The Art of Loading Brush. Wendell Berry
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Название: The Art of Loading Brush

Автор: Wendell Berry

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Языкознание

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isbn: 9781619020603

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СКАЧАТЬ the course of the 20th century, farm employment in the United States dropped to 2 percent of the work force from 41 percent, even as output soared. Since 1950, manufacturing’s share has shrunk to 8.5 percent of nonfarm jobs, from 24 percent.

      To this state of things Mr. Porter grants something like half an approval. Whereas nearly all of the “work force” once employed in farming have been “liberated . . . from their chains,” he thinks that “The current transition, from manufacturing to services, is more problematic.” Though for workers in the United States there are “options: health care, education and clean energy, just to name a few,” these options “present big economic and political challenges.” The principal challenges will be to get the politicians to abandon their promises of an increase of employment in manufacturing, and then to provide the government help necessary to make “the current transition from manufacturing to services” without too much rebellion by workers “against the changing tide.” Mr. Porter’s conclusion, despite these challenges, is optimistic:

      Yet just as the federal government once provided a critical push to move the economy from its agricultural past into its industrial future, so, too, could it help build a postindustrial tomorrow.

      Mr. Porter’s article, which clearly assumes the agreement or consent of a large number of his fellow economists and fellow citizens, rests upon the kind of assumptions that I have been calling articles of faith. Though it is certain that a lot of people, economists and others, are putting their faith in these assumptions, they are nonetheless entirely groundless. The assumptions, so far as I can trace them out, are as follows:

      1 The economy of a country or a nation needs only to provide employment, it does not matter at what. And so of course no particular value can be assigned to the production of commodities.

      2 So long as there is enough employment at work of some kind, a country or a nation can safely dispense with employment in sustainable farming and manufacturing, which is to say a sustainable dependence upon natural resources and the natural world.

      3 Farming has little economic worth. It is of the past, and better so. Farm work involves no significant responsibilities, and requires no appreciable intelligence, knowledge, skill, or character. It is, as is often said, “mind-numbing,” a servile condition from the “chains” of which all workers, even owners who work on their own farms, need to be “liberated.”

      4 The “output” of industrial agriculture will continue to “soar” without limit as ever more farmers are “liberated from their chains” by technology, and as technologies are continuously succeeded by more advanced technologies.

      5 There is no economic or intrinsic difference between agriculture and industry: A farm is no more than a factory, a plant or an animal is no more than a machine or a substance.

      6 The technological advances that have disemployed so many people from farming and manufacturing will never take away the jobs of service or postindustrial workers.

      7 History, including economic history, is a forward motion, a progress, made up of irreversible changes. These changes can be established absolutely and forever in so little time as a century or two. Thus the great technological progress since perhaps the steam engine—a progress enabled by the fossil fuels, war, internal combustion, external combustion, and a sequence of poisons—will carry us right on into the (climactic? everlasting?) “postindustrial tomorrow.”

      8 The need for “health care, education and clean energy, just to name a few,” will go securely on and on, supplying without limit the need for jobs, whereas the need for food, clothing, shelter, and manufactured goods will be supplied by what?

      Now I must tell why, as a comparatively prosperous and settled resident of my home country in the United States, I should be as troubled as I am by the faith or superstition or future-fantasy of the economists of so-called development. My family and I live, as we know and fear, in what the orthodox economists consider a backward, under-developed, and to-be-developed country. This is “rural America,” the great domestic colony that we have made of our actual country, as opposed to the nation, the government, and the economy. This particular fragment of it is called “The Golden Triangle,” a wedge of country bounded by the three interstate highways connecting Louisville, Lexington, and Cincinnati. The three are connected also by rail and by air. The Triangle is bounded on its northwest side also by the Ohio River. Because it is so fortunately located with respect to transportation and markets, this area is thought (by some) to be “Golden,” which is to say eminently suited to (future) development.

      The landscapes within the Triangle are topographically diverse—rolling uplands, steep valley sides, fairly level bottomlands—all, though varyingly, fragile and vulnerable to various established abuses. The soils are fertile, productive, responsive to good treatment, but much diminished by erosion and misuse in the years of “settlement,” severely eroded in some places, still eroding in others. The native forest is predominantly hardwood, much diminished and fragmented, suffering from diseases and invasive species, largely undervalued, neglected or ill-used, but potentially of great economic worth if well used and cared for. The watercourses are numerous, often degraded, mostly polluted by silt or chemicals or both. There is, in most years, abundant rainfall.

      The three cities seem generally to be prospering and expanding, but are expectably troubled by social disintegration, drugs, poverty, traffic congestion, and violence. The towns, including county seats, are in decay or dead, preyed upon by the cities and chain stores, diseased by urban and media culture, cheap energy, family disintegration, drugs, and the various electronic screens.

      Especially during the early decades of the tobacco program, the farming here was highly diversified and, at its best, exemplary in its husbanding of the land. Because of the program, tobacco was the basis of a local agrarian culture that was both economically and socially stabilizing. The farms were mostly small, farmed by their resident families and neighborly exchanges of work. In addition to tobacco and provender for the households, they produced (collectively and often individually) corn, small grains, hogs, chickens and other poultry, eggs, cream, milk, and an abundance of pasture for herds of beef cattle and flocks of sheep.

      The tobacco program with its benefits ended in 2004. Though it served growers of a crop that after the Surgeon General’s report of 1965 could not be defended, the program itself was exemplary. Both the people and the land benefitted from it. By the combination of price supports with production control, limiting supply to anticipated demand, the program maintained the livelihoods of the small farms, and so maintained the livelihoods of shops and stores in the towns. It gave the same protection on the market to the small producer as to the large. By limiting the acreage of a high-paying crop, it provided a significant measure of soil conservation. Most important, it supported the traditional family and social structure of the region and its culture of husbandry.

      For once and for a while, then, the farmers of this region stood together, stood up for themselves, and secured for themselves prices reasonably fair for one of their products. The tobacco program, once and for a while, gave them an asking price, with results in every way good. Before and after the program, which was their program, they have had simply to accept whatever the buyers have been pleased to offer. When producers of commodities have no asking price, the result is plunder of both land and people, as in any colony. By “asking price” I mean a fair price, as determined for example by “parity,” which would enable farmers to prosper “on a par with” their urban counterparts; a fair price, then, supported by bargaining power.

      After the demise of the tobacco program, and with it the economy and way of life it had preserved and stood for, this so-favored Triangle and its region have declined economically, agriculturally, and socially. The tobacco that is still grown here is grown mainly in large acreages under contracts written by the tobacco companies, and primarily with migrant labor. Most of the farms that are still working are mainly СКАЧАТЬ