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This article is an abridgement of an essay that appears in the 20th
Anniversary Issue of ORION, the magazine of the ORION Society. The
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This essay appeared in the 20th Anniversary issue of Orion. It in was
drawn from this spring's "The Future of Agrarianism Conference" which
was held April 25-28 at Georgetown College in Lexington, KY. It has
been further abridged for the web, where this post was drawn from. If
you would like to read the full version, please click here
https://ssl.crocker.com/orionsoc/freeom.cfm for a FREE copy of this
special 20th Anniversary Issue.
Please make time to read this essay carefully. It literally drips wisdom.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
THE AGRARIAN STANDARD
by Wendell Berry
The Unsettling of America WAS PUBLISHED twenty-five years ago; it is
still in print and is still being read. As its author, I am tempted
to be glad of this, and yet, if I believe what I said in that book,
and I still do, then I should be anything but glad. The book would
have had a far happier fate if it could have been disproved or made
obsolete years ago.
It remains true because the conditions it describes and opposes, the
abuses of farmland and farming people, have persisted and become
worse over the last twenty-five years. In 2002 we have less than half
the number of farmers in the United States that we had in 1977. Our
farm communities are far worse off now than they were then. Our soil
erosion rates continue to be unsustainably high. We continue to
pollute our soils and streams with agricultural poisons. We continue
to lose farmland to urban development of the most wasteful sort. The
large agribusiness corporations that were mainly national in 1977 are
now global, and are replacing the world's agricultural diversity,
which was useful primarily to farmers and local consumers, with
bioengineered and patented monocultures that are merely profitable to
corporations. The purpose of this now global economy, as Vandana
Shiva has rightly said, is to replace "food democracy" with a
worldwide "food dictatorship."
To be an agrarian writer in such a time is an odd experience. One
keeps writing essays and speeches that one would prefer not to write,
that one wishes would prove unnecessary, that one hopes nobody will
have any need for in twenty-five years. My life as an agrarian writer
has certainly involved me in such confusions, but I have never
doubted for a minute the importance of the hope I have tried to
serve: the hope that we might become a healthy people in a healthy
land.
We agrarians are involved in a hard, long, momentous contest, in
which we are so far, and by a considerable margin, the losers. What
we have undertaken to defend is the complex accomplishment of
knowledge, cultural memory, skill, self-mastery, good sense, and
fundamental decency -- the high and indispensable art -- for which we
probably can find no better name than "good farming." I mean farming
as defined by agrarianism as opposed to farming as defined by
industrialism: farming as the proper use and care of an immeasurable
gift.
I believe that this contest between industrialism and agrarianism now
defines the most fundamental human difference, for it divides not
just two nearly opposite concepts of agriculture and land use, but
also two nearly opposite ways of understanding ourselves, our fellow
creatures, and our world.
THE WAY OF INDUSTRIALISM is the way of the machine. To the industrial
mind, a machine is not merely an instrument for doing work or amusing
ourselves or making war; it is an explanation of the world and of
life. Because industrialism cannot understand living things except as
machines, and can grant them no value that is not utilitarian, it
conceives of farming and forestry as forms of mining; it cannot use
the land without abusing it.
Industrialism prescribes an economy that is placeless and displacing.
It does not distinguish one place from another. It applies its
methods and technologies indiscriminately in the American East and
the American West, in the United States and in India. It thus
continues the economy of colonialism. The shift of colonial power
from European monarchy to global corporation is perhaps the dominant
theme of modern history. All along, it has been the same story of the
gathering of an exploitive economic power into the hands of a few
people who are alien to the places and the people they exploit. Such
an economy is bound to destroy locally adapted agrarian economies
everywhere it goes, simply because it is too ignorant not to do so.
And it has succeeded precisely to the extent that it has been able to
inculcate the same ignorance in workers and consumers.
To the corporate and political and academic servants of global
industrialism, the small family farm and the small farming community
are not known, not imaginable, and therefore unthinkable, except as
damaging stereotypes. The people of "the cutting edge" in science,
business, education, and politics have no patience with the local
love, local loyalty, and local knowledge that make people truly
native to their places and therefore good caretakers of their places.
This is why one of the primary principles in industrialism has always
been to get the worker away from home. From the beginning it has been
destructive of home employment and home economies. The economic
function of the household has been increasingly the consumption of
purchased goods. Under industrialism, the farm too has become
increasingly consumptive, and farms fail as the costs of consumption
overpower the income from production.
The industrial contempt for anything small, rural, or natural
translates into contempt for uncentralized economic systems, any sort
of local self-sufficiency in food or other necessities. The
industrial "solution" for such systems is to increase the scale of
work and trade. It brings Big Ideas, Big Money, and Big Technology
into small rural communities, economies, and ecosystems-the
brought-in industry and the experts being invariably alien to and
contemptuous of the places to which they are brought in. There is
never any question of propriety, of adapting the thought or the
purpose or the technology to the place.
The result is that problems correctable on a small scale are replaced
by large-scale problems for which there are no large-scale
corrections. Meanwhile, the large-scale enterprise has reduced or
destroyed the possibility of small-scale corrections. This exactly
describes our present agriculture. Forcing all agricultural
localities to conform to economic conditions imposed from afar by a
few large corporations has caused problems of the largest possible
scale, such as soil loss, genetic impoverishment, and groundwater
pollution, which are correctable only by an agriculture of locally
adapted, solar-powered, diversified small farms-a correction that,
after a half century of industrial agriculture, will be difficult to
achieve.
The industrial economy thus is inherently violent. It impoverishes
one place in order to be extravagant in another, true to its
colonialist ambition. A part of the "externalized" cost of this is
war after war.
INDUSTRIALISM BEGINS WITH technological invention. But agrarianism
begins with givens: land, plants, animals, weather, hunger, and the
birthright knowledge of agriculture. Industrialists are always ready
to ignore, sell, or destroy the past in order to gain the entirely
unprecedented wealth, comfort, and happiness supposedly to be found
in the future. Agrarian farmers know that their very identity depends
on their willingness to receive gratefully, use responsibly, and hand
down intact an inheritance, both natural and cultural, from the past.
I said a while ago that to agrarianism farming is the proper use and
care of an immeasurable gift. The shortest way to understand this, I
suppose, is the religious way. Among the commonplaces of the Bible,
for example, are the admonitions that the world was made and approved
by God, that it belongs to Him, and that its good things come to us
from Him as gifts. Beyond those ideas is the idea that the whole
Creation exists only by participating in the life of God, sharing in
His being, breathing His breath. "The world," Gerard Manley Hopkins
said, "is charged with the grandeur of God." Some such thoughts would
have been familiar to most people during most of human history. They
seem strange to us, and what has estranged us from them is our
economy. The industrial economy could not have been derived from such
thoughts any more than it could have been derived from the golden
rule.
If we believed that the existence of the world is rooted in mystery
and in sanctity, then we would have a different economy. It would
still be an economy of use, necessarily, but it would be an economy
also of return. The economy would have to accommodate the need to be
worthy of the gifts we receive and use, and this would involve a
return of propitiation, praise, gratitude, responsibility, good use,
good care, and a proper regard for the unborn. What is most
conspicuously absent from the industrial economy and industrial
culture is this idea of return. Industrial humans relate themselves
to the world and its creatures by fairly direct acts of violence.
Mostly we take without asking, use without respect or gratitude, and
give nothing in return.
To perceive the world and our life in it as gifts originating in
sanctity is to see our human economy as a continuing moral crisis.
Our life of need and work forces us inescapably to use in time things
belonging to eternity, and to assign finite values to things already
recognized as infinitely valuable. This is a fearful predicament. It
calls for prudence, humility, good work, propriety of scale. It calls
for the complex responsibilities of caretaking and giving-back that
we mean by "stewardship." To all of this the idea of the immeasurable
value of the resource is central.
WE CAN GET TO the same idea by a way a little more economic and
practical, and this is by following through our literature the
ancient theme of the small farmer or husbandman who leads an abundant
life on a scrap of land often described as cast-off or poor. This
figure makes his first literary appearance, so far as I know, in
Virgil's Fourth Georgic:
I saw a man,
An old Cilician, who occupied
An acre or two of land that no one wanted,
A patch not worth the ploughing, unrewarding
For flocks, unfit for vineyards; he however
By planting here and there among the scrub
Cabbages or white lilies and verbena
And flimsy poppies, fancied himself a king
In wealth, and coming home late in the evening
Loaded his board with unbought delicacies.
Virgil's old squatter, I am sure, is a literary outcropping of an
agrarian theme that has been carried from earliest times until now
mostly in family or folk tradition, not in writing, though other such
people can be found in books. Wherever found, they don't vary by much
from Virgil's prototype. They don't have or require a lot of land,
and the land they have is often marginal. They practice subsistence
agriculture, which has been much derided by agricultural economists
and other learned people of the industrial age, and they always
associate frugality with abundance.
In my various travels, I have seen a number of small homesteads like
that of Virgil's old farmer, situated on "land that no one wanted"
and yet abundantly productive of food, pleasure, and other goods. And
especially in my younger days, I was used to hearing farmers of a
certain kind say "They may run me out, but they won't starve me out"
or "I may get shot, but I'm not going to starve." Even now, if they
cared, I think agricultural economists could find small farmers who
have prospered, not by "getting big," but by practicing the ancient
rules of thrift and subsistence, by accepting the limits of their
small farms, and by knowing well the value of having a little land.
How do we come at the value of a little land? We do so, following
this strand of agrarian thought, by reference to the value of no
land. Agrarians value land because somewhere back in the history of
their consciousness is the memory of being landless. This memory is
implicit, in Virgil's poem, in the old farmer's happy acceptance of
"an acre or two of land that no one wanted." If you have no land you
have nothing: no food, no shelter, no warmth, no freedom, no life. If
we remember this, we know that all economies begin to lie as soon as
they assign a fixed value to land. People who have been landless know
that the land is invaluable; it is worth everything. Pre-agricultural
humans, of course, knew this too. And so, evidently, do the animals.
It is a fearful thing to be without a "territory." Whatever the
market may say, the worth of the land is what it always was: It is
worth what food, clothing, shelter, and freedom are worth; it is
worth what life is worth. This perception moved the settlers from the
Old World into the New. Most of our American ancestors came here
because they knew what it was to be landless; to be landless was to
be threatened by want and also by enslavement. Coming here, they bore
the ancestral memory of serfdom. Under feudalism, the few who owned
the land owned also, by an inescapable political logic, the people
who worked the land.
Thomas Jefferson, who knew all these things, obviously was thinking
of them when he wrote in 1785 that "it is not too soon to provide by
every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a
little portion of land. The small landholders are the most precious
part of a state. . ." He was saying, two years before the adoption of
our constitution, that a democratic state and democratic liberties
depend upon democratic ownership of the land. He was already
anticipating and fearing the division of our people into settlers,
the people who wanted "a little portion of land" as a home, and,
virtually opposite to those, the consolidators and exploiters of the
land and the land's wealth, who would not be restrained by what
Jefferson called "the natural affection of the human mind." He wrote
as he did in 1785 because he feared exactly the political theory that
we now have: the idea that government exists to guarantee the right
of the most wealthy to own or control the land without limit.
In any consideration of agrarianism, this issue of limitation is
critical. Agrarian farmers see, accept, and live within their limits.
They understand and agree to the proposition that there is "this much
and no more." Everything that happens on an agrarian farm is
determined or conditioned by the understanding that there is only so
much land, so much water in the cistern, so much hay in the barn, so
much corn in the crib, so much firewood in the shed, so much food in
the cellar or freezer, so much strength in the back and arms -- and
no more. This is the understanding that induces thrift, family
coherence, neighborliness, local economies. Within accepted limits,
these become necessities. The agrarian sense of abundance comes from
the experienced possibility of frugality and renewal within limits.
This is exactly opposite to the industrial idea that abundance comes
from the violation of limits by personal mobility, extractive
machinery, long-distance transport, and scientific or technological
breakthroughs. If we use up the good possibilities in this place, we
will import goods from some other place, or we will go to some other
place. If nature releases her wealth too slowly, we will take it by
force. If we make the world too toxic for honeybees, some compound
brain, Monsanto perhaps, will invent tiny robots that will fly about
pollinating flowers and making honey.
TO BE LANDLESS IN an industrial society obviously is not at all times
to be jobless and homeless. But the ability of the industrial economy
to provide jobs and homes depends on prosperity, and on a very shaky
kind of prosperity too. It depends on "growth" of the wrong things --
on what Edward Abbey called "the ideology of the cancer cell" -- and
on greed with purchasing power. In the absence of growth, greed, and
affluence, the dependents of an industrial economy too easily suffer
the consequences of having no land: joblessness, homelessness, and
want. This is not a theory. We have seen it happen.
I don't think that being landed necessarily means owning land. It
does mean being connected to a home landscape from which one may live
by the interactions of a local economy and without the routine
intervention of governments, corporations, or charities.
In our time it is useless and probably wrong to suppose that a great
many urban people ought to go out into the countryside and become
homesteaders or farmers. But it is not useless or wrong to suppose
that urban people have agricultural responsibilities that they should
try to meet. And in fact this is happening. The agrarian population
among us is growing, and by no means is it made up merely of some
farmers and some country people. It includes urban gardeners, urban
consumers who are buying food from local farmers, consumers who have
grown doubtful of the healthfulness, the trustworthiness, and the
dependability of the corporate food system -- people, in other words,
who understand what it means to be landless.
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This essay has been abridged for the web. If you would like to read
the full version, see the links above for a Free Trial copy of this
special 20th Anniversary Issue.
Wendell Berry's many books of poetry and prose include The Unsettling
of America, What Are People For?, and Another Turn of the Crank. His
more recent books include A Place on Earth, Life is a Miracle, and
Jayber Crow. His newest work, In the Presence of Fear, is a
collection of three important essays on terrorism and globalization
all first published in Orion publications.
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