Читать книгу The Art of Loading Brush - Wendell Berry - Страница 13

The Thought of Limits in a Prodigal Age

Is there, at bottom, any real distinction between esthetics and economics?

—Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac & Other Writings on Ecology and Conservation

I want to say something about the decline, the virtual ruin, of rural life, and about the influence and effect of agricultural surpluses, which I believe are accountable for more destruction of land and people than any other economic “factor.” This is a task that ought to be taken up by an economist, which I am not. But economists, even agricultural economists, farm-raised as many of them have been, do not live in rural communities, as I do, and they appear not to care, as I do, that rural communities like mine all over the country are either dying or dead. And so, only partly qualified as I am, I will undertake this writing in the hope that I am contributing to a conversation that will attract others better qualified.

I have at hand an article from the Wall Street Journal of February 22, 2016, entitled “The U.S. Economy Is in Good Shape.” The article is by Martin Feldstein, “chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Ronald Reagan . . . a professor at Harvard and a member of the Journal’s board of contributors.” Among economists Prof. Feldstein appears to be somewhere near the top of the pile. And yet his economic optimism is founded entirely upon current measures of “incomes,” “unemployment,” and “industrial production,” all abstractions narrowly focused. Nowhere in his analysis does he mention the natural world, or the economies of land use by which the wealth of nature is made available to the “American economy.” Mr. Feldstein believes that “the big uncertainties that now hang over our economy are political.”

But from what I see here at home in the watershed of the Kentucky River, and from what I have seen and learned of other places, I know that industrial agriculture is in serious failure, which is to say that it is not sustainable. Projecting from the damages of the comparatively brief American histories of states such as Kentucky and Iowa, one must conclude that the present use of the farmland cannot be sustained for another hundred years: The rates of soil erosion are too high, the runoff is too toxic, the ecological impoverishment is too great, the surviving farmers are too few and too old. To anybody who knows these things, by witness of sight or by numerical measures, they would appear to qualify significantly the “good shape” of the economy. I conclude that Prof. Feldstein does not know these things, but is conventionally ignorant of them. Like other people of privilege for thousands of years, far more numerous now than ever before, he appears to take for granted the bounty of nature and the work that provides it to the human economy.

In remarkable contrast to the optimism of Prof. Feldstein, the New York Times of March 10, 2016, printed an article, “Who’s Killing Global Growth?” by Steven Rattner, “a Wall Street executive and a contributing opinion writer.” Mr. Rattner’s downhearted assessment, like Prof. Feldstein’s upbeat one, is based upon measures that are entirely economic or monetary, quantitative, and abstract: “financial markets,” “projections for future growth,” “wages,” “consumer spending,” “rising supply,” “disappointing demand,” etc. The “global growth” Mr. Rattner has in mind is purely financial and is without reference to the effect of such “growth” upon the health and the welfare of the globe’s actual people and other creatures. Like Prof. Feldstein, Mr. Rattner appears to suppose, consciously or not, that the natural world and human workers will continue to supply their necessary goods without limit and to the allure simply of money.

I have at hand also a sentence from the New York Review of Books, September 24, 2015, by James Surowiecki, another highly credentialed economist. Mr. Surowiecki is reviewing among others a book by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Bruce C. Greenwald, Creating a Learning Society: A New Approach to Growth, Development, and Social Progress. This book, the reviewer says, “is dedicated to showing how developing countries can use government policy to become high-growth, knowledge-intensive economies, rather than remaining low-cost producers of commodities.” I have kept this sentence in mind because of the problems it raises, all relating to my concern about the damages imposed by national and global “economies” upon land and people. Mr. Surowieki’s sentence seems to be highly condensed and allusive, a sort of formula for increasing economic growth—or, as it actually says, for turning countries into economies. The sentence no doubt is clear to economists, but it has put me to some trouble. My interest is not in the analyses and theories of these economists, since they seem mainly to ignore the natural world and the human communities that are my concern. I am interested here in their public language, by which they reveal what they accept, and expect most others to accept, as axioms—what one might call their lore or more accurately their faith.

I assume, then, that by “low-cost producers of commodities” Mr. Surowiecki means “poorly paid producers of cheap commodities,” that these commodities are material goods or raw materials produced from the land, that “knowledge-intensive economies” are based upon the abilities to exploit, trade, add value to, and market the cheaply produced commodities. Apparently it is taken for granted that this improving formula applies to all developing countries, their people, their land, and their natural resources, without regard to differences or distinctions among them. Such disregard of local and personal differences is a major article of this faith. It takes for granted furthermore that a knowledge-intensive economy, by causing growth, development, and social progress, will change a developing country into a developed country, and that this will be an all-around improvement. From the standpoint of industrial economists and their clients, this apparently is self-evident and unquestionable. It becomes immediately and urgently questionable from the standpoint of a dweller in a rural countryside who is bound to the land and the community by ties of history, family, and affection.

Here we arrive at a fundamental division of interest and allegiance, as probably also at the difference between two kinds of mind. The attention of these economists and others like them is directed as a matter of course to the monetary economy and to what, according to their abstract measurements, is good or bad for it. The attention of settled dwellers, at home in their chosen or hereditary places, is directed partially to the monetary economy, of course, and often in fear or sufferance, but their attention is directed also, out of natural affection and solicitude, to their places, the particular, unique, and irreplaceable patches of ground under their feet. Another difference involved here, if the settled dwellers are farmers, is that between people whose livelihoods are primarily dependent upon salaries and people whose livelihoods are primarily dependent upon the weather.

The settled dwellers, then, in their natural desire to remain settled, and facing the “promises” of development, certainly are going to have questions for the developers, and the first would be this: What is the net good that industrial economists, their employers, and their clients appear customarily to credit to growth, development, and “social progress”? In the United States, since at least the Civil War, and ever more rapidly after World War II, we have achieved industrial versions of all of those goals. But almost nobody is asking what is the worth of that achievement after we deduct its ecological and human costs. We have, in fact, been turning our country into an economy as fast as possible, and we have been doing so by an unaccounted squandering of its actual, its natural and its cultural, wealth.

As a second question, we should ask why commodities, the material goods that support our life, and the work of producing them, should be “low cost” or significantly cheaper than the goods and services of a “knowledge-intensive economy.” There is no reason to believe that the present market values of technological (developmental) knowledge and of commodities are absolute or in any way permanent. Nor is there reason to believe that such issues of value are, or can be, reliably settled by the free market of our present economy, or by any market. The good health of the land economies is a value that a market as such cannot consider and cannot protect. Moreover, agribusiness in all of its aspects is a knowledge-intensive system, which uses knowledge ruthlessly to control and exploit land and people.

Apparently it is assumed that a country’s economy of commodity-production, which could be as diverse as the country’s climate and soils permit, can safely be replaced or further depreciated by an economy of knowledge only. And so, as a third question, we must ask how secure and how beneficent is a one-product economy. Is the market for knowledge infinite in its demand, or can it be over-supplied and depressed, as the one-product economy of coal in the Appalachian coal fields has often been? And it hardly needs to be said that in the Appalachian coal fields the benefits of the coal economy to a rich and distant few has never adequately been measured against its impoverishment of the local people and their land.

Perhaps no outsider—no visiting expert, no dispassionate observer, certainly no outside investor—will notice the inherent weakness and cruelty of a one-product economy in a region or a country. But the adverse effects will certainly be visible and acutely feelable to the resident insiders. Those who live and must make their lives within the boundary of such an economy experience daily the readiness of their political leaders to endorse and excuse the destructiveness of “the economy,” as well as the public unwillingness to remedy or compensate the damages to the land and the people. The Appalachian coal economy has not only inflicted immeasurable and immeasurably lasting ecological and social damage to its region, but it has also distracted attention and care from the region’s other assets: its forests, soils, streams, and the (too often exported) talents of its people.

And so a fourth question: How, even in a knowledge-intensive economy, even unendingly “growing” and wealthy, are the people’s needs for food, clothing, and shelter to be met? Does the development of a highly lucrative knowledge economy entirely eliminate the need for the fundamental economies of subsistence? Do people eat and wear knowledge? Do they sleep warm in it? I know very well what the far-seeing economists will answer: People earning large salaries from “high-growth, knowledge-intensive economies” will buy their material subsistence from “low-cost producers of commodities” at home or, if not at home, then elsewhere. It is assumed that where there is a demand, and enough money, there will be unfailingly a supply, and this is another article of the industrial economic faith: The land and its “resources” will be always with us, and so will the poor who will dig, hack, and whittle an everlasting supply of low-cost commodities until they can be replaced by knowledge-intensive machines that will dig, hack, and whittle, no doubt on solar energy, faster and at a lower cost.

And so we come to question five: Do the economists of development ever attempt a fair assessment, or any assessment, of the value to a knowledge-intensive economy of a dependable local supply of life-supporting commodities? The answer, so far as I have learned, is that the developmental economists do no such thing. Their dream of human progress calls simply for the replacement of the commodity economy by the knowledge economy, and that is that. As evidence, let us consider a review of our economic past and future, “Moving On from Farm and Factory,” by Eduardo Porter, in the New York Times of April 27, 2016.

Mr. Porter’s premise is that the economies of farming and manufacturing, as a fixed and final consequence of historical trends, are now obsolete, or nearly so, and his statistics are sufficiently precipitous:

Over the course of the 20th century, farm employment in the United States dropped to 2 percent of the work force from 41 percent, even as output soared. Since 1950, manufacturing’s share has shrunk to 8.5 percent of nonfarm jobs, from 24 percent.

To this state of things Mr. Porter grants something like half an approval. Whereas nearly all of the “work force” once employed in farming have been “liberated . . . from their chains,” he thinks that “The current transition, from manufacturing to services, is more problematic.” Though for workers in the United States there are “options: health care, education and clean energy, just to name a few,” these options “present big economic and political challenges.” The principal challenges will be to get the politicians to abandon their promises of an increase of employment in manufacturing, and then to provide the government help necessary to make “the current transition from manufacturing to services” without too much rebellion by workers “against the changing tide.” Mr. Porter’s conclusion, despite these challenges, is optimistic:

Yet just as the federal government once provided a critical push to move the economy from its agricultural past into its industrial future, so, too, could it help build a postindustrial tomorrow.

Mr. Porter’s article, which clearly assumes the agreement or consent of a large number of his fellow economists and fellow citizens, rests upon the kind of assumptions that I have been calling articles of faith. Though it is certain that a lot of people, economists and others, are putting their faith in these assumptions, they are nonetheless entirely groundless. The assumptions, so far as I can trace them out, are as follows:

1 The economy of a country or a nation needs only to provide employment, it does not matter at what. And so of course no particular value can be assigned to the production of commodities.

2 So long as there is enough employment at work of some kind, a country or a nation can safely dispense with employment in sustainable farming and manufacturing, which is to say a sustainable dependence upon natural resources and the natural world.

3 Farming has little economic worth. It is of the past, and better so. Farm work involves no significant responsibilities, and requires no appreciable intelligence, knowledge, skill, or character. It is, as is often said, “mind-numbing,” a servile condition from the “chains” of which all workers, even owners who work on their own farms, need to be “liberated.”

4 The “output” of industrial agriculture will continue to “soar” without limit as ever more farmers are “liberated from their chains” by technology, and as technologies are continuously succeeded by more advanced technologies.

5 There is no economic or intrinsic difference between agriculture and industry: A farm is no more than a factory, a plant or an animal is no more than a machine or a substance.

6 The technological advances that have disemployed so many people from farming and manufacturing will never take away the jobs of service or postindustrial workers.

7 History, including economic history, is a forward motion, a progress, made up of irreversible changes. These changes can be established absolutely and forever in so little time as a century or two. Thus the great technological progress since perhaps the steam engine—a progress enabled by the fossil fuels, war, internal combustion, external combustion, and a sequence of poisons—will carry us right on into the (climactic? everlasting?) “postindustrial tomorrow.”

8 The 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 both in its natural history and in its human history, offering much 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 teach the children. But provision does not foresee, predict, project, or theorize the future. Provision instructs us to renew the roof of our house, not to shelter us when we are old—we may die or the world may end before we are old—but so we may live under a sound roof now. Provision merely accepts the chances we must take with the weather, mortality, fallibility. Perhaps the wisest of the old sayings is “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.” Provision accepts, next, the importance of diversity. Perhaps the next-wisest old saying is “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” When the bad, worse, or worst possibility presents itself, provision only continues to take the best possible care of what we have, or of what we have left.

The answers to my questions of course will affect the future. They might even bring about the “better future for our children” so famous with some politicians. But the answers will not come from the future. We must study what exists: what we know of the past, what we know now, what we can see now, if we look. It is likely that, if we look, we will see a need for the STEM disciplines, for we know already their capacity to serve some good purposes. But we will see that the need for them is limited by, for one thing, the need for other disciplines. And we will see a need also not to allow the value of highly technical knowledge to depress the value of the equally necessary and respectable knowledge of land use and land husbandry.

From its beginning, industrialism has depended on a general willingness to ignore everything that does not serve the cheapest possible production of merchandise and, therefore, the highest possible profit. And so to look back and think again, we must acknowledge real needs that have continued through the years to be real, though unacknowledged: the need to see and respect the inescapable dependence even of our present economy, as of our lives, upon nature and the natural world; and upon the need, just as important, to see and respect our inescapable dependence upon the economies—of farming, ranching, forestry, fishing, and mining—by which the goods of nature are made serviceable to human good.

And now, because it seems to be somewhat conventionally assumed that we are “moving on from farm and factory,” we need to recognize again our inescapable dependence upon manufacturing. This does not imply that we must be dependent always and for every product upon large corporations and a global economy. If manufacturing as we have known it is in decline, then that gives room to the thought of a genuinely domestic and conserving economy of provision. This would be a national economy made up of local economies, which, to an extent naturally and reasonably possible, would be complete, self-sustaining, and local in scale. For example, in a town not far from where I am writing, we have recently gained a small, clean, well-equipped, federally inspected slaughtering plant, which completes locally the connection between local pastures and local kitchens, while providing work to local people. There is no reason for this connection and provision to be more extensive. To make the connection between pasture and kitchen by way of the industrial food system is to siphon livelihoods and life itself out of the rural communities.

We also have woodlands here that could even now produce a sustainable yield of valuable hardwoods. But trees cut here at present leave here as raw lumber or saw logs, at the most minimal benefit to the community. Other places and other people may prosper on the bounty of our forest, but not our place and, except minimally for the sellers and a few workers, not our people. It is not hard, considering this, to imagine a local forest economy, made up of small enterprises that would be, within the given limits, complete and coherent, yielding local livelihoods from the good use and care of the living forest to the production of lumber for buildings to finished cabinetry. The thought of such economies is of the nature of provision, not of projection, prediction, or contingency planning. The land and the people are here now. The present economic questions are about the work by which land and people might thrive mutually in the best health for the longest time, starting now.

To think well of such enterprises, and of the possibility of combining them in a diverse and coherent local economy, is to think of the need for sustaining all of the necessary occupations. Because a local, a placed, economy would be built in sequence from the ground up, from primary production to manufacturing to marketing, a variety of occupations would be necessary. Because all occupations would be necessary, all would be equally necessary. Because of the need to keep them all adequately staffed, it would be ruinous to prefer one above another by price, custom, or social prejudice. There must be a sustained economic parity among them.

In such an economic structure the land-using occupations are primary. We must be mindful of what is, or should be, the fundamental difference between agriculture or forestry and mining, but until the farmers, ranchers, foresters, and miners have done their work, nothing else that we count as economic can happen. And unless the land users do their work well—which is to say without depleting the fertility of the earth’s surface—nothing we count as economic can happen for very long.

The land-using occupations, then, are of primary importance, but they are also the most vulnerable. We must notice, to begin with, that almost nobody in the supposedly “higher” occupational and social strata has ever recognized the estimable care, intelligence, knowledge, and artistry required to use the land without degrading or destroying it. It is as customary now as it was in the Middle Ages to regard farmers as churls—“mind-numbed,” backward, laughable, and dispensable. Farmers may be the last minority that even liberals freely stereotype and insult. If farmers live and work in an economic squeeze between inflated purchases and depressed sales, if their earnings are severely depressed by surplus production, if they are priced out of the land market, it is assumed that they deserve no better: They need only to be “liberated from their chains.”

The problem to be dealt with here is that the primary producers in agriculture and forestry do not work well inevitably. On the contrary, in our present economy there are constraints and even incentives that favor bad work, the result of which is waste of fertility and of the land itself. Good work in the use of the land is work that goes beyond production to maintenance. Production must not reduce productivity. Every mine eventually will be exhausted. But where the laws of nature are obeyed in use—as we know they can be, given sufficient care and skill—a farm, a ranch, or a forest will remain fertile and productive as long as nature lasts. Good work also is informed by traditional, locally adapted ways that must be passed down, taught and learned, generation after generation. The standard of such work, as the lineages of good farmers and of agrarian scientists have demonstrated, cannot be established only by “the market.” The standard must be partly economic, for people have to live, but it must be equally ecological in order to sustain the possibility of life, and if it is to be ecological it must be cultural. The economies of agriculture and forestry are vulnerable also because they are exceptional, in this way, to the rule of industry.

To obtain the best work in the economies of land use, those who use the land must be enabled to afford the time and patience necessary to do the best work. They must know how, and must desire, to do it well. Owners and workers in the land economy who grow their own food will not likely be starved into mistreating their land. But they can be taxed and priced into mistreating it. And so the parity of necessary occupations must be supported by parity of income.

Parity in this sense is not a new thought, although new thinking may be required in applying it to the variety of crops and commodities produced in a variety of regions. But we do fortunately have some precedence for such thinking. The Agricultural Adjustment Act defines parity as “that gross income from agriculture which will provide the farm operator and his family with a standard of living equivalent to those afforded persons dependent upon other gainful occupation.” Perhaps the idea of parity does not need much explanation or defense. If, as now and always, a sufficient staff of land-users is necessary to the health of the land and therefore to the lives of all of us, then they should be assured a decent livelihood. And this the so-called free market cannot provide except by accident.

The concept of parity, as fair-minded as it is necessary, addresses one of the problems of farming and farmers in the industrial economy. Another such problem, more fundamental and most in need of understanding, is that of overproduction. “Other gainful employment” in the cities escapes this problem because the large industrial corporations have not characteristically overproduced. Overproduction moreover is not a problem of subsistence farming, or of those enterprises of any farm that are devoted to the subsistence of the farm family. The aim of the traditional economy of the farm household—a garden, poultry, family milk cow, meat animals, vines, fruit trees—was plenty, enough for the family to eat in season and to preserve, plus some to share or to sell. Surpluses and scraps were fed to the dogs or the livestock. There were no leftovers.

Surplus production is a risk native to commercial agriculture. This is because farmers individually and collectively do not know, and cannot learn ahead of time, the extent either of public need or of market demand. Given the right weather and the “progressive” application of technologies, their failure to control production, even in their own interest, is thus inevitable. This is not so much because they won’t, but because, on their own, they can’t. Either because the market is good and they are encouraged, or because the market is bad and they are desperate, farmers tend to produce as much as they can. They tend logically, and almost by nature, toward overproduction. In the absence of imposed limits, overproduction will fairly predictably occur in agriculture as long as farmers and the land remain productive. It has only to be allowed by a political indifference prescribed by evangels of the “free market.” For the corporate purchasers the low price attendant upon overproduction is the greatest benefit, as for farmers it is the singular cruelty, of the current agricultural economy. Farm subsidies without production controls further encourage overproduction. In times of high costs and low prices, such subsidies are paid ultimately, and quickly, to the corporations.

This version of a farm economy pushes farmers off their farms. By increasing the wealth of urban investors and shoppers for “country places,” it increases the price of farmland, making it impossible especially for small farmers, or would-be small farmers, to compete on the land market. The free market lays down the rule: Good land for investors and escapists, poor land or none for farmers. Young people wishing to farm are crowded to the economic margins and to the poorest land, or to no land at all. Meanwhile overproduction of farm commodities always implies overuse and abuse of the land.

The traditional home economies of subsistence, while they lasted, gave farmers some hope of surviving their hard times. This was true especially when the chief energy source was the sun, and the dependence on purchased supplies was minimal. As farming became less and less subsistent and more and more commercial, it was exposed ever more nakedly to the vagaries and the predation of an economy fundamentally alien to it. When farming is large in scale, is highly specialized, and all needs and supplies are purchased, the farmer’s exposure to “the economy” is total.

It ought to be obvious that an economy that works against its sources will finally undercut the law of supply and demand in the most fatal way, that is, by destroying the supply. A food economy staffed by producers who are always fewer and older, whose increasing dependence on industrial technologies puts them and their land at ever greater risk, obviously cannot feed without limit an increasing population. But the reality of such an increasing scarcity is unaccounted for by the doctrine of the free market as applied to agriculture. Even less can this version of freedom comprehend the need for strict limits upon land use in order to preserve for an unlimited time the land’s ability to produce. In a natural ecosystem, even on a conservatively managed farm, the fertility cycle may turn from life to death to life again to no foreseeable limit. By opposing to this cycle the delusion of a limitlessness exclusively economic and industrial, the supposedly free market overthrows the limits of nature and the land, thus imposing a mortal danger upon the land’s capacity to produce.

When agricultural production is not controlled by a marketing cooperative such as the tobacco program, the market becomes, from the standpoint of the farmers, a sort of limitless commons, the inevitable tragedy of which is inherent in its limitlessness. In the absence of any imposed limit that they collectively agree to and abide by, all producers may have as large a share of the market as they want or can take. Only in this sense is the market, to them, “free.” To limit production as a way of assuring an equitable return to producers is assuredly an abridgement of freedom. But freedom for what? For producers, it is the freedom to produce themselves into bankruptcy—to fail, that is, by succeeding. For the purchaser, it is the freedom to destroy the producers as a normal and acceptable expense. The only solution to the tragedy of the limitless market is for the producers to divide their side, the selling side, of the market into limited fair shares by limiting production, which is exactly what the tobacco program accomplished here in my region. By preventing the farmers’ overuse of the market, it prevented as well the overuse of the land.

Agribusiness corporations of course don’t openly advocate overproduction. They don’t have to assume visibly the moral burden of their bad motive. All they have to do is stand by, praising American agriculture’s record-breaking harvests, while either hope or despair drives the remaining farmers to produce as much as they can. The agribusinesses then are glad to sell the very expensive surplus of seeds, chemicals, and machines needed for surplus production.

The agricultural tragedy of the market is in part political. And how was the by-now entirely dominant political position on the agricultural free market defined? In the middle of the twentieth century, think tanks containing corporate and academic experts laid down the decree that there were too many farmers. They decreed further that the excess should be removed as rapidly as possible, and that the instrument of this removal should be the free market, with all price supports and production controls eliminated. The assumption evidently was that the removed farmers would be replaced by industrial technologies, recommended by the land-grant universities, and supplied by the corporations. The surplus farmers would increase the industrial labor force, and they and their families would enlarge the population of consumers of industrial products. It was proposed of course that all of society, including the displaced farm families and farm workers, would benefit from this. There would be no costs, social or agricultural, no problems, no debits, nothing at all to subtract from the accrued economic and social assets. This would institute an evolutionary process that would unerringly eliminate “the least efficient producers.” Only the fittest would survive.

In short, by granting a limitless permission and scope to the free market and technological progress—which is assumed to work invariably for the best—politicians, by doing merely nothing, could rid themselves of any concern for farmers or farmland. The representatives of the people and the guardians of the common good were thus able to “free” the market to promote the (allegedly) inefficient farmers to (supposedly) the suburbs while subjecting the countryside to limitless progress and modernization. Against this heartless determinism, it is useful to remember that it was the aim of the program for burley tobacco in my region to include and help every farmer, even the smallest, who wanted to grow the crop. The difference was in the minds of the people whose work during four decades at last shaped an effective program. Those people, unlike the experts of the midcentury think tanks, were thoughtful of the needs of farming and farmers as opposed to the needs of the corporate free market known as the economy. The doctrine of “too many farmers” has never been revoked. No limit to the attrition has been proposed.

As evidence of the persistence of this doctrine, here is a passage from a letter of October 3, 2016, from John Logan Brent, Judge Executive of Henry County, Kentucky:

I have taken a couple of afternoons to work on the accounting for farming cattle under the current terms. Enclosed you will find that product based upon a real example, which is our 100 acre farm . . . and its approximately 25 cow herd. . . . The good news is that for a young man wishing to earn a middle, to slightly below middle class annual salary of $45,000 farming cattle full-time, he only has to have $3,281,000 in capital to get started. If he can find 780 acres to rent, he only has to have $551,000 for used cows and equipment. I say this is the good news, because the reality is that this was based on a weaned calf price of $850 from June of this year. According to today’s sales reports, that same calf is now $650 at best.

That alone, forgetting other adverse agricultural markets, would be an excellent recipe for the elimination of farmers. And conservationists should take note, as mostly they have not done, that in the absence of the eliminated farmers and with the consequent increase of agricultural dependence on the fossil fuels and toxic chemicals, there will be more pollution of water and air.

The related problems of low prices and overproduction of a single but significant crop were solved for about sixty years, in my part of the country and in others, in the only way they could be solved: by a combination of price supports and production controls. This was the purpose and the work of the tobacco program. I want now to look more closely at the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association, not this time as the brightest public occurrence in the history of my home countryside, but in terms of the suitability of its economic strategy to farming everywhere.

Here I must acknowledge that this organization and, more important, its economic principles have had the allegiance and the service of members of my family for three generations. Beginning in the winter of 1941, when the “Burley Association” renewed its work under the New Deal, my father, John M. Berry, Sr., served as vice president for sixteen and as president for eighteen years, retiring in 1975 but serving as an advisor until a few years before his death in 1991. My brother, John M. Berry, Jr., served as president from 1987 to 1993. My daughter, Mary Berry, started the Berry Center in New Castle, Kentucky, in 2011 for the purpose mainly of remembering, advocating, and applying the Association’s proven economic strategy and its purpose of assuring a decent livelihood for small farmers. My son serves on the Berry Center board.

Under this program, support prices for the various grades of tobacco were set according to a formula for assuring a fair return on the cost of production. Production was controlled by allotting to each farm, according to its history of production, at first an acreage, and later a poundage, that would be eligible for price supports under the program. The total of the allotments for each year was determined by the supply, worldwide, that was available for manufacture. The rule was that the supply on hand should be sufficient for 2.4 years. If the supply was less than the predicted demand for 2.4 years, allotments would be increased; if more, allotments would be reduced. I don’t know why the factor was set at 2.4. Its significance, however, is that production was limited according to an established measure of expected demand.

To buy a crop or a portion of a crop protected by the program, a purchaser had to bid a penny a pound above the support price. The government’s assistance to the program consisted of a loan, made annually “against the crop,” which permitted the program to purchase, store, and resell the portion of any year’s crop that did not earn the extra penny a pound—which, thanks to the loan, would be purchased by the Association and the grower paid at the warehouse. The cost to the government was only administrative until, in response to protests, this cost was charged to the farmers, and the program then operated on the basis of “no net cost” to the government. This program succeeded remarkably well in doing what it was designed to do, and a part of its success is that it still provides a pattern for the thought and hope of those who are working for the survival of land and people.

The tobacco program is an example of a necessary service that government can provide to people who cannot provide it to themselves. The point most needing to be made now is that parity of pricing under the tobacco program was in no sense a subsidy. It did not involve a grant of money, a government giveaway, or a public charity. The concept of parity was used, by intention, to prevent government subsidation. Its purpose was to achieve fair prices, fairly determined, and with minimal help from the government. My father defended parity as an appropriate incentive: “It accords with our way of life, and it gives real and tangible meaning to the philosophy of ‘equal opportunity.’” He thought of “direct subsidy payments” as virtually opposite to parity and an “abominable form of regimentation.”

The tobacco program in all of its versions was finally defeated and destroyed in 2004 by the political free marketers who had always opposed it, and who had resented it in proportion to its success. During the six decades of its life, the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association helped keep farm families on their farms and gainfully employed in Kentucky, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, and West Virginia. One measure of its success was the decrease of farm tenancy among the growers from 33 percent in 1940 to 9 percent in 1970. During those years some of the population of tenant farmers undoubtedly died, and some left farming, but most of them ceased to be tenant farmers by becoming owners of farms. This was a defining event in the lives of a considerable number of worthy people whom I knew. The farmer-members of the Association overwhelmingly renewed their support in referendum after referendum.

The Burley Association was thus truly a commons and a common good, based not only upon correct political and economic principles, but also upon the common history and culture, and thus upon the understanding consent of its sharers. So complete was the understanding of the members that in 1955, because of an oversupply of tobacco in storage, they voted for a 25 percent reduction of their allotments. On April 8, 2016, my neighbor Thomas Grissom, by far the best historian of the Association, wrote in a personal letter to me:

After years of research, I have concluded that the most distinctive characteristic of the Kentucky [Burley] Tobacco Program is its design and application of an industrial agriculture commodity program to the cultivation and production of an agrarian crop indigenous to an agrarian society.

I think that Tom’s perception is exactly right and that he found the right and necessary terms to describe it.

Burley tobacco, despite the dire health problems that it was found to cause and the consequent disfavor, was very much an agrarian crop. It was characteristically and mainly the product of small family farms, produced mainly by family labor and exchanges of work among neighbors. It was for a long time the staple crop in a highly diversified way of farming on landscapes that typically required considerate and affectionate care. As long as the market paid highly for high quality (which it finally ceased to do), the production of burley tobacco demanded, and from its many highly competent producers it received, both conscientious land husbandry and a fine artistry.

Industrialism and agrarianism are almost exactly opposite and opposed. Industrialism regards mechanical or technical functions as ideal. It rates its accomplishments by quantitative measures. Though it values the prestige of public charity, it is motivated necessarily by the antisocial traits that assure success in competition. Agrarianism, by contrast, arises from the primal wish for a home land or home place—the wish, in the terms of our tradition, for the freedom and independence that come with dependence on a parcel of land, however small, that one owns and is owned by or has at least the use of. Agrarianism grants its highest practical value to the good husbandry of the land. It is motivated, to an extent effective and significant, by neighborliness, family loyalty, and devotion to the coherence and longevity of communities.

As long as it has a sufficiency of “natural resources” and remains free of imposed political or economic restraint, an industrial economy will dominate and destroy an agrarian economy—no matter that the agrarian economy is indispensable for a continuing supply of resources. This defines precisely the need for the “design and application of an industrial agricultural commodity program to the cultivation and production of an agrarian crop indigenous to an agrarian society.” For a while the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association—never mind the deserved infamy of tobacco—did preserve a sort of balance between the interests of industrialism and agrarianism, which prevented their inherent difference and opposition from becoming absolute, and thus absolutely destructive of the agrarian society. This balance was fair enough to the industry and it permitted the growers to prosper. The program worked in fact to the best interest of both economies.

From the perspective of this balance during the decades when it worked as it should have, it is possible to see that a step too far toward industrialism was probably taken by the Burley Association itself when, in 1971, it permitted the “lease and transfer” of production quotas away from the farms to which they had been assigned. This change, made under pressure from industrializing members, permitted the accumulation of allotments finally into very large acreages dependent upon more extensive technology and migrant labor. The program then was obliged to “balance” a reduced agrarianism against an increased industrialism.

With the demise of the program in 2004, the region’s indigenous agrarianism could survive only as a history, a memory, and a set of vital principles that someday may be revived and reincarnated in reaction against the damages of industrialism.

For the past six decades, except for such a remnant of the New Deal, the government has done nothing for farmers except to quiet them down by subsidizing uncontrolled production, which really is worse than nothing. But this “policy,” in the minds of the dominant politicians, signified that they were “doing something for agriculture” and so relieved them of thinking or knowing about agriculture’s actual requirements. For example, the Democratic platform preceding President Clinton’s first term initially contained no agricultural plank. My brother, John M. Berry, Jr., who was on the platform committee, was dismayed by this innovation, and he said so. He was then told that a plank was being drafted. When he saw the result, he laughed. He asked if he might draft a more meaningful plank. After much resistance, he was allowed to do so. He then “spent the next six hours redrafting the amendment so as to satisfy the Clinton staff.” I am quoting his letter of June 29, 1992, to Dr. Grady Stumbo, chair of the Kentucky Democratic Party. The letter goes on to say that Clinton’s staff refused to permit any reference to

“supply management,” “price support” or any government guarantee of a fair price for farmers. They also refused to permit any reference to agribusiness control of farm policy or the level of agribusiness profits. They also refused to permit any language that could be construed as a commitment . . . to anything specific for agriculture or the rural community. . . .

I had already been advised that Chairman Ron Brown had formed an agriculture task force and sold seats to its members for $15,000** contributions to the Democratic National Committee.

Those seats went to representatives of agribusiness and other interests that have traditionally written farm policy for the Republicans.

The doctrine of “too many farmers” thus had become the established orthodoxy of the leaders of both parties. My brother was then president of the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association, which was still a major life support of our state’s small farmers. By 1992 tobacco had become indefensible as a product, and it bore too great a public stigma to be touchable by a national candidate. My brother understood that, and he did not expect approval specifically of the tobacco program. But he knew that the working principles of that program would protect farmers who produced commodities other than tobacco everywhere in the country—and would also protect our own farmers when they no longer produced tobacco. He knew that Mr. Clinton, if he wanted to, could endorse the program’s principles without endorsing its product. The agricultural plank of the 1992 Democratic platform, as published, gave a general approval to “family farmers receiving a fair price,” to “a sufficient and sustainable agricultural economy . . . achieved through fiscally responsible programs,” and to “the private–public partnership to ensure that family farmers get a fair return for their labor and investment.” And of course it condemned “Republican farm policy.” It committed Mr. Clinton and his party to do nothing. And nothing was what they did.

In 1995 President Clinton spoke to an audience of farmers and farm leaders in Billings, Montana. He acknowledged that the farm population by then was “dramatically lower . . . than it was a generation ago.” But, he said, “that was inevitable because of the increasing productivity of agriculture.” Nevertheless, he wanted to save the family farm, which he held to be “alive and well” in Montana. He believed we had “bottomed out in the shrinking of the farm sector.” He said he wanted to help young farmers. He spoke of the need to make American agriculture “competitive with people around the world.” And so on.

He could not have meant what he said, because he was speaking without benefit of thought. And why should he have thought when he was not expected to do so? He was speaking forty or fifty years after politicians and their consulting experts had abandoned any effort to think about agriculture. “Inevitable” is a word much favored by people in positions of authority who do not wish to think about problems. When and why did Mr. Clinton in 1995 think that the inevitable “shrinking of the farm sector” had ceased? In fact, “the farm sector” had not bottomed out in 1995; there is no good reason to think that it has bottomed out, at less than 1 percent of the population, in 2016. And how could he have helped young farmers except by giving them the protections against the free market that my brother had recommended three years before? Mr. Clinton was talking nonsense in Billings in 1995 because he did not have, and could not have had from his advisers, the means to think about what he thought he was talking about. The means of actual thought about the use and care of the land had been intentionally discounted and forgotten by people such as themselves.

It appears to be widely assumed by politicians, executives, academics, public intellectuals, industrial economists, and the like that they have a competent understanding of agriculture because their grandparents were farmers, or they have met some farmers, or they worked on a farm when they were young. But they invoke their understanding, which they do not have, only to excuse themselves from actual thought about actual issues of agriculture. These people have found “inevitability” a sufficient explanation for the deplorable history of industrial agriculture. They see the reason for the present discontent of “blue collar” voters as low or “stagnant” wages. They don’t see, in back of that, the dispossession that made many of them wage-workers in the first place. The loss everywhere of small farms and small towns and the respectable livelihoods that they provided was ruled “inevitable” and thus easily explained and forgotten. In their perceived worthlessness and dispensability, at least, the people of the farms and small towns were in effect racially equal. If, for instance, black small farmers were helped to prosper, as some liberals would have liked, then white small farmers would have had to be helped to prosper, which would have pleased neither liberals nor conservatives.

It was, then, “inevitable” that the independent livelihoods in the old economies of the countryside and the small towns should be replaced by the mainly subservient livelihoods in industry, or by unemployment. But if the “working class” counted for nothing and were dispensable as small farmers or farmhands or as small independent keepers of shops and stores or as independent tradespeople and craftspeople, why then should they count for something and be more than dispensable as “blue-collar workers”? In the corporate and urban economy the blue-collar workers were just as “inevitably” replaceable by technologies as they had been before. They were then notified that they were losing out because they were “uneducated.” They needed “a college education,” in default of which they were offered “retraining” and “job creation.” But these were only political baits, which left the blue-collared ones to their “inevitable” fate of low or stagnant wages or unemployment.

This doctrine of inevitability, also known as technological progress, is in fact a poor excuse for an economic and technological determinism, as heartless as it is ignorant, which has belonged about equally to the political establishment of both parties. Realizing that they were the broken eggs of an omelet that others would eat, the blue-collar workers became angry. Their anger turned them to Donald Trump, who at least recognized their existence and the political usefulness of their anger.

In the pre-Trump version of the history of progress, determinism and inevitability overruled any need for actual knowledge and actual thought. But with the ascendancy of Mr. Trump, at least some of the determinists seem to be reverting to free will. While the conservatives, who have strained at a gnat and swallowed a camel, endeavor to digest their dinner, the liberals talk of “connecting” with the blue-collar workers of rural America, to whom they have given not a substantive thought since Ezra Taft Benson, Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture, pronounced to their grandparents the political death sentence, “Get big or get out.”

Let us remember also the workers, white and black, who in their thousands became simply obsolete at the instant when “efficient” machines were brought into the coal mines, the factories, and the fields of sugarcane and cotton. I thought of them when I read in a column by Roger Cohen in the New York Times of November 19, 2016, that “the very essence of the modern world” is “the movement of people and ever greater interconnectedness, driven by technology.” Mr. Cohen approves of this “essence” and is afraid that Mr. Trump will stop it. What he has in mind surely must be the voluntary movement of people. The movements of people actually “driven by technology” are outside Mr. Cohen’s field of vision, surely only because of his political panic. Millions of people, as we know, have been driven away from their homes in the modern world by the similarly imperative technologies of industrial production and industrial war.

I am uncertain what value Mr. Cohen assigns to “interconnectedness,” but he cannot be referring to the interconnectedness of families in their home places, or of neighbors in their neighborhoods. How the loss of those things can be compensated by movement, driven or not, is far from clear. The same obscurity clouds over any massive “movement of peoples,” as over the arguments by which these movements are excused or justified. It does not require a great refinement of intellect to see the harm that is in all of them.

The experts who decided in the middle of the twentieth century that there were too many 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.