Landlessness (Berry)
January 6th, 2008 | Published in Agrarianism, Economics, Quotes | 1 Comment
To be landless in an industrial society obviously is not at all times to be jobless and homeless. But the ability of the industrial economy to provide jobs and homes depends on the prosperity, and on a very shaky kind of prosperity too. It depends on “growth” of the wrong things such as roads and dumps and poisons—on what Edward Abbey called “the ideology of the cancer cell”—and on greed with purchasing power. In the absence of growth, greed, and affluence, the dependents of an industrial economy too easily suffer the consequences of having no land: joblessness, homelessness, and want. This is not a theory. We have seen it happen.
–Wendell Berry, “The Agrarian Standard” in Citizenship Papers (2003), pp. 149-150
January 8th, 2008 at 12:54 pm (#)
Surely growth in the Agrarian economy is also reliant upon growth of the wrong things. In New Zealand they’re thinking of taxing cow farts in order cut down on Greenhouse Gas emissions (farming accounts for a huge amount of carbon production that wouldn’t otherwise be produced if that land was covered by forests), not to mention the huge problems caused by farm effluent.
Humans require growth and development. We cannot sit still in one place without expanding at all, humans are by their nature impatient. Where that does not happen we have stagnation and that is worse than homelessness and joblessness in the long-run. I would also argue with the point that someone who owns a small uneconomic plot of land is really in a better situation to provide for themselves than someone who owns capital (Farmers and Peasants who owned small plots of land were undernourished for decades, and were only able to support themselves through trade driven by increased demand in the cities).
Whether that growth is ‘wrong’ depends on the situation, but to make some kind of broad-sweeping generalisation that growth in urban economies is universally bad because it can only ever come ‘bad things’ and growth in the Agrarian economy can only ever come from ‘good things’ is surely almost certainly wrong.