What Matters?. Wendell Berry

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СКАЧАТЬ rural school now runs a fleet of buses for the underaged and provides a large parking lot for those over sixteen who “need” a car to go to school. Education has been oversold, overbuilt, over-electrified, and overpriced. Colleges have grown into universities. Universities have become “research institutions” full of undertaught students and highly accredited “professionals” who are overpaid by the public to job-train the young and to invent cures and solutions for corporations to “market” for too much money to the public. And we have balanced this immense superstructure, immensely expensive to use and maintain, upon the frail stem of the land economy that we conventionally abuse and ignore.

      There is no good reason, economic or otherwise, to wish for the “recovery” and continuation of the economy we have had. There is no reason, really, to expect it to recover and continue, for it has depended too much on fantasy. An economy cannot “grow” forever on limited resources. Energy and food cannot stay cheap forever. We cannot continue forever as a tax-dependent people who do not wish to pay taxes. Delusion and the future cannot serve forever as collateral. An untrustworthy economy dependent on trust cannot beguile the people’s trust forever. The old props have been kicked away. The days when we could be safely crazy are over. Our airborne economy has turned into a deadfall, and we have got to jack it down. The problem is that all of us are under it, and so we have got to jack it down with the least possible suffering to our land and people. I don’t know how this is to be done, and I am inclined to doubt that anybody does. You can’t very confidently jack something down if you didn’t know what you were doing when you jacked it up.

      I do know that the human economy as a whole depends, as it always has, on nature and the land economy. The economy of land use is our link with nature. Though economic failure has not yet called any official attention to the land economy and its problems, those problems will have to be rightly solved if we are to solve rightly our other economic problems. Before we can make authentic solutions to the problems of credit and spending, we have got to begin by treating our land with the practical and effective love that alone deserves the name of patriotism. From now on, if we would like to continue here, our use of our land will have to be ruled by the principles of stewardship and thrift, using as the one indispensable measure, not monetary profit or industrial efficiency or professional success, but ecological health. And so I will venture to propose the following agenda of changes that would amount to a new, long-term agricultural policy:

      1. There should be no further price supports or subsidies without production controls. This is because surplus production is an economic weapon, allowing corporations to reduce income to farmers while increasing their own income.

      2. Return to 100 percent parity between agriculture and industry. Parity (fair) prices for agricultural products would make proposed payments for “ecological services” unnecessary, and would solve other problems as well.

      3. Enforce anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws. Don’t let any corporation get big, rich, or powerful enough to hold the nation for ransom. This applies with exceptional force to agribusiness and food corporations.

      4. Help young farmers to own farms. In a sane economy such help would be unnecessary, but the departure of farm-raised young people from farming is now an agricultural crisis of the greatest urgency. And we don’t have enough farm-raised young people. Others need to be drawn in. Here are some measures we should consider. We should set appropriate and reasonable acreage limits, according to region, for family-scale farms and ranches. Taxes should be heavy on holdings above those limits. Holdings within the prescribed limits should be taxed at their agricultural value. There should be inheritance taxes on large holdings; none on small holdings. No-interest loans should be made available to young farmers and ranchers buying acreages under the limits. (These suggestions raise a lot of problems, and I flinch in making them. Acreage limits are hard to set appropriately, as we learned from the homestead laws. Also some of these measures would be unnecessary if land prices were not inflated above agricultural value, and if food prices were not deflated below their actual economic and ecological cost.

      5. Phase out toxic chemicals, which are inconsistent with the principles of good agriculture, and which are polluting the rivers and the oceans.

      6. Phase out biofuels as quickly as possible. We have got to observe a strict distinction between fire and food, driving and eating. We can’t “feed the hungry” and feed automobiles from the same land, using the same land-destroying technologies and methods, forever.

      7. Phase in perennial plants—for pasture, winter forage, and grain crops—to replace annual crops requiring annual soil disturbance or annual applications of “no-till” chemicals. This would bring a substantial reduction of soil erosion and toxicity.

      8. Set and enforce high standards of water quality.

      9. High water quality standards (enforced) and a program to replace annual crops with perennials would tend strongly toward the elimination of animal factories. But let us be forthright on this issue. We should get rid of animal factories, those abominations, as quickly as we can. Get the farm animals, including hogs and chickens, back on grass. Put the animals where they belong, and their manure where it belongs.

      10. Animal production should be returned to the scale of localities and communities. Do away with subsidies, incentives, and legislation favorable to gigantism in dairy, meat, and egg production.

      11. Encourage the development of local food economies, which make more sense agriculturally and economically than our present overspecialized, too-concentrated, long-distance food economy. Local food economies are desirable also from the standpoints of public health, “homeland security,” and the energy economy. Provide economic incentives and supportive legislation for the establishment of local, small-scale food-processing plants, canneries, year-round farmers’ markets, etc.

      12. Local food economies, to be genuine, require local adaptation of domestic species and varieties of plants and animals. The universal evolutionary requirement of local adaptation has unaccountably been waived with respect to humans. But this waiver is potentially disastrous. We need ways of agriculture that are preservingly adapted to the ecological mosaic and even to individual farms and ranches. For the sake of local adaptation, and the genetic diversity that is necessary to it, we need to put an end to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s proposed National Animal Identification System, to the patenting of species, and to genetic engineering—all of which aim at a general agricultural uniformity and corporate control of agriculture and food. Central planning and its inevitable goal of uniformity cannot work in agriculture because of the requirement of local adaptation and the consequent need for local intelligence. Central planning and uniformity are effective only for the diminishment of genetic and biological diversity and the destruction of small producers.

      13. Help and encourage small-scale forestry and owners of small woodlands. See that current market prices for sawlogs and other forest products are readily available everywhere. Tax fairly.

      14. Study and teach sustainable forestry, using examples such as the Menominee Forest in Wisconsin and the Pioneer Forest in Missouri.

      15. Promote the good use and care of farm woodlands as assets integral to the economy of farms.

      16. Encourage the development, in forested regions, of local forest economies, providing economic incentives for local processing and value-adding, as for food.

      Would such measures increase significantly the number of people at work in the land economy? Of course they would. This would be an authentic version, for a change, of “job creation.” This work would help our economy, our people, and our country all at the same time. And that is the authentic test of practicality, for it makes complete economic sense.

       (2009)

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