The Art of Loading Brush. Wendell Berry
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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 from the ground up, from primary production to manufacturing to marketing, a variety of occupations would be necessary. Because all occupations would be necessary, all would be equally necessary. Because of the need to keep them all adequately staffed, it would be ruinous to prefer one above another by price, custom, or social prejudice. There must be a sustained economic parity among them.
In such an economic structure the land-using occupations are primary. We must be mindful of what is, or should be, the fundamental difference between agriculture or forestry and mining, but until the farmers, ranchers, foresters, and miners have done their work, nothing else that we count as economic can happen. And unless the land users do their work well—which is to say without depleting the fertility of the earth’s surface—nothing we count as economic can happen for very long.
The land-using occupations, then, are of primary importance, but they are also the most vulnerable. We must notice, to begin with, that almost nobody in the supposedly “higher” occupational and social strata has ever recognized the estimable care, intelligence, knowledge, and artistry required to use the land without degrading or destroying it. It is as customary now as it was in the Middle Ages to regard farmers as churls—“mind-numbed,” backward, laughable, and dispensable. Farmers may be the last minority that even liberals freely stereotype and insult. If farmers live and work in an economic squeeze between inflated purchases and depressed sales, if their earnings are severely depressed by surplus production, if they are priced out of the land market, it is assumed that they deserve no better: They need only to be “liberated from their chains.”
The problem to be dealt with here is that the primary producers in agriculture and forestry do not work well inevitably. On the contrary, in our present economy there are constraints and even incentives that favor bad work, the result of which is waste of fertility and of the land itself. Good work in the use of the land is work that goes beyond production to maintenance. Production must not reduce productivity. Every mine eventually will be exhausted. But where the laws of nature are obeyed in use—as we know they can be, given sufficient care and skill—a farm, a ranch, or a forest will remain fertile and productive as long as nature lasts. Good work also is informed by traditional, locally adapted ways that must be passed down, taught and learned, generation after generation. The standard of such work, as the lineages of good farmers and of agrarian scientists have demonstrated, cannot be established only by “the market.” The standard must be partly economic, for people have to live, but it must be equally ecological in order to sustain the possibility of life, and if it is to be ecological it must be cultural. The economies of agriculture and forestry are vulnerable also because they are exceptional, in this way, to the rule of industry.
To obtain the best work in the economies of land use, those who use the land must be enabled to afford the time and patience necessary to do the best work. They must know how, and must desire, to do it well. Owners and workers in the land economy who grow their own food will not likely be starved into mistreating their land. But they can be taxed and priced into mistreating it. And so the parity of necessary occupations must be supported by parity of income.
Parity in this sense is not a new thought, although new thinking may be required in applying it to the variety of crops and commodities produced in a variety of regions. But we do fortunately have some precedence for such thinking. The Agricultural Adjustment Act defines parity as “that gross income from agriculture which will provide the farm operator and his family with a standard of living equivalent to those afforded persons dependent upon other gainful occupation.” Perhaps the idea of parity does not need much explanation or defense. If, as now and always, a sufficient staff of land-users is necessary to the health of the land and therefore to the lives of all of us, then they should be assured a decent livelihood. And this the so-called free market cannot provide except by accident.
The concept of parity, as fair-minded as it is necessary, addresses one of the problems of farming and farmers in the industrial economy. Another such problem, more fundamental and most in need of understanding, is that of overproduction. “Other gainful employment” in the cities escapes this problem because the large industrial corporations have not characteristically overproduced. Overproduction moreover is not a problem of subsistence farming, or of those enterprises of any farm that are devoted to the subsistence of the farm family. The aim of the traditional economy of the farm household—a