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IN
OCTOBER OF 1993, the New York Times announced that the United States
Census Bureau would "no longer count the number of Americans who
live on farms " In explaining the decision, the Times provided
some figures as troubling as they were unsurprising. Between 1910 and
1920, we had 32 million farmers living on farms-about a third of our
population. By 1950, this population had declined, but our farm
population was still 23 million. By 199l, the number was only 4.6
million, less than 2 percent of the national population. That is, our
farm population had declined by an average of almost half a million
people a year for forty-one years. Also, by 199l, 32 percent of our
farm managers and 86 percent of our farmworkers did not live on the
land they farmed.
These figures describe a catastrophe that
is now virtually complete. They announce that we no longer have an
agricultural class that is, or that can require itself to be,
recognized by the government; we no longer have a "farm vote"
that is going to be of much concern to politicians. American farmers,
who over the years have wondered whether or not they counted, may now
put their minds at rest: they do not count. They have become
statistically insignificant.
We must not fail to appreciate
that this statistical insignificance of farmers is the successful
outcome of a national purpose and a national program. It is the
result of great effort and of principles rigorously applied. It has
been achieved with the help of expensive advice from university and
government experts, by the tireless agitation and exertion of the
agribusiness corporations, and by the renowned advantages of
competition-of our farmers among themselves and with farmers of other
countries. As a result, millions of country people have been
liberated from farming, landownership, self-employment, and other
idiocies of rural life.
But what has happened to our
agricultural communities is not exceptional any more than it is
accidental. This is simply the way a large, exploitive, absentee
economy works. For example, here is a New York Times News Service
report on "rape-and-run" logging in Montana:
Throughout
the 1980s, the Champion International Corp. went on a tree-cutting
binge in Montana, levelling entire forests at a rate that had not
been seen since the cut-and-run logging days of the last century.
Now the hangover has arrived. After liquidating much of its
valuable timber in the Big Sky country, Champion is quitting Montana,
leaving behind hundreds of unemployed mill workers, towns staggered
by despair and more than 1,000 square miles of heavily logged land.
The article goes on to speak
of the revival of "a century old complaint about large, distant
corporations exploiting Montana for its natural resources and then
leaving after the land is exhausted." And it quotes a Champion
spokesman, Tucker Hill, who said, "We are very sympathetic to
those people and very sad. But I don't think you can hold a company's
feet to the fire for everything they did over the last twenty years."
If you doubt that exhaustion is the calculated result of such
economic enterprise. you might consider the example of the mountain
counties of eastern Kentucky from which, over the last three-quarters
of a century enormous wealth has been extracted by the coal
companies, leaving the land wrecked and the people poor
The
same kind of thing is now happening in banking. In the county next to
mine an independent local bank was recently taken over by a large
out-of-state bank. Suddenly some of the local farmers and small
business people, who had been borrowing money from that bank for
twenty years and whose credit records were good, were refused credit
because they did not meet the requirements of a computer in I distant
city. Old and once-valued customers now find that they are known by
category rather than character. The directors and officers of the
large bank clearly have reduced their economic thinking to one very
simple question: "Would we rather make one big loan or many
small ones?" Or to put it only a little differently: "Would
we rather support one large enterprise or many small ones?" And
they have chosen the large over the small.
This economic
prejudice against the small has, of course, done immense damage for a
long rime to small or family sized businesses in city and country
alike. But that prejudice has often overlapped with an industrial
prejudice against anything rural and against the land itself, and
this prejudice has resulted in damages that are not only extensive
but also longlasting or permanent.
As we all know, we have
much to answer for in our use of this continent from the beginning,
but in the last half-century we have added to our desecrations of
nature a deliberate destruction of our rural communities. The
statistics I cited at the beginning are incontrovertible evidence of
this. But so is the condition of our farms and forests and rural
towns. If you have eyes to see, you can see that there is a limit
beyond which machines and chemicals cannot replace people; there is a
limit beyond which mechanical or economic efficiency cannot replace
care.
I am talking here about the common experience, the
common fate, of rural communities in our country for a long time. It
has also been, and it will increasingly be, the common fate of rural
communities in other countries. The message is plain enough, and we
have ignored it for too long: the great, centralized economic
entities of our time do not come into rural places in order to
improve them by "creating jobs." They come to take as much
of value as they can take, as cheaply and as quickly as they can take
it. They are interested in "job creation" only so long as
the jobs can be done more cheaply by humans than by machines. They
are not interested in the good health-economic or natural or human-of
any place on this earth. And if you should undertake to appeal or
complain to one of these great corporations on behalf of your
community, you would discover something most remarkable: you would
find that these organizations are organized expressly for the evasion
of responsibility. They are structures in which, as my brother says,
"the buck never stops." The buck is processed up the
hierarchy until finally it is passed to "the shareholders,"
who characteristically are too widely dispersed, too poorly informed,
and too unconcerned to be responsible for anything. The ideal of the
modern corporation is to be (in terms of its own advantage) anywhere
and (in terms of local accountability) nowhere. The message to
country people, in other words, is this: Don't expect favors from
your enemies.
And that message has a corollary that is just
as plain and just as much ignored: The governmental and educational
institutions from which rural people should by right have received
help have not helped. Rather than striving to preserve the rural
communities and economies and an adequate rural population, these
institutions have consistently aided, abetted, and justified the
destruction of every part of rural life. They have eagerly served the
superstition that all technological innovation is good. They have
said repeatedly that the failure of farm families, rural businesses,
and rural communities is merely the result of progress and efficiency
and is good for everybody.
We are now pretty obviously facing
the possibility of a world that the supranational corporations, and
the governments and educational systems that serve them, will control
entirely for their own enrichment-and, incidentally and inescapably,
for the impoverishment of all the rest of us This will be a world in
which the cultures that preserve nature and rural life will simply be
disallowed. It will be, as our experience already suggests, a
postagricultural world. But as we now begin to see, you cannot have a
postagricultural world that is not also postdemocratic,
postreligious, postnatural-in other words, it will be posthuman,
contrary to the best that we have meant by "humanity."
In
their dealings with the countryside and its people, the promotors of
the so-called global economy are following a set of principles that
can be stated as follows. They believe that a farm or a forest is or
ought to be the same as a factory; that care is only minimally
necessary in the use of the land; that affection is not necessary at
all; that for all practical purposes a machine is as good as a human;
that the industrial standards of production, efficiency, and
profitability are the only standards that are necessary; that the
topsoil is lifeless and inert; that soil biology is safely
replaceable by soil chemistry; that the nature or ecology of any
given place is irrelevant to the use of it; that there is no value in
human community or neighborhood; and that technological innovation
will produce only benign results.
These people see nothing
odd or difficult about unlimited economic growth or unlimited
consumption in a limited world. They believe that knowledge is
property and is power, and that it ought to be. They believe that
education is job training. They think that the summit of human
achievement is a high-paying job that involves no work. Their public
boast is that they are making a society in which everybody will be a
"winner"-but their private aim has been to reduce radically
the number of people who, by the measure of our historical ideals,
might be thought successful: the independent, the self-employed, the
owners of small businesses or small usable properties, those who work
at home.
The argument for joining the new international trade
agreements has been that there is going to be a one-world economy,
and we must participate or be left behind-though, obviously, the
existence of a one-world economy depends on the willingness of all
the world to join, The theory is that under the rule of
international, supposedly free trade, products will naturally flow
from the places where they can be best produced to the places where
they are most needed. This theory assumes the long-term safety and
sustainability of massive international transport, for which there
are no guarantees, just as there are no guarantees that products will
be produced in the best way or to the advantage of the workers who
produce them or mat they will reach or can be afforded by the people
who need them.
There are other unanswered questions about the
global economy, two of which are paramount: How can any nation or
region justify the destruction of a local productive capacity for the
sake of foreign trade? And how can people who have demonstrated their
inability to run national economies without inflation, usury,
unemployment, and ecological devastation now claim that they can do a
better job in running a global economy? American agriculture has
demonstrated by its own ruination that you cannot solve economic
problems just by increasing scale and, moreover, that increasing
scale is almost certain to cause other problems-ecological, social,
and cultural.
We can't go on too much longer, maybe, without
considering the likelihood that we humans are not intelligent enough
to work on the scale to which we have been tempted by our
technological abilities. Some such recognition is undoubtedly
implicit in American conservatives' long-standing objection to a big
central government. And so it has been odd to see many of these same
conservatives pushing for the establishment of a supranational
economy that would inevitably function as a government far bigger and
more centralized than any dreamed of before. Long experience has made
it clear-as we might say to the liberals-that to be free we must
limit the size of government and we must have some sort of home rule.
But it is just as clear-as we might say to the conservatives-that it
is foolish to complain about big government if we do not do
everything we can to support strong local communities and strong
community economies.
But in helping us to confront,
understand, and oppose the principles of the global economy, the old
political alignments have become virtually useless. Communists and
capitalists are alike in their contempt for country people, country
life, and country places. They have exploited the countryside with
equal greed and disregard. They are alike even in their plea that it
is right to damage the present in order to make "a better
future."
The dialogue of Democrats and Republicans or of
liberals and conservatives is likewise useless to us. Neither party
is interested in farmers or in farming or in the good care of the
land or in the quality of food. Nor are they interested in taking the
best care of our forests. The leaders of these parties are equally
subservient to the supranational corporations. Of this the North
American Free Trade Agreement and the new revisions to the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade are proof.
Moreover, the old
opposition of country and city, which was never useful, is now more
useless than ever. It is, in fact, damaging to everybody involved, as
is the opposition of producers and consumers. These are not
differences but divisions that ought not to exist because they are to
a considerable extent artificial. The so-called urban economy has
been just as hard on urban communities as it has been on rural
All
these conventional affiliations are now meaningless, useful only to
those in a position to profit from public bewilderment. A new
political scheme of opposed parties, however, is beginning to take
form. This is essentially a two-party system, and it divides over the
fundamental issue of community. One of these parties holds that
community has no value; the other holds that it does. One is the
party of the global economy; the other I would call simply the party
of local community. The global party is large, though not populous,
immensely powerful and wealthy, self-aware, purposeful, and tightly
organized. The community party is only now coming aware of itself; it
is widely scattered,
highly diverse, small though potentially
numerous, weak though latently powerful, and poor though by no means
without resources.
We know pretty well the makeup of the
party of the global economy, but who are the members of the party of
local community? They are people who take a generous and neighborly
view of self-preservation; they do not believe that they can survive
and flourish by the rule of dog eat dog; they do not believe that
they can succeed by defeating or destroying or selling or using up
everything but themselves. They doubt that good solutions can be
produced by violence. They want to preserve the precious things of
nature and of human culture and pass them on to their children. They
want the world's fields and forests to be productive; they do not
want them to be destroyed for the sake of production. They know you
cannot be a democrat (small d ) or a conservationist and at the same
time a proponent of the supranational corporate economy. They
believe-they know from their experience-that the neighborhood, the
local community, is the proper place and frame of reference for
responsible work. 'They see that no commonwealth or community of
interest can be defined by greed. They know that things connect-that
farming, for example, is connected to nature, and food to farming,
and health to food-and they want to preserve the connections. They
know that a healthy local community cannot be replaced by a market or
an entertainment industry or an information highway. They know that
contrary to all the unmeaning and unmeant political talk about "job
creation," work ought not to be merely a bone thrown to
otherwise unemployed. They know that work ought to be necessary; it
ought to be good, it ought to be satisfying and dignifying to the
people who do it, and genuinely useful and pleasing to the people for
whom it is done.
The party of local community, then, is a
real party with a real platform and an agenda of real and doable
work. And it has, we might add, a respectable history in the hundreds
of efforts, over several decades, to preserve local nature or local
health or to sell local products to local consumers. Now such efforts
appear to be coming into their own, attracting interest and energy in
a way they have not done before. People are seeing more clearly all
the time the connections between conservation and economics. They are
seeing that a community's health is largely determined by the way it
makes its living.
The natural membership of the community
party consists of small farmers, ranchers, and marker gardeners,
worried consumers, owners and employees of small shops, stores,
community banks, and other small businesses, self-employed people,
religious people, and conservationists. The aims of this party really
are only two: the preservation of ecological diversity and integrity,
and the renewal, on sound cultural and ecological principles, of
local economies and local communities.
So now we must ask how
a sustainable local community (which is to say a sustainable local
economy) might function. I am going to suggest a set of rules that I
think such a community would have to follow. And I hasten to say that
I do not consider these rules to be predictions; I am not interested
in foretelling the future. If these rules have any validity, that is
because they apply now.
If the members of a local community want
their community to cohere, to flourish, and to last, these are some
things they would do:
1. Always ask of any proposed change or
innovation: What will this do to our community? How will this affect
our common wealth?
2. Always include local nature-the land, the
water, the air, the native creatures-within the membership of the
community.
3. Always ask how local needs might be supplied from
local sources, including the mutual help of neighbors.
4. Always
supply local needs first (And only then think of exporting their
products, first to nearby cities, and then to others.)
5.
Understand the unsoundness of the industrial doctrine of "labor
saving" if that implies poor work, unemployment, or any kind of
pollution or contamination .
6. Develop properly scaled
value-adding industries for local products to ensure that the
community does not become merely a colony of the national or global
economy.
7. Develop small-scale industries and businesses to
support the local farm and/or forest economy.
8. Strive to
produce as much of the communitys own energy as possible.
9.
Strive to increase earnings (in whatever form) within the community
and decrease expenditures outside the community.
10. Make sure
that money paid into the local economy circulates within the
community for as long as possible before it is paid out.
11. Make
the community able to invest in itself by maintaining its properties,
keeping itself clean (without dirtying some other place), caring for
its old people, teaching its children.
12. See that the old and
the young take care of one another. The young must learn from the
old, nor necessarily and not always in school. There must be no
institutionalized "child care" and "homes for the
aged." The community knows and remembers itself by the
association of old and young. .
13. Account for costs now
conventionally hidden or "externalized." Whenever possible,
these costs must be debited against monetary income.
14. Look
into the possible uses of local currency, community-funded loan
programs, systems of barter, and the like.
15. Always be aware of
the economic value of neighborly acts. In our time the costs of
living are greatly increased by the loss of neighborhood, leaving
people to face their calamities alone.
16. A rural community
should always be acquainted with, and complexly connected with,
community-minded people in nearby towns and cities.
17. A
sustainable rural economy will be dependent on urban consumers loyal
to local products. Therefore, we are talking about an economy that
will always be more cooperative than competitive.
These rules
are derived from Western political and religious traditions, from the
promptings of ecologists and certain agriculturists, and from common
sense. They may seem radical, but only because the modern national
and global economies have been formed in almost perfect disregard of
community and ecological interests. A community economy is not an
economy in which well-placed persons can make a "killing."
It is not a killer economy. It is an economy whose aim is generosity
and a well-distributed and safeguarded abundance. If it seems unusual
to hope and work for such an economy, then we must remember that a
willingness to put the community ahead of profit is hardly
unprecedented among community business people and local banks.
How
might we begin to build a decentralized system of durable local
economies? Gradually, I hope. We have had enough of violent or sudden
changes imposed by predatory interests outside our communities. In
many places, the obvious way to begin the work I am talking about is
with the development of a local food economy. Such a start is
attractive because it does not have to be big or costly, it requires
nobodys permission, and it can ultimately involve everybody. It does
not require us to beg for mercy from our exploiters or to look for
help where consistently we have failed to find it. By "local
food economy" I mean simply an economy in which local consumers
buy as much of their food as possible from local producers and in
which local producers produce as much as they can for the local
market.
Several conditions now favor the growth of local food
economies. On the one hand, the costs associated with our present
highly centralized food system are going to increase. Growers in the
Central Valley of California, for example, can no longer depend on an
unlimited supply of cheap water for irrigation. Transportation costs
can only go up. Biotechnology, variety patenting, and other
agribusiness innovations are intended not to help farmers or
consumers but to extend and prolong corporate control of the food
economy; they will increase the cost of food, both economically and
ecologically.
On the other hand, consumers are increasingly
worried about the quality and purity of their food, and so they would
like to buy from responsible growers close to home. They would like
to know where their food comes from and how it is produced. They are
increasingly aware that the larger and more centralized the food
economy becomes, the more vulnerable it will be to natural or
economic catastrophe, to political or military disruption, and to bad
agricultural practice.
For all these reasons, and others, we
need urgently to develop local food economies wherever they are
possible. Local food economies would improve the quality of food.
They would increase consumer influence over production; consumers
would become participatory members in their own food economy. They
would help to ensure a sustainable, dependable supply of food. By
reducing some of the costs associated with long supply lines and
large corporate suppliers (such as packaging, transportation, and
advertising), they would reduce the cost of food at the same time
that they would increase income to growers. they would tend to
improve farming practices and increase employment in agriculture.
They would rend to reduce the size of farms and increase the number
of owners.
Of course, no food economy can be, or ought to be,
only local. But the orientation of agriculture to local needs, local
possibilities, and local limits is indispensable to the health of
both land and people, and undoubtedly to the health of democratic
liberties as well.
For many of the same reasons, we need also
to develop local forest economies, of which the aim would be the
survival and enduring good health of both our forests and their
dependent local communities. We need to preserve the native diversity
of our forests as we use them. As in agriculture, we need local,
small-scale, nonpolluting industries (sawmills, woodworking shops,
and so on) to add value to local forest products, as well as local
supporting industries for the local forest economy.
As
support for sustainable agriculture should come most logically from
consumers who consciously wish to keep eating, so support for
sustainable forestry, might logically come from loggers, mill
workers, and other employees of the forest economy who consciously
wish to keep working. But many people have a direct interest in the
good use of our forests: farmers and ranchers with woodlots, all who
depend on the good health of forested watersheds, the makers of wood
products, conservationists, and others.
What we have before
us, if we want our communities to survive, is the building of an
adversary economy, a system of local or community economies within,
and to protect against, the would-be global economy. To do this, we
must somehow learn to reverse the flow of the siphon that has for so
long been drawing resources, money, talent, and people out of our
countryside with very, little if any return, and often with a return
only of pollution, impoverishment, and ruin. We must figure out new
ways to fund, at affordable rates, the development of healthy local
economies. We must find ways to suggest economically-for finally no
other suggestion will be effective-that the work, the talents, and
the interest of our young people are needed at home.
Our
whole society has much to gain from the development of local
land-based economies . They would carry us far toward the ecological
and cultural ideal of local adaptation. They would encourage the
formation of adequate local cultures (and this would be authentic
multiculturalism). They would introduce into agriculture and forestry
a sort of spontaneous and natural quality control, for neither
consumers nor workers would want to see the local economy destroy
itself by abusing or exhausting its sources. And they would complete
at last the task of freedom from colonial economics begun by our
ancestors more than two hundred years ago.
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 recentdy the T S. Eliot Award, The Aiken Taylor Award for Poetry, the John Hay Award of the Orion Society, and The Chnstian Century's Award for Excellence in Poetry.
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