An American Interview, an independence gift/reminder
awake & linking : Sun Magazine | posted by Shaun OI 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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