Fire and Knowledge

Good use of property … seems to require not only ownership but personal occupation and use by the owner. That is to say that the good use of property requires the widest possible distribution of ownership.

—Wendell Berry, “Property, Patriotism, and National Defense” in Home Economics (1986), p. 106.

You cannot lose your land and remain free; if you keep your land, you cannot be enslaved.

–Wendell Berry, “A Few Words in Favor of Edward Abbey” in What Are People For? (1990), p. 45.

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

Though agrarianism proposes that everybody has agrarian responsibilities, it does not propose that everybody should be a farmer or that we do not need cities. Nor does it propose that every product should be a necessity. Furthermore, any thinkable human economy would have to grant manufacturing an appropriate and honorable place. Agrarians would insist only that any manufacturing enterprise should be formed and scaled to fit the local landscape, the local ecosystem, and the local community, and that it should be locally owned and employ local people. They would insist, in other words, that the shop or factory owner should not be an outsider, but rather a sharer in the fate of the place and its community. The deciders should have to live with the results of their decisions.

–Wendell Berry, “The Whole Horse” in Citizenship Papers (2003), p. 121

[The agrarian mind] prefers the Creation itself to the powers and quantities to which it can be reduced. And this is a mind completely different from that which sees creatures as machines, minds as computers, soil fertility as chemistry, or agrarianism as an idea.

–Wendell Berry, “The Whole Horse” in Citizenship Papers (2003), p. 118

Don’t you find it odd that people will put more work into choosing their mechanic or house contractor than they will into choosing the person who grows their food?

–Joel Salatin in Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 240

Joel Salatin, a farmer in Virginia (one of the best in America, as far as I know), wrote an interesting diatribe about how everything he wants to do is illegal. He can’t slaughter his own animals, collaborate marketing with neighbors, charge for farm tours, or build the house he wanted without government interference. If you don’t know much about how government makes life hard for small, environmentally-conscious farmers, you should definitely read this.

I learned about Joel in The Omnivore’s Dilemma and was really taken with his permacultural methods of farming. Someday my wife and I hope to visit his farm and attend one of his seminars.

This article made it on the homepage of del.icio.us, which is very encouraging. In fact, I have been very encouraged over the past year about how environmentally / agriculturally-aware our culture is becoming. It is still a very small segment to be sure, but it is starting to catch on. Thank God.

My hope is that someday feedlots, industrial agriculture, pollution, and destructive mining and foresting practices will be as reprehensible to us as racism.

I think agriculture the most honorable, because the most independent, of all professions.

–Benjamin Franklin, as quoted in H.W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (2000), p. 664