The Art of Loading Brush. Wendell Berry

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СКАЧАТЬ much of our vulnerable countryside the year-round protection of perennial pastures and hay crops, but it is a far cry from the old diversity of crops and livestock. Of much greater concern is the continuous planting of large acreages of soy beans and corn, a way of farming unsuited to our sloping land (or, in fact, to any land), erosive, toxic, requiring large expenditures of money for uncertain returns. For such cropping the fences are removed, making the land useless for grazing. Farms are being subdivided and “developed,” or cash-rented for corn and beans.

      The land is no longer divided and owned in the long succession, by inheritance or purchase, of farmer after farmer. It has now become “real estate,” ruled by the land market, owned increasingly by urban investors, or by urban escapees seeking the (typically short-lived) consolation and relaxation of “a place in the country.” The government now subsidizes land purchases by some young farmers, “helping” them by involving them in large long-term debts and in ways of farming that degrade the land they may, late in their lives, finally own. For many young people whose vocation once would have been farming, farming is no longer possible. You have to be too rich to farm before you can afford a farm in my county.

      Only a few years ago, I received a letter from a man extraordinarily thoughtful, who described himself as an ex-addict whose early years were spent under the teaching and influence of a family elder, in the tobacco patches of a neighborhood of small farms. Caught up by the centrifugal force of a disintegrating community and way of life, he drifted into addiction, from which, with help, he got free. He wrote to me, I think, believing that I should know his story. People, he said, were wondering what comes after the tobacco program. He answered: drug addiction. He was right. Or he was partly right. His answer would have been complete if he had added screen addiction to drug addiction.

      As long as the diverse economy of our small farms lasted, our communities were filled with people who needed one another and knew that they did. They needed one another’s help in their work, and from that they needed one another’s companionship. Most essentially, the grownups and the elders needed the help of the children, who thus learned the family’s and the community’s work and the entailed duties, pleasures, and loyalties. When that work disappears, when parents leave farm and household for town jobs, when the upbringing of the young is left largely to the schools, then the children, like their parents, live as individuals, particles, loved perhaps but not needed for any usefulness they may have or any help they might give. As the local influences weaken, the outside influences grow stronger.

      And so the drugs and the screens are with us. The day is long past when most school-age children benefitted from work and instruction that gave them in turn a practical assurance of their worth. They have now mostly disappeared from the countryside and from the streets and houseyards of the towns. In this new absence and silence of the children, parents, teachers, church people, and public officials hold meetings to wonder what to do about the drug problem. The screen problem receives less attention, but it may be the worst of the two because it wears the aura of technological progress and social approval.

      The old complex life, at once economic and social, was fairly coherent and self-sustaining because each community was focused upon its own local countryside and upon its own people, their needs, and their work. That life is now almost entirely gone. It has been replaced by the dispersed lives of dispersed individuals, commuting and consuming, scattering in every direction every morning, returning at night only to their screens and carryout meals. Meanwhile, in a country everywhere distressed and taxed by homelessness, once-used good farm buildings, built by local thrift and skill, rot to the ground. Good houses, that once sheltered respectable lives, stare out through sashless windows or have disappeared.

      I have described briefly and I am sure inadequately my home country, a place dauntingly complex both in its natural history and in its human history, offering much that is good, much good also that is unappreciated or unrecognized. Outsiders passing through, unaware of its problems, are apt to think it very beautiful, which partly it still is. To me, and to others known to me, it is also a very needy place. When I am wishing, as I often do, I wish its children might be taught thoroughly and honestly its own history, and its history as a part of American history. I wish every one of its schools had enough biologists and ecologists to lead the students outdoors, to show them where they are in relation to drainages, soils, plants, and animals. I wish we had an economy wisely kind to the land and the people.

      A good many years ago somebody, or several somebodies, named this parcel of land “The Golden Triangle.” Like I assume most people here, I don’t know who the somebodies were. I don’t know how or what they were thinking or what their vision was. I know that the name “The Golden Triangle” is allied to other phrases or ideas, equally vague and doubtful, that have been hovering over us: the need for “job creation,” the need to “bring in industry,” the obligation (of apparently everybody) to “compete in the global economy,” the need (of apparently everybody) for “a college education,” the need for or the promises of “the service economy,” and “the knowledge economy.” None of these by now weary foretellings has anything in particular to do with anything that is presently here. They and the thinking they represent all gesture somewhat heroically toward “the Future,” another phrase, obsessively repeated by the people out front in politics and education, signifying not much. Perhaps the most influential “future” right now is that of “the knowledge economy,” as yet not here but surely expected. This means that in order to get jobs and to compete in the global economy, our eligible young people need to major in courses of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics while they are still in high school. This is the so-called STEM curriculum, dear to the hearts of our several too expensive, overadministered, underfunded, and ravenous state universities. And STEM is promoted by slurs, coming from the highest offices of state government, against such studies as literature and history.

      The advantage of the STEM-emphasis to the education industry is fairly obvious. And if the great corporations of the global knowledge economy settle in the Golden Triangle or somewhere nearby, they surely will be glad to have a highly trained workforce readily available. But no supreme incarnation of the knowledge economy has yet arrived. If such an arrival is imminent or expected, that has not been announced to the natives. No doubt for that reason, the authorities have not predicted how many STEM graduates the future is going to need (and, as predicted, pay well). The possibility that the schools may turn out too many expensively educated, overspecialized STEM graduates evidently is not being considered. Nor evidently is the possibility that a surplus of such graduates, like their farming ancestors, will have no asking price, and so will come cheap to whomever may hire them. Maybe someday the people living here will have a fine, affluent Scientific, Technological, Engineered, and Mathematized Future to live in. Or, of course, maybe not.

      That, anyhow, is development as we know it in The Golden Triangle. Meanwhile, our land is going to the devil, and too many of our people are addicted to drugs or screens or to mere distraction.

      For a person living here, it is possible to imagine an economic project that would be locally appropriate and might actually help us. This likely is a project that could not be accomplished by economists only, but economists surely will be needed. The project would be to define a local or regional economy that, within the given limits, would be diverse, coherent, and lasting. If they were not so fad-ridden, economists might see that a knowledge economy, or any other single economy, cannot and should not occupy a whole region or a whole future. They might consider the possibility of a balance or parity of necessary occupations.

      I am assuming a need for any locality, region, or nation to provide itself so far as possible with food, clothing, and shelter. Such fundamental economic provision, one would think, should be considered normal or fitting to human inhabitation of the earth. In addition to the economic benefits to local people of local supplies, a future-oriented society such as ours ought to consider the possibility that any locality might become stranded by lasting interruptions of long-distance transportation. Since for many years I have been trying to think as a pacifist, I feel a little strange in addressing issues of military strategy. But it seems preposterous to СКАЧАТЬ