, alien both 
to the nature of the land and to the minds and lives of the people. But as we 
humans seem always to have known, though we have often needed to be reminded, 
freedom is founded upon the land and upon the free use of local intelligence 
in husbanding the land. Disfranchisement approaches the absolute when 
powerful outsiders do your thinking for you. This can happen only when local 
intelligence is degraded and disvalued and when, as a consequence, political 
responsibility is sold out.

The local use of local intelligence must start with the local landscape. And 
so, as a necessary discipline for any wishing, we must ask what, besides 
coal, the landscape of eastern Kentucky offers to its people. The answer is 
that the other great natural resource of the region is its forest. Though the 
forest has a long history of abuse, and though huge parcels have been and are 
being destroyed outright by surface mining, forestry and the economy of 
forest products offer the greatest opportunities to local intelligence. And 
whereas the coal economy is an economy based upon the exhaustion of the 
resource, the forest, by good use, can be made sustainable.

The other important resource of the region is a significant, if limited, 
capacity for sustainable food production. The landscape is predominately 
steep and most of it is obviously best suited for forestry, but there are 
some bottomlands, gentler slopes, and ridges that can be used without damage 
as pastures or croplands or gardens. This is made thinkable as a prospect by 
the numerous people of the region who, as any observant traveler will notice, 
are excellent gardeners, who practice other arts of subsistence such as 
beekeeping, and who by such means have kept alive the spirit of 
self-sufficiency and independence.

I don’t know how many such people there are. Nor do I know the number of 
acres that might properly be used to produce food. I don’t know how near the 
region might come to feeding itself. But common sense and mere caution 
require that every region should become as self-sufficient as possible in 
food production, just as every community should sustain itself as far as 
possible by the good use of its land.

As in the rest of the state, the forestry and farming of eastern Kentucky 
have been wasteful, and the coal companies have made the topsoil and the 
forest as temporary as coal. But if the region is to replace, or survive, the 
coal economy, it must develop sustainable ways of using its forest ecosystems 
and productive soils.

We might like to suppose that it would be better for eastern Kentucky, and 
for the whole state, if university and government experts should ever become 
inclined to think about a coal-less future for the region. Maybe so. But we 
should be extremely uneasy about supposing so.

If these experts ever begin to dare to think beyond their long addiction to 
coal power, coal money, and such fantasies as “clean coal,” then we should 
expect and prepare for a noisy tumult of central planning, summoning of 
outside experts, grant-proposing, visions of high-tech development, souping 
up of technical education, economic incentives, tax breaks, “job creation,” 
and marketing of cheap labor. The result, in sum, would be yet another 
imposed economy for the region, making light (again) of the local economic 
potential of the local landscape, of local intelligence, local history, and 
local culture. Industrial intellectuals, as we know, do not hesitate to 
“apply” ideas and technologies to places they don’t live in and know nothing 
about. They are recognizable by their contempt for everything they regard as 
“provincial” and their inability to tolerate anything modest or local. They 
will run in headlong panic from whatever is small in scale, low in cost, or 
“old-fashioned.”

We are not confronting the question of whether or not another exploitive 
economy will try to fasten itself upon the region. That is happening already, 
most noticeably in the appearance of timber industries that operate, 
expectably, without regard for forest ecology. It is horrible to think that 
the coal economy might be replaced by an economy that would in effect mine, 
and thus destroy, the forest.

And so I wish that in the face of continuing industrial destruction, and 
despite the official sound and fury of “economic development,” the people of 
eastern Kentucky will recognize in their own minds and places the powers of 
economic, political, and ecological self-defense and local self-determination.