Words&Dirt

Wendell Berry is an author I’ve been meaning to get to for a long time. As a staunch defender of the environment and nonindustrial agriculture, Berry challenged my parents’ generation to think twice about the price of American modernity. This collection of essays from the 1970s and 80s does just that, and in much richer terms than the reductive cost-benefit analyses that often pass for solid thinking in economics. This book still has lots to offer 21st-century readers; despite some noteworthy points of disagreement, I was impressed with Berry’s intelligence, wit and infectious passion for the natural world.

One has only to dip into this collection––which contains both literary essays and works of cultural critique––to discover that Berry has little regard for the standards of contemporary American life. He vilifies all sources of centralized, industrial power (private and public), whose goals he sees as indisputably orthogonal to those of the small communities and farms that form the backbone of a healthy society. He is especially concerned with the loss of “local knowledge,” which can only be discovered and maintained by people living in a particular place over long periods of time:

[It is] a kind of knowledge, inestimably valuable and probably indispensable, that comes out of common culture and that cannot be taught as part of the formal curriculum of a school…the kind of knowledge, obviously, that is fundamental to the possibility of community life and to certain good possibilities in the characters of people. Though I don’t believe that it can be taught and learned at a university, I think that it should be known about and respected in a university…It is certainly no part of banking or economics as now taught and practiced. (119)

If this seems like a “fuzzy” definition of knowledge, I think Berry would count that as a compliment. One of Berry’s best qualities is his devotion to arguments and ideas that cannot be quantified, and will therefore have no champions except those who muster fine rhetoric in their defense.

Local knowledge is impossible to define outside the context of a particular place and people, but anyone can intuitively understand what it is. Whether urban or rural, rich or poor, humans bodies contain information in the form of memories, stories and habitual behaviors. The vast majority of this information cannot be reproduced in a lab or survey, and is a completely unique product of how that individual navigates his or her environment.

A human community…must collect leaves and stories, and turn them into account. It must build soil, and build that memory of itself––in lore and story and song––that will be its culture. These two kinds of accumulation, of local soil and local culture, are intimately related. (154)

The same general principles are true of land, plants and nonhuman animals; the interchange between these various evolved repositories of information is far too complex to comprehensively track or analyze. In short, ecology is really, really complicated.

Because it defies the standards of “objective” knowledge utilized by governments and capitalist economies, local knowledge has been marginalized and often extinguished by the forces of nationalization and globalization. As Berry sees it, local communities “have been invaded by the organizations” of modernity, which replace local knowledge with a “hegemony of professionals” that “erects itself on local failure, and from then on the locality exists merely as a market for consumer goods and as a source of ‘raw material,’ human and natural” (163-4). Cities, the bastions of professionalization, develop a vampiric relationship with the surrounding countryside, siphoning nutrients and intelligent individuals away from rural communities.

Berry sums up the problem with devastating accuracy:

As local community decays along with local economy, a vast amnesia settles over the countryside. As the exposed and disregarded soil departs with the rains, so local knowledge and local memory move away to the cities or are forgotten under the influence of homogenized salestalk, entertainment, and education. This loss…has been ignored, or written off as one of the cheaper “prices of progress,” or made the business of folklorists. (157)

Given that these trends were evident long before the 1970s and have continued relatively unabated, it is hard to disagree with Berry that we are witnessing the death knell of rural communities across America. It is easy to disagree, however, with his sentiment that all interventions into local communities by outside influences are necessarily destructive. Berry does not level with his readers about the distinct dangers of locality. Local cultures can be vibrant, quirky and rich in character, but they can also be petty, bigoted and ignorant of anything beyond the immediate horizon. Some information is universal, at least in terrestrial terms. Gravity and antiseptic work the same in Kansas as they do in Bombay. As Thoreau said, “the sun looks on our cultivated fields and on the prairies and forests without distinction” (Walden, 108).

The idea that external entities have nothing of value to offer local communities isn’t just untrue theoretically and practically, but also historically. Contrary to Berry’s lopsided view, the march to modernity has been a mixed bag of miracles and calamities. Human history is bloodied by our tribal heritage, and one of the important functions of the state and the market is the creation of systemic partitions between communities that might otherwise be at each other’s throats.

The “price of progress” is not incontestably a deficit. Should the “local knowledge” that African Americans were inferior to whites in the American South have gone unchallenged by the federal government during the Civil Rights movement? Should we accept practices like female genital mutilation because they represent the “local knowledge” of small African communities? Should we cast off our aspirations of providing all Americans with affordable healthcare because doing so might require a national rather than a local solution? If diagnosed with a rare illness, should I reject the expertise of an urban doctor because she is not a member of my rural community?

Most troubling is Berry’s willingness to romanticize small-scale farming and thrust it forward as the best possible way of achieving harmony with nature.

The idea that we should obey nature’s laws and live harmoniously with her as good husbanders and stewards of her gifts is old…It is our present principled and elaborately rationalized rape and plunder of the natural world that is a new thing under the sun. (108)

This is backwards. If we’re going to make appeals to antiquity, we should remember that, “Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology” (Sapiens, 74). Like it or not, the plundering of nature is humanity’s default setting; it does Berry no good to deny this. Better to admit that the idea of stewardship is a relatively new one (which he doesn’t), and then go on to make a worthy case for it (which he does).

It’s also crucial to remember that agriculture as we know it is only ten thousand years old, and is in no way a “natural” activity for humans. Our bodies are not evolved for the repetitive manual labor that farming requires. Farm work is damned difficult, even for folks who choose it, and we shouldn’t be surprised when people want to make a living doing something else––for good reason. Even a global or national shift back to local, “sustainable” farming (if there truly is such a thing) wouldn’t be a panacea.

Though his language and arguments are crisp as a cloudless morning, Berry’s voice trembles with the fury of a lost age, one whose hope of resurrection fades with every passing day. For all his undeniable wisdom, Berry is cantankerous and does not respond well to criticism (as evidenced in one of the essays containing reader feedback). Nearly all of the cultural and economic trends bemoaned in this book have continued since these essays were first written, indicating that humanity has entertained Berry’s grievances only long enough to shiver at our sins before settling back into a life where comfort trumps responsibility. This should not surprise anyone. It’s the choice we’ve always made: to take all we can get before the other guy shows up, and then blindly defend “our ground” against all challengers (or, more recently, coerce someone into defending it for us).

I do not wish to imply that particular individuals or groups need to embrace this unsavory ethos to have a good life, nor that it is impossible to cultivate a harmonious and ethical relationship with the natural world. My critiques of Berry aren’t meant to degrade him or deny the value of his perspective. I am trying to be realistic. And realistically, there are some great ideas in this book that ring true today and will for a very long time, I suspect.

Berry emphasizes that we’re all complicit in bringing about current eco-catastrophes:

Our waste problem is not the fault only of producers. It is the fault of an economy that is wasteful from top to bottom––a symbiosis of an unlimited greed at the top and a lazy, passive, and self-indulgent consumptiveness at the bottom––and all of us are involved in it. (127)

This is a hard truth to admit, but the upside of doing so is the acknowledgment that we’re all in this together. If everyone is a part of the problem, everyone is potentially part of the solution. And when it comes to solutions, Berry has a terrific message. Rejecting the mentality of “planetary” solutions, which “describe a problem in such a way that it cannot be solved,” Berry implores us to “care for each of the planet’s millions of human and natural neighborhoods, each of its millions of small pieces and parcels of land, each one of which is in some precious way different from all the others” (198, 200).

I don’t think most people are categorically opposed to planetary solutions for environmental destruction, but I also don’t think many of us are in a position to design such solutions, or bring about their implementation. But most people have a home, and maybe a yard. Some people are even lucky enough to live in communities that have managed to plug into the modern world while still retaining a strong sense of local identity, as I do. The importance of tending our homes and lands is profound; we needn’t go anywhere to start making a difference.

Berry might want to travel back to a time when small towns and farmers didn’t have to deal with the rest of the world, but that is fantasy. The great wide world is riddled with human faults, but I still don’t want to give up my connection to it, and I don’t think doing so would improve my life or my land. We don’t need to reject modernity, but we do need to acknowledge that current paradigms are besotted with centralized power structures that rely too heavily on “objective” knowledge that serves the ends of amoral, capitalist economies of scale. There has to be a bigger seat at the table for people who “tend farms that they know and love, farms small enough to know and love, using tools and methods that they know and love, in the company of neighbors that they know and love” (210).

There is a new dialectic forming between local communities and the global village, one in which we can all participate. The conversation is well underway. You may not hear about it on the news or see it on your morning commute, but it’s all around you. Your starting point is the earth beneath your feet.

Rating: 8/10