Fire and Knowledge

If we want our forests to last, then we must make wood products that last, for our forests are more threatened by shoddy workmanship than by clear-cutting or by fire.

—Wendell Berry, “Preserving Wilderness” in Home Economics (1986), p. 143.

[N]ot putting cupholders in a car is a serious mistake. I read a couple of years ago that Volvo had to redesign all its cars for the American market for this very reason. Volvo’s engineers had foolishly thought that what buyers were looking for was a reliable engine, side-impact bars, and heated seats, when in fact what they craved was little trays into which they could insert their Slurpees.

—Bill Bryson, I’m a Stranger Here Myself (Broadway Books: 1999), p. 71.

Everywhere, every day, local life is being discomforted, disrupted, endangered, or destroyed by powerful people who live, or who are privileged to think they live, beyond the bad effects of their bad work.

A powerful class of itinerant professional vandals is now pillaging the country and laying it waste. Their vandalism is not called by that name because of its enormous profitability (to some) and the grandeur of its scale. If one wrecks a private home, that is vandalism, but if, to build a nuclear power plant, one destroys good farmland, disrupts a local community, and jeopardizes lives, home, and properties within an area of several thousand square mile, that is industrial progress.

—Wendell Berry, “Higher Education and Home Defense” in Home Economics (1986), p. 50.

When my generation of women walked away from the kitchen we were escorted down that path by a profiteering industry that knew a tired, vulnerable marketing target when they saw it. “Hey, ladies,” it said to us, “go ahead, get liberated. We’ll take care of dinner.” They threw open the door and we walked into a nutritional crisis and genuinely toxic food supply.

—Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (HarperCollins: 2007), p. 126.

We are defeated at work because our work gives us no pleasure. We are defeated at home because we have no pleasant work there. We turn to the pleasure industries for relief from our defeat, and are again defeated, for the pleasure industries can thrive and grow only upon our dissatisfaction with them.

Where is our comfort but in the free, uninvolved, finally mysterious beauty and grace of this world that we did not make, that has no price? Where is our sanity but there? Where is our pleasure but in working and resting kindly in the presence of this world?

—Wendell Berry, “Economy and Pleasure” in What Are People For? (1990), p. 140.

What is called “capitalism” might more accurately be called consumerism. It is the consumers who call the tune, and those capitalists who want to remain capitalists have to learn to dance to it. The twentieth century began with high hopes for replacing the competition of the marketplace by a more efficient and more humane economy, planned and controlled by government in the interests of the people. However, by the end of the century, all such efforts were so thoroughly discredited by their actual results in countries around the world that even communist nations abandoned central planning, while socialists governments in democratic countries began selling off government-run enterprises, whose chronic losses had been a heaven burden to the taxpayers.

Privatization was embraced as a principle by such conservative governments as those of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Britain and President Ronald Regan in the United States. But the most decisive evidence for the efficiency of the marketplace was that even socialist and communist government leaders who were philosophically opposed to capitalism turned back towards the free market after seeing what happens when industry and commerce operate without the guidance of prices, profits, and losses.

—Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics (3rd Edition, Basic Books, 2007), p. 178.

I know of no good reason why these containers and all other forms of manufactured “waste”—solid, liquid, toxic, or whatever—should not be outlawed. There is no sense and no sanity in objecting to the desecration of the flag while tolerating and justifying and encouraging as a daily business the desecration of the country for which it stands.

—Wendell Berry, “Waste” in What Are People For? (1990), p. 127.

It is useless to reduce your own consumption unless you also reduce your income. Everything you earn gets saved or spent, and anything that you save just gets spent later, by you or someone else. Changing your spending pattern will put a dent in the amount consumed only if it allows you to reduce your income.

–Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (UK Edition, 2004), p. 153