
awake & linking
: Sun Magazine | posted by Shaun O
I was moved reading this American interview in the midst of Independence Day celebrations. As I thankfully celebrate our country,
I also feel like we have big hurdles standing just before us, and we
have to be creative and intuitive to do well for ourselves and
generations (our family) to come. With that hunger in my gut, I read
this interview and chew on the good food of thought, care, and genius.
I would beg you to read it, study it well, so we could engage each
other on it’s issues. We might point out truth to one another, truth
we would miss on our own, leaping the hurdles together.
Digging In: Wendell Berry On Small Farms, Local Wisdom, And The Folly Of Greed
Here
are outtakes, speaking directly to recent posts here, and in line with
questions we've asked about information and the urban role for good
land-use in the future:
On Community -
Fearnside:
You’re a well-known advocate for local economies, yet you write for a
much-wider-than-local audience, which means you must rely on the
machinery of the corporate world to get your message out. Is there a
contradiction in this, or is it simply an inescapable paradox that you
must be pragmatic about?
Berry:
There are contradictions in it, no doubt about that. There’s an
absolutely lethal contradiction in my driving and flying around to talk
about conservation and local economies. But you have to live in the
world the way it is. You can’t declare yourself too good for it and
move away. You have to carry the effort wherever you can take it.
You’ve got to have allies. The thought of the Committees of
Correspondence in the American Revolution is never very far from my
mind. People have to stay in touch somehow. They have to meet and talk.
They have to support each other. But that’s a network, not a community.
On Information -
Fearnside:
It seems that we’ve been separated from our local communities by radio,
television, and now the Internet. Because these forces come from
outside the communities, they often don’t reflect the communities’
values. How can we stay plugged in to information and yet preserve our
local connections?
Berry: I don’t
know. There’s not much you can do, unless you want to disconnect
yourself from those electronic gadgets. I pretty much do. Tanya and I
haven’t had a television for a long time; people used to give tv sets
to our children, because they felt sorry for us. I think we were given
three over the years. I listen to the radio some. I don’t have a
computer, and I almost never see a movie. To me this isolation is
necessary. It keeps my language available to me in a way that I don’t
think it would be if I were full of that public information all the
time.
On the Food System -
Fearnside:
Should the responsibility for changing the food system lie more with
the consumer, more with the producer, or equally with both?
Berry: When the producers — the farmers — are going broke, it’s wrong to
expect them to reform the system. In fact, there are too few actual
farmers left to reform anything. So, as a practical matter, reform is
going to have to come from consumers. Industrial agriculture is an
urban invention, and if agriculture is going to be reinvented, it’s
going to have to be reinvented by urban people.
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