Wendell Berry
Against Economic Imperialism
The critical difference that I want to talk about is between an imposed economy, in which the land and people of an area are exploited by outside interests, and an economy genuinely local, which rises both from the local land and from the intelligence, skill, and stewardship of the local people.
Before the tobacco program was set up under the New Deal, the tobacco economy of most of Kentucky was imposed. It was controlled by and for the tobacco companies, and the growers had no power. On the market, they had no recourse but to accept the offered price, however low. Their efforts to increase income by increasing volume tended only to lower prices and increase costs, making them even poorer than before. In 1907, one of my grandfathers sold his tobacco crop and got nothing for it. It barely paid the commission on its own sale. In that year and others like it, my grandfather was one of many cruelly exploited farmers. Obviously, in such a predicament, people need to organize, limit production, and so enforce fair market prices—which, under the tobacco program, the growers were able to do. (This is similar to the achievement of the labor movement in industry.)
Now I want to make another point, less obvious maybe, but at least equally important. The tobacco-growing families who survived that long adversity of the market did so largely, I think, because they were living from their land. The old subsistence economy was still intact. Of the things they needed to live they produced much and bought little. This was the age-old economy of households and neighborhoods, founded upon vegetable gardens, home orchards, barnyard poultry flocks, family milk cows and meat hogs. This provisioning was supported in turn by a practical culture that—in contrast to the public immensity and private passivity of modern consumerism—was local, small in scale, highly adaptive, independent, and democratic.
By now, the local cultures of subsistence are either dying or dead. As a result, the people of the land and the land-use economics are more vulnerable and more dependent, more helpless, than they have ever been. But you can't destroy the local economies and cultures of people without destroying at the same time the local landscapes.
What we Kentuckians for the Commonwealth are talking about inescapably, all the time, is the terrifying disease of land destruction or, in fact, world-destruction. So far, by way of our political leaders, we have attempted mostly to deal with the symptoms: climate change, pollution, poverty, low income, poor education, bad health, etc. But if you don't cure the disease, the symptoms get worse, which worsens the disease.
Because of the loss of governmental protections such as the tobacco program and the weakening of the labor movement, we now have imposed economies on all rural landscapes, farmed or forested or mined, and all are being destroyed. Destruction by surface mining is faster, but eventually—at present rates of erosion, chemical poisoning, destructive logging, "development," etc.—all the land will be destroyed. The land and the people, in an imposed economy, are treated merely as "resources" to be exploited and used up. The land, as Wes Jackson has repeatedly said, becomes as exhaustible—as nonrenewable, contrary to its nature—as petroleum.
We are dealing here with what seems to be a law: You cannot divide the land from the people, or detach the people from the land, without the gravest injury to both. To be preserved in human use, the land must be inhabited by people who are attached to it culturally and economically, who know how to care properly for it while they use it, and who want and are willing to care for it because they understand their dependence on it.
Now we are coming into the neighborhood of that ever more popular word "sustainability." We have got to be careful, because we Americans haven't sustained very much for very long. To mean anything, sustainability must be defined as a set of local economic practices worked out in keeping with ecological standards, the health of local ecosystems, and the needs of the local people.
I can't discuss these issues with people in eastern Kentucky without recognizing that I am to a considerable extent an outsider. My part of the state is in several ways different from their part. And yet we are joined politically and by gravity. I lived beside the Kentucky River, not far from its mouth, and I know that this river is suffering. It is in bad health because of bad economic practices from the headwaters all the way down. And so I need to be in conversation with my upstream neighbors about our political and economic health, which is to say the health of our river. I would say to my upstream neighbors what I would say to my neighbors downstream and to my own family: We need to think again about our dependence on the great corporations and their global economy. We need to ask carefully and earnestly what that so-called economy is extracting from our land, our ecosystems and watersheds, our neighbors, our families, and our own souls—only to pay us at last the nothing that my grandfather received for his 1907 tobacco crop.
And so up and down the Kentucky River and along the other rivers rising in the Appalachian coal lands, collecting in their courses the runoff of agricultural and industrial chemicals and the discharge of urban sewage, we need to be thinking of local economies that would be both ecologically sound and supportive of the local people. Here I can do no better than to align my remarks with the thinking of the exemplary patriot and citizen, Judy Bonds of West Virginia: her fierce opposition to the imposed economy and the abuses of coal companies, her loyal harking back to the old subsistence economics, and her plea for economic diversification to provide to people working in the strip mines economic choices "to where they don't have to destroy their own homes in order to live there."
"Subsistence" is a word fallen into disfavor: We have been taught to scorn subsistence economies as "backward" or "underdeveloped." But I'm trying to think of a subsistence economy as the most secure life-support system, both natural and cultural, comprised of the local soil, the local ecosystem, and the skills of the local people. I want to understand what it means for a human community to depend so far as possible upon its home landscape—how, for instance, such local dependence would make for a measure of independence and protection from outside forces of exploitation. I'm remembering the Old Testament scholar Ellen Davis's argument that the local knowledge and domestic skills of the virtuous woman of Proverbs 31 were protections against exploitation by the imperial economy of her time.
When the coal economy has ended, eastern Kentucky, like other regions at the end of industrial exploitation and exhaustion, will be dependent on what will remain of the local landscape and on the intelligence and capability of the local people. After coal, the great resource of the region will be the forest. To make the fullest sense of our resistance to the coal industry's abuses of land and people, we have to begin now to think more carefully than before of the forest: of its present and future health, of the best ways of caring for it and using it, and of the development of local forest economies. By local forest economy, I mean the whole set of skills and enterprises by which local people and local woodlands can be mutually sustaining: the work of care and maintenance; the harvesting of timber, fuel, food, and other forest products; properly scaled manufacturing enterprises—sawmills, for example, and furniture factories—to add value to the produce of the forest; and the many other employments that will be needed to support the forest economy. This would mean local work for local people. It would also mean the strongest local support for the best care and the best use of the forest.
We are again in the neighborhood of that word "sustainability," which is now attaching itself also to forestry. The official forces of forestry in Kentucky are now having a good deal to say in favor of sustainable forestry and the standards and principles of forest sustainability, but this official language at present is so vague as to be useless. To make sense under the heading of forest sustainability, it is necessary to study examples such as the Menominee Forest in Wisconsin and the Pioneer Forest in Missouri that have thrived and even prospered in use for a long time.
Here I want to speak a little of the work of Jason Rutledge of southwestern Virginia. For many years Jason has been practicing and teaching a way of forestry that seems to me to earn honestly the adjective "sustainable." This involves the use of horses for draft power in the woods, and a method of logging known as "worst-first, single-tree selection." This means, in practice, that every fifteen or twenty years, the forester removes from the forest the trees of the worst quality, causing the least possible disturbance to the terrain and the smallest possible openings in the canopy. The result is that the forest remains ecologically intact, therefore continuously productive, and that the quality and value of the timber stand increases with each harvest. This clearly makes better sense than "high-grading," which takes out only the best trees, and clear cutting, which takes them all. This sort of care and selectivity in logging is eased by the use of horses, which keeps operating expenses low, in contrast to the use of heavy machinery, which is expensive and thus places an emphasis hard to resist upon volume. Horse-logging, moreover, is affordable to local entrepreneurs working on a small scale, and thus tends to localize the forest economy, whereas machine logging siphons money out of the local community.
Most of the land of eastern Kentucky is best suited to forestry, and it is best protected by its native forest. But some of the land can be farmed: arable valley bottoms, and gentler slopes suitable for pasture; I'm not talking about the famous "flat land" made by surface mining. And here I want to invoke again the principle of local subsistence. All over our state we need to be organizing local food economies to enable local people to be fed so far as possible from local farms and gardens. No food should be exported until local needs have been met.
To meet local needs, agriculture will have to diversify, which will require the work of more people, on the land and also in processing, marketing, and distribution. This, as opposed to "bringing in industry," is the right kind of "job creation." I can report, for everybody's encouragement, that the City of Louisville, with the help and participation of surrounding counties, is now well started in the development of its own local food economy on the principle of cooperation and mutual support between producers and consumers. This effort, so far, seems to me to have been in every way admirable, another good example.
Eastern Kentucky's best advantage in agriculture is its tradition of home gardening. I never visit that part of the state in the growing season without admiring and envying the gardens, which are invariably earlier and more abounding than ours at home. The gardeners of those gardens, their skills, and their tradition, are an asset and a resource of the greatest promise.
Now I'll bring this talk to a neighborly stop. I think a good rule for any region is to pay only limited and very critical attention to anybody from somewhere else.
Before the tobacco program was set up under the New Deal, the tobacco economy of most of Kentucky was imposed. It was controlled by and for the tobacco companies, and the growers had no power. On the market, they had no recourse but to accept the offered price, however low. Their efforts to increase income by increasing volume tended only to lower prices and increase costs, making them even poorer than before. In 1907, one of my grandfathers sold his tobacco crop and got nothing for it. It barely paid the commission on its own sale. In that year and others like it, my grandfather was one of many cruelly exploited farmers. Obviously, in such a predicament, people need to organize, limit production, and so enforce fair market prices—which, under the tobacco program, the growers were able to do. (This is similar to the achievement of the labor movement in industry.)
Now I want to make another point, less obvious maybe, but at least equally important. The tobacco-growing families who survived that long adversity of the market did so largely, I think, because they were living from their land. The old subsistence economy was still intact. Of the things they needed to live they produced much and bought little. This was the age-old economy of households and neighborhoods, founded upon vegetable gardens, home orchards, barnyard poultry flocks, family milk cows and meat hogs. This provisioning was supported in turn by a practical culture that—in contrast to the public immensity and private passivity of modern consumerism—was local, small in scale, highly adaptive, independent, and democratic.
By now, the local cultures of subsistence are either dying or dead. As a result, the people of the land and the land-use economics are more vulnerable and more dependent, more helpless, than they have ever been. But you can't destroy the local economies and cultures of people without destroying at the same time the local landscapes.
What we Kentuckians for the Commonwealth are talking about inescapably, all the time, is the terrifying disease of land destruction or, in fact, world-destruction. So far, by way of our political leaders, we have attempted mostly to deal with the symptoms: climate change, pollution, poverty, low income, poor education, bad health, etc. But if you don't cure the disease, the symptoms get worse, which worsens the disease.
Because of the loss of governmental protections such as the tobacco program and the weakening of the labor movement, we now have imposed economies on all rural landscapes, farmed or forested or mined, and all are being destroyed. Destruction by surface mining is faster, but eventually—at present rates of erosion, chemical poisoning, destructive logging, "development," etc.—all the land will be destroyed. The land and the people, in an imposed economy, are treated merely as "resources" to be exploited and used up. The land, as Wes Jackson has repeatedly said, becomes as exhaustible—as nonrenewable, contrary to its nature—as petroleum.
We are dealing here with what seems to be a law: You cannot divide the land from the people, or detach the people from the land, without the gravest injury to both. To be preserved in human use, the land must be inhabited by people who are attached to it culturally and economically, who know how to care properly for it while they use it, and who want and are willing to care for it because they understand their dependence on it.
Now we are coming into the neighborhood of that ever more popular word "sustainability." We have got to be careful, because we Americans haven't sustained very much for very long. To mean anything, sustainability must be defined as a set of local economic practices worked out in keeping with ecological standards, the health of local ecosystems, and the needs of the local people.
I can't discuss these issues with people in eastern Kentucky without recognizing that I am to a considerable extent an outsider. My part of the state is in several ways different from their part. And yet we are joined politically and by gravity. I lived beside the Kentucky River, not far from its mouth, and I know that this river is suffering. It is in bad health because of bad economic practices from the headwaters all the way down. And so I need to be in conversation with my upstream neighbors about our political and economic health, which is to say the health of our river. I would say to my upstream neighbors what I would say to my neighbors downstream and to my own family: We need to think again about our dependence on the great corporations and their global economy. We need to ask carefully and earnestly what that so-called economy is extracting from our land, our ecosystems and watersheds, our neighbors, our families, and our own souls—only to pay us at last the nothing that my grandfather received for his 1907 tobacco crop.
And so up and down the Kentucky River and along the other rivers rising in the Appalachian coal lands, collecting in their courses the runoff of agricultural and industrial chemicals and the discharge of urban sewage, we need to be thinking of local economies that would be both ecologically sound and supportive of the local people. Here I can do no better than to align my remarks with the thinking of the exemplary patriot and citizen, Judy Bonds of West Virginia: her fierce opposition to the imposed economy and the abuses of coal companies, her loyal harking back to the old subsistence economics, and her plea for economic diversification to provide to people working in the strip mines economic choices "to where they don't have to destroy their own homes in order to live there."
"Subsistence" is a word fallen into disfavor: We have been taught to scorn subsistence economies as "backward" or "underdeveloped." But I'm trying to think of a subsistence economy as the most secure life-support system, both natural and cultural, comprised of the local soil, the local ecosystem, and the skills of the local people. I want to understand what it means for a human community to depend so far as possible upon its home landscape—how, for instance, such local dependence would make for a measure of independence and protection from outside forces of exploitation. I'm remembering the Old Testament scholar Ellen Davis's argument that the local knowledge and domestic skills of the virtuous woman of Proverbs 31 were protections against exploitation by the imperial economy of her time.
When the coal economy has ended, eastern Kentucky, like other regions at the end of industrial exploitation and exhaustion, will be dependent on what will remain of the local landscape and on the intelligence and capability of the local people. After coal, the great resource of the region will be the forest. To make the fullest sense of our resistance to the coal industry's abuses of land and people, we have to begin now to think more carefully than before of the forest: of its present and future health, of the best ways of caring for it and using it, and of the development of local forest economies. By local forest economy, I mean the whole set of skills and enterprises by which local people and local woodlands can be mutually sustaining: the work of care and maintenance; the harvesting of timber, fuel, food, and other forest products; properly scaled manufacturing enterprises—sawmills, for example, and furniture factories—to add value to the produce of the forest; and the many other employments that will be needed to support the forest economy. This would mean local work for local people. It would also mean the strongest local support for the best care and the best use of the forest.
We are again in the neighborhood of that word "sustainability," which is now attaching itself also to forestry. The official forces of forestry in Kentucky are now having a good deal to say in favor of sustainable forestry and the standards and principles of forest sustainability, but this official language at present is so vague as to be useless. To make sense under the heading of forest sustainability, it is necessary to study examples such as the Menominee Forest in Wisconsin and the Pioneer Forest in Missouri that have thrived and even prospered in use for a long time.
Here I want to speak a little of the work of Jason Rutledge of southwestern Virginia. For many years Jason has been practicing and teaching a way of forestry that seems to me to earn honestly the adjective "sustainable." This involves the use of horses for draft power in the woods, and a method of logging known as "worst-first, single-tree selection." This means, in practice, that every fifteen or twenty years, the forester removes from the forest the trees of the worst quality, causing the least possible disturbance to the terrain and the smallest possible openings in the canopy. The result is that the forest remains ecologically intact, therefore continuously productive, and that the quality and value of the timber stand increases with each harvest. This clearly makes better sense than "high-grading," which takes out only the best trees, and clear cutting, which takes them all. This sort of care and selectivity in logging is eased by the use of horses, which keeps operating expenses low, in contrast to the use of heavy machinery, which is expensive and thus places an emphasis hard to resist upon volume. Horse-logging, moreover, is affordable to local entrepreneurs working on a small scale, and thus tends to localize the forest economy, whereas machine logging siphons money out of the local community.
Most of the land of eastern Kentucky is best suited to forestry, and it is best protected by its native forest. But some of the land can be farmed: arable valley bottoms, and gentler slopes suitable for pasture; I'm not talking about the famous "flat land" made by surface mining. And here I want to invoke again the principle of local subsistence. All over our state we need to be organizing local food economies to enable local people to be fed so far as possible from local farms and gardens. No food should be exported until local needs have been met.
To meet local needs, agriculture will have to diversify, which will require the work of more people, on the land and also in processing, marketing, and distribution. This, as opposed to "bringing in industry," is the right kind of "job creation." I can report, for everybody's encouragement, that the City of Louisville, with the help and participation of surrounding counties, is now well started in the development of its own local food economy on the principle of cooperation and mutual support between producers and consumers. This effort, so far, seems to me to have been in every way admirable, another good example.
Eastern Kentucky's best advantage in agriculture is its tradition of home gardening. I never visit that part of the state in the growing season without admiring and envying the gardens, which are invariably earlier and more abounding than ours at home. The gardeners of those gardens, their skills, and their tradition, are an asset and a resource of the greatest promise.
Now I'll bring this talk to a neighborly stop. I think a good rule for any region is to pay only limited and very critical attention to anybody from somewhere else.
from The Louisville Review Number 71.1, Special Kentucky Issue, 2012
