The Art of Loading Brush. Wendell Berry
that is good, much good also that is unappreciated or unrecognized. Outsiders passing through, unaware of its problems, are apt to think it very beautiful, which partly it still is. To me, and to others known to me, it is also a very needy place. When I am wishing, as I often do, I wish its children might be taught thoroughly and honestly its own history, and its history as a part of American history. I wish every one of its schools had enough biologists and ecologists to lead the students outdoors, to show them where they are in relation to drainages, soils, plants, and animals. I wish we had an economy wisely kind to the land and the people.
A good many years ago somebody, or several somebodies, named this parcel of land “The Golden Triangle.” Like I assume most people here, I don’t know who the somebodies were. I don’t know how or what they were thinking or what their vision was. I know that the name “The Golden Triangle” is allied to other phrases or ideas, equally vague and doubtful, that have been hovering over us: the need for “job creation,” the need to “bring in industry,” the obligation (of apparently everybody) to “compete in the global economy,” the need (of apparently everybody) for “a college education,” the need for or the promises of “the service economy,” and “the knowledge economy.” None of these by now weary foretellings has anything in particular to do with anything that is presently here. They and the thinking they represent all gesture somewhat heroically toward “the Future,” another phrase, obsessively repeated by the people out front in politics and education, signifying not much. Perhaps the most influential “future” right now is that of “the knowledge economy,” as yet not here but surely expected. This means that in order to get jobs and to compete in the global economy, our eligible young people need to major in courses of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics while they are still in high school. This is the so-called STEM curriculum, dear to the hearts of our several too expensive, overadministered, underfunded, and ravenous state universities. And STEM is promoted by slurs, coming from the highest offices of state government, against such studies as literature and history.
The advantage of the STEM-emphasis to the education industry is fairly obvious. And if the great corporations of the global knowledge economy settle in the Golden Triangle or somewhere nearby, they surely will be glad to have a highly trained workforce readily available. But no supreme incarnation of the knowledge economy has yet arrived. If such an arrival is imminent or expected, that has not been announced to the natives. No doubt for that reason, the authorities have not predicted how many STEM graduates the future is going to need (and, as predicted, pay well). The possibility that the schools may turn out too many expensively educated, overspecialized STEM graduates evidently is not being considered. Nor evidently is the possibility that a surplus of such graduates, like their farming ancestors, will have no asking price, and so will come cheap to whomever may hire them. Maybe someday the people living here will have a fine, affluent Scientific, Technological, Engineered, and Mathematized Future to live in. Or, of course, maybe not.
That, anyhow, is development as we know it in The Golden Triangle. Meanwhile, our land is going to the devil, and too many of our people are addicted to drugs or screens or to mere distraction.
For a person living here, it is possible to imagine an economic project that would be locally appropriate and might actually help us. This likely is a project that could not be accomplished by economists only, but economists surely will be needed. The project would be to define a local or regional economy that, within the given limits, would be diverse, coherent, and lasting. If they were not so fad-ridden, economists might see that a knowledge economy, or any other single economy, cannot and should not occupy a whole region or a whole future. They might consider the possibility of a balance or parity of necessary occupations.
I am assuming a need for any locality, region, or nation to provide itself so far as possible with food, clothing, and shelter. Such fundamental economic provision, one would think, should be considered normal or fitting to human inhabitation of the earth. In addition to the economic benefits to local people of local supplies, a future-oriented society such as ours ought to consider the possibility that any locality might become stranded by lasting interruptions of long-distance transportation. Since for many years I have been trying to think as a pacifist, I feel a little strange in addressing issues of military strategy. But it seems preposterous to me that we should maintain an enormous, enormously expensive armory of weapons, including nuclear bombs, ready at every moment to defend a country in which most people live far from the sources of their food, clothing, and other necessities. Arguing from our leaders’ own premises, then, the need for balanced local economies is obvious. From the recognition of local needs, both visible and supposable, the people of this or any region might reasonably proceed to a set of questions needing to be answered. Eventually, I think, there would be many such questions. I am sure that I don’t know them all, but it is easy to foresee some of them:
1 After so long a history of diminishment and loss, what remains here, in the land and people of this place, that is valuable and worth keeping? Or: What that is here do the local people need for their own use and sustenance, and then, the local needs met, to market elsewhere?
2 What is the present use or value of the local land and its products to the local people?
3 How might we earn a sustainable income from the local land and its products? This would require adding value locally to the commodities—the goods!—coming from our farms and woodlands, but how might that be done?
4 What kinds of work are necessary to preserve and to live from the productivity of our land and people?
5 What do our people need to know, or learn and keep in mind, in order to accomplish the necessary work? The STEM courses might help, might be indispensable, but what else is needed? We are talking of course about education for livelihood, but also for responsible membership, citizenship, and stewardship.
6 What economic balances are necessary to reward adequately, and so to maintain indefinitely, the necessary work?
To answer those questions, close and patient study will be required of economists and others. The difficulty here is that, within the terms and conditions of the dominant economy over the last century and a half, the communities and economies of land use have been increasingly vulnerable. The effort to make them something like sustainable would have to begin with attention to the difference between the industrial economy of inert materials and monetary abstractions and an authentic land economy that must include the kindly husbandry of living creatures. This is the critical issue. As for many years, we are still hearing that almost any new technology will “transform farming.” This implies an almost-general approval of the so far unrestrainable industrial prerogative to treat living creatures as comprising a sort of ore, and the food industry as a sort of foundry. If farming is no more than an industry to be unendingly transformed by technologies, as is still happening, then farmers can be replaced by engineers, and engineers finally by robots, in the progress toward our evident goal of human uselessness. If, on the contrary, because of the uniqueness and fragility of each one of the world’s myriad of small places, the land economies must involve a creaturely affection and care, then we must look back fifty or sixty years and think again. If, as even some scientists have recognized, there are natural and human limits beyond which farming (and forestry) cannot be industrialized, then we need a more complex and particularizing language than the economists so far use.
The six questions I have proposed for my or any region do not derive from a wished-for or a predicted future. They have to do with what I would call “provision,” which depends upon being attentively and responsibly present in the present. We do not, for example, love our children because of their potential to become well-trained workers in a future knowledge economy. We love them because we are alive to them in this present moment, which is the only time when we and they are alive. This love implicates us in a present need to provide: to be living a responsible life, which is to say a responsible economic life.
Provision, I think, is never more than caring properly for the good that you have, including your own life. As it relates to the future, provision does only what our oldest, longest experience tells us to do. We must continuously attend to our need for food, clothing, and shelter. We must care for the land, care for the forest, plant trees, plant gardens and crops, see that the brood animals are bred, keep the house and the household intact. We must