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THIS
ESSAY owes its existence to anxiety and to insomnia.
l write,
as l must, from the point of view of a country person, a member of a
small rural community that has been dwindling rapidly since the end
of World War II. Only the most fantastical optimism could ignore the
possibility that my community is doomed-that it was doomed by the
overwhelming victory of industrialism over agrarianism (both North
and South) in the Civil War and the history both subsequent and
consequent to it. It may be that my community-its economy, its faith,
its local knowledge, its affection for itself and its place-will
dwindle on for another generation or two and then disappear or be
replaced by a commuters' suburb. If it is doomed, then I have no
doubt that much else is doomed also, for I cannot see how a nation, a
society, or a civilization can live while its communities die.
If
that were all my thought, then I might find some comfort in despair.
I might resign myself and at least sleep better. But I am convinced
that the death of my community is not necessary and not inevitable. I
believe that such remnant communities as my own, fallen to the ground
as they are, might still become the seeds of a better civilization
than we now have-better economy, better faith, better knowledge and
affection. That is what keeps me awake, that difficult hope.
My
hope, I must say, subsists on an extremely meager diet-a reducer's
diet. It takes some strength from the knowledge that we may be
looking doom squarely in the face, from the knowledge that human
beings, let alone human societies, cannot live indefinitely by poison
and fire. It takes some strength from knowing that more and more
people seem to have this knowledge; more and more people seem to know
that we now have to choose consciously, perhaps for the first time in
human history, between doom and something better.
My hope
feeds, however uneasily, on such a phrase as "the forest
commons" that has recently floated up into public discussion. I
think I know the worry and the hope from which that phrase comes. It
comes from a growing awareness of the mutuality of the health of
human beings and the health of nature, and this is encouraging. I am
uneasy about it because I think I know also what the word "commons"
means. It means a property belonging to a community, which the
community members are free to use because they will use it with
culturally prescribed care and restraint. I do not think that this
even remotely applies to us.
Historically, the commons
belonged to the local community, not to "the public." The
possibility of a commons, in the true sense, depends on local
adaptation, a process in which Americans have, at times and in
places, made a few credible beginnings, always frustrated by the
still-dominant belief that local adaptation does not matter because
localities do not matter. At present it is generally true that we do
not know in any useful sense where we are, much less how to act on
the basis of such knowledge. If we humans know where we are and how
to live well and conservingly there, then we can have and use the
place "in common." Otherwise-and it is still far otherwise
with us-we must find appropriate ways to parcel out, and so limit,
both privilege and responsibility.
The idea of a commons
applies perhaps to most tribal cultures. It applied to English
culture before the long and bitter history of enclosure. It applied,
for a while, in New England. But we in Kentucky, as in most of the
rest of the United States, never had such an idea. We have had the
idea of private property, the idea of public property, and the idea
of the commonwealth-and we have valued those ideas in about that
order We have never thought very well or very thoroughly about any of
those ideas. Nevertheless, I prefer the word "commonwealth"
(in its literal and now somewhat outdated sense) to the word
"commons," for the very reason that "commonwealth"
comes to us with so great a historical burden. We have been saying it
and ignoring it for so long that though it accurately names our
condition and our hope, it is not likely to lead to too much
optimism. Too much optimism, I am afraid, will lead us to understand
by "commons" only what we have so far understood by
"public"-and that clearly would solve none of our problems
.
In my own politics and economics I am a Jeffersonian-or, I
might more accurately say, I am a democrat and an agrarian. I believe
that land that is to be used should be divided into small parcels
among a lot of small owners; I believe therefore in the right of
private property. I believe that, given our history and tradition, a
large population of small property holders offers the best available
chance for local cultural adaptation and good stewardship of the
land-provided that the property holders are secure, legally and
economically, in their properties.
To say that the right of
private property has often been used to protect individuals and even
global corporations in their greed is not to say that it cannot
secure individuals in an appropriate economic share in their country
and in a consequent economic and political independence, just as
Thomas Jefferson thought it could. That is the political
justification of the right of private property. There is also, I
believe, an ecological justification. If landed properties are
democratically divided and properly scaled, and if family security in
these properties can be preserved over a number of generations, then
we will greatly increase the possibility of authentic cultural
adaptation to local homelands. Not only will we make more apparent to
successive generations the necessary identity between the health of
human communities and the health of local ecosystems but we will also
give people the best motives for caretaking and we will call into
service the necessary local intelligence and imagination. Such an
arrangement would give us the fullest possible assurance that our
forests and farmlands would be used by people who know them best and
care the most about them.
My interest here is in preserving
the possibility of intimacy in the use of the land. Some of us still
understand the elaborate care necessary to preserve marital and
familial and social intimacy, but I am arguing also for the necessity
of preserving silvicultural and agricultural intimacy. The
possibility of intimacy between worker and place is virtually
identical with the possibility of good work. True intimacy in work,
as in love, means lifelong commitment; it means knowing what you are
doing. The industrial consumer and the industrial producer believe
that after any encounter between people or between people and the
world there will be no consequences. The consumptive society is
interested in sterile or inconsequential intimacy, which is a
fantasy. But suppose, on the contrary, that we try to serve the
cultural forms and imperatives that prepare adequately for the
convergence of need with fertility, of human life with the natural
world. Then we must think of consequences; we must think of the
children.
I am an uneasy believer in the right of private
property because I know that this right can be understood as the
right to destroy property, which is to say the natural or the given
world. I do not believe that such a right exists, even though its
presumed existence has covered the destruction of a lot of land. A
considerable amount of this destruction has been allowed by our
granting to corporations the status of ' persons" capable of
holding ' private property." Most corporate abuse or destruction
of land must be classified, I think, as either willing or
intentional. The willingness to use land on a large scale implies
inevitably at least a willingness to damage it. But because we have
had, alongside our history of land abuse, a tradition or at least a
persistent hope of agrarian economy and settled community life, the
damage to the land that has been done by individual owners is more
likely to be attributable to ignorance or to economic constraint To
speak sensibly of property and of the rights and uses of property, we
must always observe this fundamental distinction between corporate
property and property that is truly private-that is, property of
modest or appropriate size owned by an individual.
Our
history, obviously, gives us no hope that, in our present lack of a
general culture of land stewardship, the weaknesses in our idea of
private property can be corrected by the idea of public
property.
There is some hope, I think, in the idea of the
commonwealth, which seems to acknowledge than we all have a common
interest or share in the land, an interest that precedes our interest
in private property. Of the precedence of our share in the common
wealth the best evidence is that we share also a common health; the
two, in fact, are inseparable. If we have the "right to life,"
as we have always supposed, then that right must stand upon the
further right to air, water, food, clothing, and shelter.
It
follows that every person exercising the right to hold private
property has an obligation to secure to the rest of us the right to
live from that property. He or she has an obligation to use it in
such a way as to not impair or diminish our rightful interest in
it.
But-and here is the catch-that obligation on the part of
the landowner implies a concurrent obligation on the part of society
as a whole. If we give our proxy to the landowner to use-and, as is
always implied, to take care of-the land on our behalf, then we are
obliged to make the landowner able to afford not only to use the land
but also to care properly for it. This is where the grossest error of
our civilization shows itself
In giving a few farmers our
proxies to produce food in the public behalf for very little economic
return, we have also given them our proxies to care for the land in
the public behalf for no economic return at all. This is our
so-called cheap-food policy, which is in fact an anti-farming policy,
an anti-farmer policy, and an anti-land policy. We have also a
cheap-timber policy, which is similarly calamitous.
We hold
the land under a doctrine of private property that in practice
acknowledges no commonwealth. By allowing or forcing the owners and
users of productive land to share in the commonwealth so minimally
that they are poorly paid for their work and not paid at all for
their stewardship, we have stood an ancient pyramid on its tip. We
now have an enormous population of urban consumers dependent on a
tiny population of rural producers. And this involves a number of
problems that are not merely quantitative or practical.
In her
paper "Agricultural Industrialization and the Loss of
Biodiversity, " my friend Laura Jackson helps us to see that as
farming families dwindle away, we lose not just essential and perhaps
irreplaceable knowledge but also an old appreciation and affection
that may be even more valuable. Here is what she says about the
industrialisation of livestock production; though she is talking
about agriculture, her principle applies just as obviously to
forestry
While innovative farmers can still raise hogs and
dairy cattle more cheaply and with fewer environmental impacts than
the high-density livestock facility, they suffer as their neighbors
go out of business and the infrastructure and markets for livestock
crumble.... Without a market to sell their animals, even the most
practical, conscientious, and sustainable operations, including those
of the Amish and Mennonites, are in danger of disappearing. When the
minds responsible for these farms have left the countryside, replaced
by minimum-wage labor in factory-style facilities, so will the
potential to conserve and improve the agricultural
landscape.
Conservationists have now begun to acknowledge that
the health and productivity of the land constitute a commonwealth. I
say they have begun to acknowledge this because at present they tend
to acknowledge it only so far as it pertains to forested or otherwise
"wild" land, the land that most conservationists understand
as "natural." They wish to protect the common wealth of the
forested land by some such doctrine as "the forest commons."
But the danger is that this will accomplish only one more anomalous
inversion; from a doctrine of private landownership that acknowledges
no commonwealth, we might go to a doctrine of commonwealth in which
there are no private shares. "The forest commons," I am
afraid, may become an idea that will separate forestry and forest
conservation from the rural economy, just as industrial agriculture
is an idea that has separated farming and soil conservation from the
rural economy.
To insist that our public forests should be
cared for and used as a commonwealth already strains belief, for it
raises immediately the question of where we are to find the people
who know how and are adequately motivated to care for it. Our
history-which is still the history of a colonial economy-could not
produce an adequate number of people adequately prepared to be good
stewards of the public lands any more than of lands "privately'
owned. Colonial economies place no value on stewardship, and do not
teach, encourage, reward, or even protect it.
To remedy this
failure, we will have to realize that not just forest land but all
land, private and public, farmed or forested, is "natural."
All land is natural and all nature is a common wealth. Wherever we
live, we live in nature and by using nature, and this use everywhere
implies the requirement of good stewardship. But we will have to do
more than merely change our minds. We will have to implement a
different kind of education and a different kind of economy.If in
order to protect our forest land we designate it a commons or
commonwealth separate from private ownership, then who will care for
it? The absentee timber companies who see no reason to care about
local consequences? The same government agencies and agents who are
failing at present to take good care of our public forests? Is it
credible that people inadequately skilled and inadequately motivated
to care well for the land can be made
to care well for it by public insistence that they do so?
The
answer is obvious: you cannot get good care in the use of the land by
demanding it from public officials. That you have the legal right to
demand it does not at all improve the case. If one out of every two
of us should become a public official, we would be no nearer to good
land stewardship than we are now. The idea that a displaced people
might take appropriate care of places is merely absurd: there is no
sense in it and no hope. Our present ideas of conservation and of
public stewardship are not enough. Duty is not enough. Sentiment is
not enough. No mere law, divine or human, could conceivably be enough
to protect the land while we are using it.
If we want the land
to be cared for, then we must have people living on and from the land
who are able and willing to care for it. If-as the idea of
commonwealth clearly implies-landowners and land users are
accountable to their fellow citizens for their work, their products,
and their stewardship, then these landowners and land users must be
granted an equitable membership in the economy.
Thirty years
ago, one of the organizations leading the fight against strip mining
was the Appalachian Group to Save the Land and the People. This
seemed an exemplary organization-an informed local response to a
local calamity-and I was strongly affected and influenced by it. What
most impressed me was the complexity of purpose announced in its
name: it proposed to save the land and
the people. This seems to me still an inescapable necessity. You
really cannot specialize the work of conservation. You cannot save
the land apart from the people or the people apart from the land. To
save either, you must save both-that is a lesson taught nowhere
better than in the economic history of the Commonwealth of Kentucky.
To save both the land and the people, you need a strong rural
economy. In truth, you need several strong rural economies, for even
so small a state as ours has many regions, and a good economy joins
local people conservingly to their local landscapes.
If we are
serious about conservation, then we are going to have to quit
thinking of our work as a sequence of specialized and temporary
responses to a sequence of specialized and temporary emergencies. We
will have to realize finally that our work is economic. We are going
to have to come up with competent, practical, at-home answers to the
humblest human questions: How should we live? How should we keep
house? How should we provide ourselves with food, clothing shelter,
heat, light, learning, amusement, rest? How, in short, ought we to
use the world?
No conservation issue could lead more directly
to those questions than the issue of Kentucky forestry. It is true
that our state contains some sizable areas of private or public
forest land, but we cannot proceed on the assumption that we are
dealing with large tracts of timber or that we can ever hope to
conserve our forests solely by forest conservation policies, however
enlightened.
In Kentucky we have 12,700,000 acres of forest,
more than 90 percent of which is privately owned. We must assume, I
think, that many of the 440,000 owners of this land would fiercely
oppose any public appropriation of their modest properties or any
diminution of their rights therein. Although I know very well the
dangers to the common wealth and health inherent in private property
rights, I would be one of those fierce opposers.
The first of
my reasons is my too little faith in the longterm efficacy of public
stewardship. Perhaps the public will prove equal to the task of
wilderness preservation, though that is by no means certain. But it's
not easy to imagine the conditions under which highly competent and
responsible public stewardship of land that is in use might be
maintained for many generations and through the inevitable changes of
politics and economics.
My second reason is that I do have
some faith in the longterm efficacy of private stewardship, again
provided that the connection between the people and the land can be
made secure. To be preserved in use, even our public lands must come
to be intimately connected to their local communities by means of
strong local economies .
The two great ruiners of privately
owned land, as I have said, are ignorance and economic constraint.
And these tend to be related. People have ruined land mainly by
overusing it-by forcing it to produce beyond its power to recover or
by forcing it to produce what it never should have been asked to
produce. And behind this overuse, almost always, has been economic
need. Sometimes ignorance and poverty have been directly related: the
land would have produced better immediately had it been better used.
But economic constraint also preserves ignorance in land use:
families have often failed or starved out before they had time to
learn to use the land well. Land that passes rapidly from one owner
or user to another will not be adequately studied or learned and so
will almost predictably be abused. The more marginal or difficult the
land, the worse will be the abuse.
This work of ignorance and
economic constraint, moreover, has been abetted by our time's radical
and artificial division of the producer's interest in the land from
the interest of the consumer. In reality, these two interests are the
same, and yet our idea of "the market" has encouraged us to
think of the interests of producer and consumer as two interests, not
only divided but competitive. And we have allowed many economic
enterprises and many agencies to interpose themselves between
producers and consumers, greatly increasing our bewilderment about
our economy, our connection to the land and to one another, and our
ecological and economic responsibilities. One result, to name only
the most prominent, is our so-called cheap-food policy, by which
farmers are put under pressure to abuse the land on behalf of urban
consumers, many of whom think of themselves as conservationists.
In
Kentucky we are now moving rapidly toward the end of such economic
fantasy. Conservationists wishing to establish good forestry
practices in our state will immediately see the hopelessness of
conventional economics and of conventional conservation if only they
will consider that many of the owners of Kentuckys forests are
farmers, and therefore that one of the greatest threats to our
forests is the continuing stress within our agricultural economy. We
would-be conservers of the state's forests must see that the
interests of producers and consumers, of landowners and
conservationists are not divided but only the two sides of a
mutuality of interest that waits to be defined. Conservation clearly
cannot advance much farther here unless conservationists can make
common cause with small landowners and land users. And our state's
small farmers and other small landowners desperately need the
understanding and help of conservationists.
I would beg my
fellow conservationists, as I would beg my fellow farmers, to realize
that we must quit thinking of our countryside piecemeal, in terms of
separate products or enterprises: tobacco, timber, livestock,
vegetables, feed grains, recreation, and so on. We must begin to
think of the human use of each of our regions or localities as one
economy, both rural and urban, involving all the local products. We
must learn to see such local economies as the best and perhaps the
only means we have of preserving that system of ecological and
cultural connections that is, inescapably, our common wealth.
If
conservationists are serious about conservation, they will have to
realize that the best conserver of land in use will always be the
small owner or operator, farmer or forester or both, who lives within
a securely placed family and community, who knows how to use me land
in the best way, and who can afford to do so. Conservationists who
are also farmers or foresters already feel the tension between the
demands of ecology and the demands of our present economy; they
already feel the urgency of our need for a better economy and better
work.
Now consumer-conservationists must begin to feel these
strains and stresses also. they will have to acquaint themselves with
the requirements of good agriculture. They will have to see that a
good food economy does not enrich the agribusiness and grocery
corporations at the expense of everything and everybody else, but
pays to the real producers the real costs of good food production in
Capital, labor, skill, and care. They will have to become active and
knowledgeable participants in their local food economies. They will
have to see that their local Sierra Club chapter is no more important
to conservation than their local food-marketing co-op.
Similarly,
they will have to understand the value of and give their support and
patronage to the formation of good local forest economies,
permanently in place, scaled so as to use the local forests in the
best way, and able to pay a price for timber that will encourage the
best forestry and logging practices. These three issues of local
economy, scale, and price will determine the quality of use. Our
present economy pretty well dictates that a farmer's woodlot or
forested hillside will be roughly logged once in a generation or once
in a lifetime, and otherwise ignored or used for grazing. A good
local forest economy would both protect the forest from abuse and
make it a continuing source of income to the landowner and the local
community.
Let me give just one very suggestive example of
what I mean. My friend Gene Logsdon owns fourteen acres of woodland
in Ohio, and his son, Jerry, has a small woodworking shop. One of
Gene's main reasons for owning his wooded acreage is that he likes
trees. He likes to walk in his woods and look at the wildflowers or
watch warblers in the spring. His two woodlots would be valuless or
even repugnant to him as fourteen acres of stumps. At the same time,
a part of his fascination with his small farm, including his
woodlots, is in his economic relation to it. He uses his land because
using it makes economic sense and gives pleasure. He logs his
woodlands very selectively for firewood and lumber, taking mostly
dead or dying or defective trees-and always leaving some dead trees
in hospitality to the birds and animals. Every few years he
accumulates enough logs for a day's sawing, and then he hires a man
with a portable band saw to come and saw the logs into boards. Here
is what he wrote to me in response to something I had written about
local forest economies:
You could have made the point that
not only do woodlot owners lack bargaining power but when the wood
comes back to the local lumberyard the price is atrocious. Jerry
tells me that the last time we had the band saw man in to saw logs,
we came away from a day's work with something like 3,ooo board feet
of good white oak lumber, worth $3,ooo or $4,ooo. and this was all
from blemished or poor-grade logs that we could not have sold at all
to a timber buyer The band sawyer charged us $350! Not only that, but
we got a few board feet of mulberry, pear, and sassafras for
furniture accents. The mulberry and pear were big old yard trees that
a regular sawmill would never take because of possible hardware in
the log. A band sawyer can take the risk of hitting a nail because a
dulled band-saw blade can be sharpened for $15.
This is an
excellent example of intimacy in land use. This is the way a good
forest economy reaches the ground. Such intimacy enables pleasure,
good care, attention to details, awareness of small opportunities,
diversity, and thrift. It prevents abuse, preserves the forest, and
produces an economic return. A fourteen-acre woodland that supplies a
household's winter heat and $1,000 worth of sawed lumber a year is
contributing significant income-considerably more, in fact, than an
equal acreage of corn. We should note in passing that Gene's
woodlands have produced this income probably without diminishment of
their value as standing timber. Moreover, as he well knows, such farm
woodlands might also produce fence posts, medicinal or edible herbs,
Christmas wreaths, mushrooms, and other products usable or
marketable. We must also understand that this sort of forestry and
forest economics cannot expectably or even imaginably be practiced by
a public agency or a timber company.
But let us not limit our
thinking just to the economics of woodlands. Let us think of the
thousands of farm woodlands in Kentucky not just as the possible
basis of a system of good regional forest economies but as parts of
family farms that include, in addition to their woodlands, some land
that is arable and some that is in permanent pasture. Such farms in
Kentucky are capable of producing an astonishing variety of
marketable products: forest products, livestock, row crops, herbs and
mushrooms, fruits and vegetables. They can produce these good and
necessary things in great abundance indefinitely, protecting in the
process the commonwealth of air, water, forests, and soils, granted
only the one condition: vigorous local economies capable of
supporting a stable and capable rural population, rewarding them
appropriately for both their products and their srewardship. The
development of such economies ought to be the primary aim of our
conservation effort. Such development is not only desirable; it is
increasingly necessary and increasingly urgent.
Wendell
Berry is the author of thirty two books of fiction, poetry. and
essays, including Sabbaths;
Sex, Economy, Freedom, & Community;
and What Are People
For? He has farmed
a hillside in his native Henry County, Kentucky, for thirty years. A
former professor of English at the University of Kentucky, he has
received numerous awards for his work, including most recently the T
S. Eliot Award, The Aiken Taylor Award for Poetry, the John Hay Award
of the Orion Society, and The
Christian Century's
Award for Excellence in Poetry.
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