The Art of Loading Brush. Wendell Berry
need for “health care, education and clean energy, just to name a few,” will go securely on and on, supplying without limit the need for jobs, whereas the need for food, clothing, shelter, and manufactured goods will be supplied by what?
Now I must tell why, as a comparatively prosperous and settled resident of my home country in the United States, I should be as troubled as I am by the faith or superstition or future-fantasy of the economists of so-called development. My family and I live, as we know and fear, in what the orthodox economists consider a backward, under-developed, and to-be-developed country. This is “rural America,” the great domestic colony that we have made of our actual country, as opposed to the nation, the government, and the economy. This particular fragment of it is called “The Golden Triangle,” a wedge of country bounded by the three interstate highways connecting Louisville, Lexington, and Cincinnati. The three are connected also by rail and by air. The Triangle is bounded on its northwest side also by the Ohio River. Because it is so fortunately located with respect to transportation and markets, this area is thought (by some) to be “Golden,” which is to say eminently suited to (future) development.
The landscapes within the Triangle are topographically diverse—rolling uplands, steep valley sides, fairly level bottomlands—all, though varyingly, fragile and vulnerable to various established abuses. The soils are fertile, productive, responsive to good treatment, but much diminished by erosion and misuse in the years of “settlement,” severely eroded in some places, still eroding in others. The native forest is predominantly hardwood, much diminished and fragmented, suffering from diseases and invasive species, largely undervalued, neglected or ill-used, but potentially of great economic worth if well used and cared for. The watercourses are numerous, often degraded, mostly polluted by silt or chemicals or both. There is, in most years, abundant rainfall.
The three cities seem generally to be prospering and expanding, but are expectably troubled by social disintegration, drugs, poverty, traffic congestion, and violence. The towns, including county seats, are in decay or dead, preyed upon by the cities and chain stores, diseased by urban and media culture, cheap energy, family disintegration, drugs, and the various electronic screens.
Especially during the early decades of the tobacco program, the farming here was highly diversified and, at its best, exemplary in its husbanding of the land. Because of the program, tobacco was the basis of a local agrarian culture that was both economically and socially stabilizing. The farms were mostly small, farmed by their resident families and neighborly exchanges of work. In addition to tobacco and provender for the households, they produced (collectively and often individually) corn, small grains, hogs, chickens and other poultry, eggs, cream, milk, and an abundance of pasture for herds of beef cattle and flocks of sheep.
The tobacco program with its benefits ended in 2004. Though it served growers of a crop that after the Surgeon General’s report of 1965 could not be defended, the program itself was exemplary. Both the people and the land benefitted from it. By the combination of price supports with production control, limiting supply to anticipated demand, the program maintained the livelihoods of the small farms, and so maintained the livelihoods of shops and stores in the towns. It gave the same protection on the market to the small producer as to the large. By limiting the acreage of a high-paying crop, it provided a significant measure of soil conservation. Most important, it supported the traditional family and social structure of the region and its culture of husbandry.
For once and for a while, then, the farmers of this region stood together, stood up for themselves, and secured for themselves prices reasonably fair for one of their products. The tobacco program, once and for a while, gave them an asking price, with results in every way good. Before and after the program, which was their program, they have had simply to accept whatever the buyers have been pleased to offer. When producers of commodities have no asking price, the result is plunder of both land and people, as in any colony. By “asking price” I mean a fair price, as determined for example by “parity,” which would enable farmers to prosper “on a par with” their urban counterparts; a fair price, then, supported by bargaining power.
After the demise of the tobacco program, and with it the economy and way of life it had preserved and stood for, this so-favored Triangle and its region have declined economically, agriculturally, and socially. The tobacco that is still grown here is grown mainly in large acreages under contracts written by the tobacco companies, and primarily with migrant labor. Most of the farms that are still working are mainly or exclusively producing beef cattle—which is good, insofar as it gives much of our vulnerable countryside the year-round protection of perennial pastures and hay crops, but it is a far cry from the old diversity of crops and livestock. Of much greater concern is the continuous planting of large acreages of soy beans and corn, a way of farming unsuited to our sloping land (or, in fact, to any land), erosive, toxic, requiring large expenditures of money for uncertain returns. For such cropping the fences are removed, making the land useless for grazing. Farms are being subdivided and “developed,” or cash-rented for corn and beans.
The land is no longer divided and owned in the long succession, by inheritance or purchase, of farmer after farmer. It has now become “real estate,” ruled by the land market, owned increasingly by urban investors, or by urban escapees seeking the (typically short-lived) consolation and relaxation of “a place in the country.” The government now subsidizes land purchases by some young farmers, “helping” them by involving them in large long-term debts and in ways of farming that degrade the land they may, late in their lives, finally own. For many young people whose vocation once would have been farming, farming is no longer possible. You have to be too rich to farm before you can afford a farm in my county.
Only a few years ago, I received a letter from a man extraordinarily thoughtful, who described himself as an ex-addict whose early years were spent under the teaching and influence of a family elder, in the tobacco patches of a neighborhood of small farms. Caught up by the centrifugal force of a disintegrating community and way of life, he drifted into addiction, from which, with help, he got free. He wrote to me, I think, believing that I should know his story. People, he said, were wondering what comes after the tobacco program. He answered: drug addiction. He was right. Or he was partly right. His answer would have been complete if he had added screen addiction to drug addiction.
As long as the diverse economy of our small farms lasted, our communities were filled with people who needed one another and knew that they did. They needed one another’s help in their work, and from that they needed one another’s companionship. Most essentially, the grownups and the elders needed the help of the children, who thus learned the family’s and the community’s work and the entailed duties, pleasures, and loyalties. When that work disappears, when parents leave farm and household for town jobs, when the upbringing of the young is left largely to the schools, then the children, like their parents, live as individuals, particles, loved perhaps but not needed for any usefulness they may have or any help they might give. As the local influences weaken, the outside influences grow stronger.
And so the drugs and the screens are with us. The day is long past when most school-age children benefitted from work and instruction that gave them in turn a practical assurance of their worth. They have now mostly disappeared from the countryside and from the streets and houseyards of the towns. In this new absence and silence of the children, parents, teachers, church people, and public officials hold meetings to wonder what to do about the drug problem. The screen problem receives less attention, but it may be the worst of the two because it wears the aura of technological progress and social approval.
The old complex life, at once economic and social, was fairly coherent and self-sustaining because each community was focused upon its own local countryside and upon its own people, their needs, and their work. That life is now almost entirely gone. It has been replaced by the dispersed lives of dispersed individuals, commuting and consuming, scattering in every direction every morning, returning at night only to their screens and carryout meals. Meanwhile, in a country everywhere distressed and taxed by homelessness, once-used good farm buildings, built by local thrift and skill, rot to the ground. Good houses, that once sheltered respectable lives, stare out through sashless windows or have disappeared.
I have described briefly and I am sure inadequately my home country, a place dauntingly complex