The Art of Loading Brush. Wendell Berry
farmers had in fact no agricultural knowledge or competence upon which to base such a judgment. They and their successors certainly had not the competence to assume any responsibility for, or in any way to mitigate, the totalitarian displacement of about twenty million farmers.
Farming is one of the major enactments of the connection between the human economy and the natural world. In the industrial age farming also enacts the connection, far more complicated and perilous than industrialists admit, between industrial technologies and living creatures. Some science certainly needs to be involved, also more and better accounting. But good farming is first and last an art, a way of doing and making that involves human histories, cultures, minds, hearts, and souls. It is not the application by dullards of methods and technologies under the direction of a corporate-academic intelligentsia.
If we should want to revive, or begin, in a public way the actual thinking about agriculture that has actually taken place in some cultures, that is still taking place in some small organizations and on some farms, what would we have to do? We would have to begin, I think, by giving the most careful attention to issues of carrying capacity, scale, and form, to issues of production, of course, but also and just as necessarily to issues of maintenance or conservation. The indispensable issue of conservation would apply, not just to the farm’s agricultural “resources,” but also to the ecosystem that includes the farm and to the waterways that drain it. I think, moreover, that this attention to issues must be paid always outdoors in the presence of examples. The thing of greatest importance is to think about the land with the land’s people in the presence of the land. Every theory, calculation, graph, diagram, idea, study, model, method, scheme, plan, and hope must be caught firmly by the ear and led out into the weather, onto the ground.
It is obvious that this effort of thinking has to confront everywhere the limits both of nature and of human nature, limits imposed by the ecosphere and ecosystems, limits of human intelligence, human cultures, and the capacities of human persons. Such thought is authenticated by its compatibility with limits, its willingness to accept limits and to limit itself. This will not be easy in a time overridden by fantasies of limitlessness. A market limitlessly usable by sellers and limitlessly exploitable by buyers is merely normal in such a time. And limitlessness is the common denominator of the dominant political sides, both of which tend to refer to limitlessness as “freedom.”
We have the liberal freedom of unrestrained personal behavior, and the conservative freedom of unrestrained economic behavior. These two freedoms are more alike, more allied, and more collaborative than either side would like to admit. Opposition to the industrial economy’s ravaging of the landscapes of farming and forestry now comes from a small and scattered alliance of agrarians, not from liberals or conservatives.
Conservatives and liberals disagree passionately about climate change, for example, yet liberal protests against climate change far exceed protests against the waste and pollution that occur locally in industrial agriculture and are its reputed causes. And neither the conservatives who esteem the fossil fuels nor the liberals who deplore them have advocated rationing their use, either to make them last or to reduce their harm. For these people the old ideals of enough and plenty have been overruled by the ideals of all you want and all you can get. They cannot imagine that for farmers a limitless market share, like a limitless appetite, can lead only to the related diseases of too much and too little.
Science, apart from moral limits in scientists, seems to be limitless, for it has produced nuclear and chemical abominations that humans, with their very limited intelligence, can neither limit nor safely live with. “Anything goes” and “Stop at nothing” are the moral principles that some scientists have borrowed apparently from the greediest of conservatives and the most libertine of liberals. The faith that limitless technological progress will finally solve the problems of limitless contamination seems to depend upon some sort of neo-religion.
The good care of land and people, on the contrary, depends primarily upon arts, ways of making and doing. One cannot be, above all, a good neighbor without such ways. And the arts, all of them, are limited. Apart from limits they cannot exist. The making of any good work of art depends, first, upon limits of purpose and attention, and then upon limits specific to the kind of art and its means.
It is a formidable paradox that in order to achieve the sort of limitlessness we have begun to call “sustainability,” whether in human life or the life of the ecosphere, strict limits must be observed. Enduring structures of household and family life, or the life of a community or the life of a country, cannot be formed except within limits. We must not outdistance local knowledge and affection, or the capacities of local persons to pay attention to details, to the “minute particulars” only by which, William Blake thought, we can do good to one another. Within limits, we can think of rightness of scale. When the scale is right, we can imagine completeness of form.
The first limit to be encountered in making a farm—or a regional or national economy—is carrying capacity: How much can we ask of this land, this field or this pasture or this woodland, without diminishing the land’s response? And then we come to other limits, perhaps many of them, each one addressing directly our imagination, sympathy, affection, forbearance, knowledge, and skill. And now I must call to mind Aldo Leopold, who, unlike most conservationists since John Muir, could think beyond wilderness conservation to conservation of the country’s economic landscapes of farming and forestry. His conception of humanity’s relation to the natural world was eminently practical, and this must have come from his experience as a hunter and fisherman, his study of game management, and his and his family’s restoration of their once-exhausted Sand County farm. He knew that land-destruction is easy, for it requires only ignorance and violence. But the obligation to restore the land and conserve it requires humanity in its highest, completest sense. The Leopold family renewed the fertility and health of their land by their work, their pleasure, and their love for their place and for one another.
Aldo Leopold thought carefully about farming and forestry because he knew that far more land would be put to those uses than ever could be safeguarded in wilderness preserves. In an essay of 1945, “The Outlook for Farm Wildlife,” he laid side by side “two opposing philosophies of farm life” (the italics being his):
1 The farm is a food-factory, and the criterion of its success is salable products.
2 The farm is a place to live. The criterion of success is a harmonious balance between plants, animals, and people; between the domestic and the wild; between utility and beauty.
This is a statement about form, contrasting a form that is too simple and too exclusive with a form that may be complex enough to accommodate the interest of what is actually involved. Under the rule of the first form, “the trend of the landscape is toward a monotype.” This form can be adequately described as the straightest, shortest line between input and income. All else is left out or denied. Such a form concedes nothing to its whereabouts. It is placed upon whatever landscape merely by imposition, as a cookie cutter is imposed upon dough. In its simplicity and rigidity, such a form is bad art, but also, as Leopold knew and as we now know better than he could have, it is bad science.
The second form is described as “a harmonious balance” among a diversity of interests. On such a farm, made whole by the high artistry of farming, every part is both limited and enabled by the others. This harmonious balance, I should not need to say, cannot be prefabricated. It can be realized only uniquely within the boundary of any given farm, according to the natures and demands of its indwelling plants and animals, and according to the abilities, needs, and wishes of its resident human family. Wherever this is fully accomplished, it is a grand masterpiece to behold.
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