Subject: 27 Propositions on Resource Sustainability
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Comments:
                  **  CARING FOR THE LAND **
Noted environmentalist and author Wendell Berry outlined 27 short
propositions on global thinking and resource sustainability in
February's THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.  Berry's concerns center on the
sustainability of cities, but there is a close connection to our RPA
theme "Global Resource Issues."  The undercurrent of Berry's
message is appropriate for forest management: If we don't take care
of ecosystems locally, there is no hope for global resource
stewardship.     3+ pages follow.  Dve...

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                       OUT OF YOUR CAR, OFF YOUR HORSE
                              By Wendell Berry

Twenty-seven propositions about global thinking
and the sustainability of cities:

I. Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible. Those who have "thought
globally" (and among them the most successful have been imperial governments and
multinational corporations) have done so by means of simplifications too extreme
and oppressive to merit the name of thought. Global thinkers tend to be
dangerous also; we now have national thinkers in the northeastern United States
who look upon Kentucky as a garbage dump.

II. Global thinking can only be statistical. Its shallowness is exposed by the
least intention to do something. Unless one is willing to be destructive on a
very large scale, one cannot do something except locally, in a small place.
Global thinking can only do to the globe what a space satellite does to it:
reduce it, make a bauble of it. Look at one of those photographs of half the
earth taken from outer space, and see if you recognize your neighborhood. If you
want to see where you are, you will have to get out of your space vehicle, out
of your car, off your horse, and walk over the ground. On foot you will find
that the earth is still satisfyingly large, and full of beguiling nooks and
crannies.

III. If we could think locally, we would do far better than we are doing now.
The right local questions and answers will be the right global ones. The Amish
question "What will this do to our community?" tends toward the right answer for
the world.

IV. If we want to put local life in proper relation to the globe, we must do so
by imagination, charity, and forbearance, and by making local life as
independent and sulf-sufficient as we can - not by the presumptuous abstractions
of "global thought."

V. If we want to keep our thoughts and acts from destroying the globe, then we
must see to it that we do not ask too much of the globe or any part of it. To
make sure that we do not ask too much, we must learn to live at home, as
independently and self-sufficiently as we can. That is the only way we can keep
the land we are using, and its ecological limits, always in sight.

VI. The only sustainable city - and this, to me, is the indispensable ideal and
goal - is a city in balance with its countryside: a city, that is, that would
live off the net ecological income of its supporting region, paying as it goes
all its ecological and human debts.

VII. The cities we now have are living off ecological principal, by economic
assumptions that seem certain to destroy them. They do not live at home. They
do not have their own supporting regions. They are out of balance with their
supports, wherever on the globe their supports are.

VIII. The balance between city and countryside is destroyed by industrial
machinery, "cheap" productivity in field and forest, and "cheap" transportation.
Rome destroyed the balance with slave labor; we have destroyed it with "cheap"
fossil fuel.

IX. Since the Civil War, perhaps, and certainly since the Second World War, the
norms of productivity have been set by the fossil-fuel industries.

X. Geographically, the sources of the fossil fuels are rural. Technically,
however, the production of these fuels is industrial and urban. the facts and
integrities of local life, and the principle of community, are considered as
little as possible, for to consider them would not be quickly profitable. Fossil
fuels have always been produced at the expense of local ecosystems and of local
human communities. The fossil-fuel economy is the industrial economy par
excellence, and it assigns no value to local life, natural or human.

XI. When the industrial principles exemplified in fossil-fuel production are
applied to field and forest, the results are identical: local life, both natural
and human, is destroyed.

XII. Industrial procedures have been imposed on the countryside pretty much to
the extent that country people have been seduced or forced into dependence on
the money economy. By encouraging this dependence, corporations have increased
their ability to rob the people of their property and their labor. The result
is that a very small number of people now own all the usable property in the
country, and workers are increasingly the hostages of their employers.

XIII. Our present "leaders" - the people of wealth and power - do not know what
it means to take a place seriously: to think it worthy, for its own sake, of
love and study and careful work. They cannot take any place seriously because
they must be ready at any moment, by the terms of power and wealth in the modern
world, to destroy any place.

XIV. Ecological good sense will be opposed by all the most powerful economic
entities of our time, because ecological good sense requires the reproduction
or replacement of those entities. If ecological good sense is to prevail, it can
do so only through the work and the will of the people and of the local
communities. 

XV. For this task our currently prevailing assumptions about knowledge,
information, education, money, and political will are inadequate. All our
institiutions with which I am familiar have adopted the organizational patterns
and the quantitative measures of the industrial corporations. Both sides of the
ecological debate, perhaps as a consequence, are alarmingly abstract.

XVI. But abstraction, of course, is what is wrong. The evil of the industrial
economy (capitalist or communist) is the abstractness inherent in its procedures
- its inability to distinguish one place or person or creature from another.
William Blake saw this two hundred years ago. Anyone can see it now in almost
any of our common tools and weapons.

XVII. Abstraction is the enemy wherever it is found. The abstractions of
sustainability can ruin the world just as surely as the abstractions of
industrial economics. Local life may be as much endangered by "saving the
planet" as by "conquering the world." Such a project calls for abstract purposes
and central powers that cannot know, and so will destroy, the integrity of local
nature and local community.

XVIII. In order to make ecological good sense for the planet, you must make
ecological good sense locally. You can't act locally by thinking globally. If
you want to keep your local acts from destroying the globe, you must think
locally.

XIX. No one can make ecological good sense for the planet. Everyone can make
ecological good sense locally, if the affection, the scale, the knowledge, the
tools, and the skills are right.

XX. The right scale in work gives power to affection. When one works beyond the
reach of one's love for the place one is working in, and for the things and
creatures one is working with and among, then destruction inevitably results.
An adequate local culture, among other things, keeps work within the reach of
love.

XXI. The question before us, then, is an extremely difficult one: How do we
begin to remake, or to make, a local culture that will preserve our part of the
world while we use it? We are talking here not just about a kind of knowledge
that involves affection but also about a kind of knowledge that comes from or
with affection - knowledge that is unavailable to the unaffectionate, and that
is unavailable to anyone as what is called information.

XXII. What, for a start, might be the economic result of local affection? We
don't know. Moreover, we are probably never going to know in any way that would
satisfy the average dean or corporate executive. The ways of love tend to be
secretive and, even to lovers themselves, somewhat inscrutable.

XXIII. The real work of planet-saving will be small, humble, and humbling, and
(insofar as it involves love) pleasing and rewarding. Its jobs will be too many
to count, too many to report, too many to be publicly noticed or rewarded, too
small to make anyone rich or famous.

XXIV. The great obstacle may be not greed but the modern hankering after
glamour. A lot of our smartest, most concerned people want to come up with a big
solution to a big problem. I don't think that planet-saving, if we take it
seriously, can furnish employment to many such people.

XXV. When I think of the kind of worker the job requires, I think of Dorothy Day
(if one can think of Dorothy Day herself, separate from the publicity that came
as a result of her rarity), a person willing to go down and down into the
daunting, humbling, almost hopeless local presence of the problem - to face the
great problem one small life at a time.

XXVI. Some cities can never be sustainable, because they do not have a
countryside around them, or near them, from which they can be sustained. New
York City cannot be made sustainable, nor can Phoenix. Some cities in Kentucky
or the Midwest, on the other hand, might reasonably hope to become sustainable.

XXVII. To make a sustainable city, one must begin somehow, and I think the
beginning must be small and economic. A beginning could be made, for example,
by increasing the amount of food bought from farmers in the local countryside
by consumers in the city. As the food economy became more local, local farming
would become more diverse; the farms would become smaller, more complex in
structure, more productive; and some city people would be needed to work on the
farms. Sooner or later, as a means of reducing expenses both ways, organic
wastes from the city would go out to fertilize the farms of the supporting
region; thus city people would have to assume an agricultural responsibility,
and would be properly motivated to do so both by the wish to have a supply of
excellent food and by the fear of contaminating that supply. The increase of
economic intimacy between a city and its sources would change minds (assuming,
of course, that the minds in question would stay put long enough to be changed).
It would improve minds. The locality, by becoming partly sustainable, would
produce the thought it would need to become more sustainable.


                                     From The Atlantic Monthly, February 1991

                                     Distributed over ECO-WATCH, Feb. 19, 1991,
                                     with permission from The Atlantic
                                      
                                                       D.Iverson:R04A