The Art of Loading Brush. Wendell Berry

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СКАЧАТЬ armory of weapons, including nuclear bombs, ready at every moment to defend a country in which most people live far from the sources of their food, clothing, and other necessities. Arguing from our leaders’ own premises, then, the need for balanced local economies is obvious. From the recognition of local needs, both visible and supposable, the people of this or any region might reasonably proceed to a set of questions needing to be answered. Eventually, I think, there would be many such questions. I am sure that I don’t know them all, but it is easy to foresee some of them:

      1 After so long a history of diminishment and loss, what remains here, in the land and people of this place, that is valuable and worth keeping? Or: What that is here do the local people need for their own use and sustenance, and then, the local needs met, to market elsewhere?

      2 What is the present use or value of the local land and its products to the local people?

      3 How might we earn a sustainable income from the local land and its products? This would require adding value locally to the commodities—the goods!—coming from our farms and woodlands, but how might that be done?

      4 What kinds of work are necessary to preserve and to live from the productivity of our land and people?

      5 What do our people need to know, or learn and keep in mind, in order to accomplish the necessary work? The STEM courses might help, might be indispensable, but what else is needed? We are talking of course about education for livelihood, but also for responsible membership, citizenship, and stewardship.

      6 What economic balances are necessary to reward adequately, and so to maintain indefinitely, the necessary work?

      To answer those questions, close and patient study will be required of economists and others. The difficulty here is that, within the terms and conditions of the dominant economy over the last century and a half, the communities and economies of land use have been increasingly vulnerable. The effort to make them something like sustainable would have to begin with attention to the difference between the industrial economy of inert materials and monetary abstractions and an authentic land economy that must include the kindly husbandry of living creatures. This is the critical issue. As for many years, we are still hearing that almost any new technology will “transform farming.” This implies an almost-general approval of the so far unrestrainable industrial prerogative to treat living creatures as comprising a sort of ore, and the food industry as a sort of foundry. If farming is no more than an industry to be unendingly transformed by technologies, as is still happening, then farmers can be replaced by engineers, and engineers finally by robots, in the progress toward our evident goal of human uselessness. If, on the contrary, because of the uniqueness and fragility of each one of the world’s myriad of small places, the land economies must involve a creaturely affection and care, then we must look back fifty or sixty years and think again. If, as even some scientists have recognized, there are natural and human limits beyond which farming (and forestry) cannot be industrialized, then we need a more complex and particularizing language than the economists so far use.

      The six questions I have proposed for my or any region do not derive from a wished-for or a predicted future. They have to do with what I would call “provision,” which depends upon being attentively and responsibly present in the present. We do not, for example, love our children because of their potential to become well-trained workers in a future knowledge economy. We love them because we are alive to them in this present moment, which is the only time when we and they are alive. This love implicates us in a present need to provide: to be living a responsible life, which is to say a responsible economic life.

      Provision, I think, is never more than caring properly for the good that you have, including your own life. As it relates to the future, provision does only what our oldest, longest experience tells us to do. We must continuously attend to our need for food, clothing, and shelter. We must care for the land, care for the forest, plant trees, plant gardens and crops, see that the brood animals are bred, keep the house and the household intact. We must teach the children. But provision does not foresee, predict, project, or theorize the future. Provision instructs us to renew the roof of our house, not to shelter us when we are old—we may die or the world may end before we are old—but so we may live under a sound roof now. Provision merely accepts the chances we must take with the weather, mortality, fallibility. Perhaps the wisest of the old sayings is “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.” Provision accepts, next, the importance of diversity. Perhaps the next-wisest old saying is “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” When the bad, worse, or worst possibility presents itself, provision only continues to take the best possible care of what we have, or of what we have left.

      The answers to my questions of course will affect the future. They might even bring about the “better future for our children” so famous with some politicians. But the answers will not come from the future. We must study what exists: what we know of the past, what we know now, what we can see now, if we look. It is likely that, if we look, we will see a need for the STEM disciplines, for we know already their capacity to serve some good purposes. But we will see that the need for them is limited by, for one thing, the need for other disciplines. And we will see a need also not to allow the value of highly technical knowledge to depress the value of the equally necessary and respectable knowledge of land use and land husbandry.

      From its beginning, industrialism has depended on a general willingness to ignore everything that does not serve the cheapest possible production of merchandise and, therefore, the highest possible profit. And so to look back and think again, we must acknowledge real needs that have continued through the years to be real, though unacknowledged: the need to see and respect the inescapable dependence even of our present economy, as of our lives, upon nature and the natural world; and upon the need, just as important, to see and respect our inescapable dependence upon the economies—of farming, ranching, forestry, fishing, and mining—by which the goods of nature are made serviceable to human good.

      And now, because it seems to be somewhat conventionally assumed that we are “moving on from farm and factory,” we need to recognize again our inescapable dependence upon manufacturing. This does not imply that we must be dependent always and for every product upon large corporations and a global economy. If manufacturing as we have known it is in decline, then that gives room to the thought of a genuinely domestic and conserving economy of provision. This would be a national economy made up of local economies, which, to an extent naturally and reasonably possible, would be complete, self-sustaining, and local in scale. For example, in a town not far from where I am writing, we have recently gained a small, clean, well-equipped, federally inspected slaughtering plant, which completes locally the connection between local pastures and local kitchens, while providing work to local people. There is no reason for this connection and provision to be more extensive. To make the connection between pasture and kitchen by way of the industrial food system is to siphon livelihoods and life itself out of the rural communities.

      We also have woodlands here that could even now produce a sustainable yield of valuable hardwoods. But trees cut here at present leave here as raw lumber or saw logs, at the most minimal benefit to the community. Other places and other people may prosper on the bounty of our forest, but not our place and, except minimally for the sellers and a few workers, not our people. It is not hard, considering this, to imagine a local forest economy, made up of small enterprises that would be, within the given limits, complete and coherent, yielding local livelihoods from the good use and care of the living forest to the production of lumber for buildings to finished cabinetry. The thought of such economies is of the nature of provision, not of projection, prediction, or contingency planning. The land and the people are here now. The present economic questions are about the work by which land and people might thrive mutually in the best health for the longest time, starting now.

      To think well of such enterprises, and of the possibility of combining them in a diverse and coherent local economy, is to think of the need for sustaining all of the necessary occupations. Because a local, a placed, economy would be built in sequence СКАЧАТЬ