I am currently reading, The Essential Agrarian Reader, edited by Norman Wirzba and including essays from all the usual cast: Wendell Berry, Gene Logsdon, David Orr, Wes Jackson and Barbara Kingsolver, as well as many from folk with whom I’m not familiar – Susan Witt, Vandana Shiva, Brian Donohue and others.
I’ve seen Wirzba’s (who contributes some essays, in addition to editing) name around a few places and he looks like someone I’ll be reading more of. He’s another Kentuckian doing our state proud, it looks like.
Here are some excerpts from Wirzba’s introduction, and it’s right on:
It would seem, especially given the abundance and relative cheapness of food, that we do not have a food problem. The appearance, however, is deceiving… [We] are beginning to see that the complete costs associated with current food abundance are extremely high and that current pricing hides these costs from consumers.
Food, for the most part, is now an industrial product. As such its character and quality, as well as the conditions under which it is produced, are determined by the demands of industrial and market efficiency. While this might make good economic sense, the effect of treating food as an industrial rather than as a natural and cultural product has been the abuse of land, animals and human communities…
Rural communities have suffered greatly as a result of this transformed food system. With the demise of local seed companies, local purchasers, and processors and distributors, money that would have circulated several times within a community (and thus benefited many businesses and families) go elsewhere. With this cash exodus, small towns and cities that were once the heart of American cultural life find it impossible to maintain basic services in education, health care, construction and general social welfare. There is no place to go but the big city.
Rural communities also bear the brunt of noxious corporate farming practices. While taxpayers absorb the costs of tax incentives and price subsidies to induce big producers to set up shop in their states or counties, local communities must deal with disgusting odors, contaminated ground and surface water, accumulated toxic waste, and stressed infrastructure mechanisms like roadways and waterways. The costs are rarely picked up by the producers responsible for them.
As consumers we should be asking whether or not the free exchange of products, the stewardship of public goods like soil and water, or more fundamental yet, informed public discussion about food issues can result from a context where integrated corporate monopolies set pricing and production. Consumers are mostly ignorant about how food is produced and provided, so they are in no position to understand, let alone confront, agricultural abuses like the depletion or contamination of public water supplies or the heavy use of antibiotics and hormones in meat and dairy operations. Doctors are increasingly aware that public health costs will increase dramatically as we confront super pests and viruses that evolve in confined farm factories. The costs of cleaning up water contaminated by agricultural runoff will also need to be picked up by consumers…
Given this partial list of problems, we now need to ask if a food system can be secure if it depends on making its farmers, communities, consumers, and land base insecure. Our highly centralized food system, besides being undemocratic, hugely wasteful, and destructive, is also vulnerable to external threats of terrorism, volatile global markets, and pests...
How would an agrarian worldview address this situation of insecurity?
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Great stuff. Ideas and topics that we desperately need to be considering, talking about, debating, addressing. Now.
I found the book at our local library. Check it out. And keep an eye on Norman Wirzba (his other books include, The Paradise of God: Renewing Religion in an Ecological Age, and The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry).
9 comments:
Vandana Shiva is a Nobel Laureate economist who has done work on poverty in India.
I think it interesting that, just as we are reaching our limits on urbanization and suburbanization, the editors of this volume are calling for a rethinking on agrarian terms as well. In light of the "food shortages" of recent months, the idea that ours foodstuffs are no longer part of a larger community but an industrial commodity is important to remember.
At the same time, valorizing a way of life that is no longer accessible or meaningful to most human beings (myself included) is, I think, also wrong. It might be that it is important to keep the facts of industrial farming squarely before us as we consider issues of economic security. At the same time, rural communities have allowed the slow but steady growth of industrial agriculture in everything from corn and soybeans to pigs and cows for a simple reason - money. The death of rural, agricultural communities and the cultures that grew up around and through it, was something that, while not planned, was nonetheless part of the larger process of rationalization of the economy.
I have no answers to the various conundrums - from well-water pollution from the run-off of industrial pig farming to the manipulation of supply to boost prices - but I'm not sure reviving agrarian communal practices is practicable. At least, from my very suburban vantage point.
Why not?
Because agrarian communal practices are anathema to the modern American individualist who would rather live a life of self centered leisure than one of slopping hogs, mucking out stalls, or weeding gardens in a community? Maybe.
I'm not at all convinced that an agrarian worldview is better than an industrial one. For all of its faults, starvation is far more rare in 21st Century America than in pre-industrial societies where the majority of people are subsistence farmers.
A society of freehold farmers can be an advance in society. Say, for example, if the U.S. had actually enforced the "40 acres and a mule" notion in 1865 and built up African-American economic power through the individual ownership of land. But it's only a stepping stone to further economic advancement.
Geoffrey wrote:
I think it interesting that, just as we are reaching our limits on urbanization and suburbanization, the editors of this volume are calling for a rethinking on agrarian terms as well.
Are we reaching such limits? How do you reach this conclusion?
UM, kyndill, look around the world. Agrarian communities are vanishing, partly due to economic forces, partly due to economic pressures, and partly due to just plain old fashioned historic trends. There is nothing inherently superior about slopping hogs, cleaning stalls, etc. It is hard work, but it wouldn't be called "work" if it were easy. The US hasn't been majority rural in a century, and pretending that, somehow, a return to the land and the cultural values of rural communities would be a partial answer to our current malaise misses many of the negatives of such life - limited horizons; the limits on personal freedom, including freedom of expression; a wariness towards innovation and "newness". I can attest to these things because I was raised in a small town in upstate NY (pop. at time around 5,000), my father was raised on a farm and spoke often of both the positives and negatives, and I currently live in what was once prime agricultural country in northern IL, but is swiftly becoming suburbia. I know farmers, and I know those who couldn't tell a horse from a pig if they were labeled, and I can tell you that the cultural values of both kinds of people, and all the other sorts out there, are both pluses and minuses.
There is a huge difference between dealing with issues of artificial scarcity of food resources and promoting the values of agrarian communities. The former cannot be dwelt with by some kind of mythical return to the latter; rather, they need to be addressed in the terms in which agriculture is now practiced, as an industry, through regulation and legislation.
Geoffrey, Did Kyndill say there was anything inherently superior in farm work? I didn't read it that way. I can't speak for him/her? but I have found it to be superior for my health and spiritual well-being.
You seem to be saying that "a return to the land and the cultural values of rural communities" would not even be "a partial answer to our current malaise" and that there is some inherent superiority in "personal freedom, freedom of expression, and the unquestioned acceptance of innovation and newness". Yet, from the number of "back to the land" bloggers I see now of days I would conclude that many people have already found this "return to the land" and the shunning of some of these innovations to be their answer. Certainly a return to the backyard garden and bicycle would alleviate many of America's problems.
"Agrarian communities are vanishing"
In some places yes, however, I just read an article where it was reported that the Amish population has nearly doubled in the last sixteen years and that the population of Hutterites,(that most communal of all agrarian communities) is also on the rise.
And finally, "valorizing a way of life that is no longer accessible or meaningful to most human beings" is no more wrong than say, extolling the virtue of industrial agriculture.
eyemkmootoo
eyemkmootoo, I think the point of the comment to which I responded was quite clear. I also think that much of the "back to the land" movement is, while admirable, quite small and open to so few people.
Most people, for a variety of reasons, cannot respond to such a call, and even if they did, would be daunted, not by the work, but the entire ethos not just of their individual lives, but of the community's values.
I do not think it is a question of superiority or inferiority. It is simply a matter of historical trends and reality.
I agree that there are many things we in urbanized/suburbanized America need to do differently. I hardly consider tilling one's garden "agrarian". It's a hobby.
Sorry to offend. It wasn't clear to me.
Food is not a hobby.
eyemkmootoo
I'm with kmoo and Kyndill on this one, Geoffrey. Food is not a hobby. Wendell Berry suggests there's nothing we can do more important for the environment or peace or justice than growing a garden. We are a people removed from our food, without a clue as to how to survive if agribusiness ever collapses or simply becomes unprofitable.
The Agrarians are not calling for everyone to become a farmer. They are calling for everyone to be more aware, more concerned, more informed about our food. I agree and I'm sure at least on that level, you surely agree, too.
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