I finally managed to find the article. Need to trim that double url, Toni.
I've been reading Wendell Berry for decades and have enjoyed most of his
work. He is an articulate advocate who loves the land. Occasionally he is
problematic to me, as in his argument against the computer and his apologia
for tobacco.
Berry often ends his arguments with telling us what we need to do and here
he does so several times. Well, to effect the changes Berry advocates, what
we need to do is to stop increasing our population and to change our
American lifestyle. Although the tide of population movement into the
cities has been reversed, our country will be predominately urban for the
foreseeable future. Most urban dwellers today are the children of urban
dwellers, whose memory of the land is obscure, so they have little
knowledge of or sympathy for the land. And they have most of the votes. And
they dominate the economy.
Land conservation increasingly requires compromises to modern lifestyle. We
can't use the Earth without changing its face. We can't have our coal and
have undisturbed land, too. We can't have low-price beef and have bucolic
pastures sparsely populated with cattle, too. And we can't build
subdivisions and shopping malls and retain prime farmland, too. These are
choices our society has made. These are choices each of us makes with each
trip through the checkout line. They are the natural result of a free
enterprise system, rising population, and an evolving lifestyle.
There is a clear momentum to our society. The direction in which it is
going is not helpful to the land. And each one of us is contributing to
that direction.