Troubling Fantasies

The famous farmer, poet, professor, and writer Wendell Berry confronts the industrial/scientific complex in a deeply troubling essay in a recent issue of The Hudson Review.

When recently honored by the Smithsonian, Berry insisted that:

"Part of the reason for writing all these essays is my struggle never to quit, to never utter those awful words ‘it’s inevitable.’"

But Berry points out that "the economic independence of families, communities, and even regions has been almost completely destroyed,"and that despite this interdependence:

"Our great politicians seem only dimly aware that an actual country lies out there beyond the places of power, wealth, and knowledge."

But most troubling of all, at least for those of us who think that science offers the best hope to governments who wish to make decisions on a fair, rational basis, Berry believes that land-grant colleges (which were established largely to help farmers) have hopelessly failed in their mission:

"…as we continue our enterprise of "sound science" and technological progress, our agriculture becomes more and more toxic, specialized and impoverished of genes, breeds, and varieties; we deplete the aquifers and the rivers; our rural communities die; our fields and our foods become less healthful; our food supply becomes ever more dependent on long-distance transportation and immigrant labor; our water becomes less drinkable; the hypoxic zone grows in the Gulf of Mexico."

This seems a little unfair to me. Is it science that has led to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico? Or corporate agriculture and industrial plants spewing toxins? And is it science that has allowed those nitrates and toxins, or industry and look-the-other-way governments and regulators? 

But Berry is less interested in pointing the finger than he is the issues facing farmers, and on this front, he has a point difficult to counter. It’s true that today’s world is much more about "information" than about "conversation," and that much of this "information" is technical, deliberately stripped of all local language and context. Such information is of little or no use unless it is part of a conversation, Berry thinks. He wants less information from "the center" (the city, university, and government) and more conversation from what he calls "the periphery" (farmers and locals outside wealth and power).

"The idea of the extension service should be applied to the whole institution. Not just the agricultural extension agents, but also the graduate teachers, doctors, lawyers, and other community servants should be involved. They should be carrying news from the university out into its region, of course. But this would be extension in two directions: They would also be carrying back into the university news of what is happening that works well, what is succeeding according to the best standards, what works locally. And they should be carrying back criticism also: what is not working, what the university is not doing that it should do, what it is doing that it should do better."

And he warns that:

"The idea that we have now progressed from a land-based economy to an economy based on information is a fantasy…people of the center believe that the people of the periphery will always supply their needs from the land and will always keep the land productive: There will always be an abundance of food, fiber, timber, and fuel. This too is a fantasy. It is not known but simply taken for granted."

It’s that last line that troubles me most. I have not the analytic tools to fairly evaluate this particular assumption. But is there any doubt that it is, in fact, taken for granted?