Notes from Day Seven: Can old ways become new ways? (Part 1)

Header image for Interrobang article CREDIT: DAVID MARSHALL
Wendell Berry is an influential writer.

Most of us are at the end of another year of school. This venerable paper will slow down. This column itself will cease for the summer. I am going to give the last words in this column to a writer who I believe to be one of the most important in today's world. He is Wendell Berry.

A writer, a professor, a farmer, a Christian theologian, Berry is not easily led. In 1968 when he would have been 34, he participated in the Kentucky Conference on War and the Draft. Some readers may remember the late '60s and the war that the United States waged against the small country of Vietnam. At that conference Berry delivered a “Statement” against that war.

He said: “We (Americans) seek to preserve peace by fighting a war, or to advance freedom by subsidizing dictatorships, or to ‘win the hearts and minds of the people' by poisoning their crops and burning their villages and confining them in concentration camps; we seek to uphold the ‘truth' of our cause with lies, or to answer conscientious dissent with threats and slurs and intimidations ... I have come to the realization that I can no longer imagine a war that I would believe to be either useful or necessary. I would be against any war.”

Many continue to appreciate Berry's lament of war. However, there is another branch of his thinking that resonates with even more people. His writing addresses a cluster of inter-related problems, especially the problem of our food supply system founded on the availability of cheap oil and the problem of our loss of connection with our natural habitats. For Berry, the food industry is destroying our appetites, our appreciation for food. At the same time it is tied to a consumer economy that is destroying the planet.

God created us to be a species that, among other things, lives in appreciation of the sources of our physical wellbeing and has a relationship of affirmation and fruitfulness with respect to our earthly home. Berry recognizes this and calls his readers to a new appreciation of that for which we have been created.

This appreciation can take many forms. One of them is to re-value the farm, not the farm as an industry that imprisons millions of hogs, chickens and cattle in spaces where they barely have room to defecate, but the farm as a smaller enterprise where a family can make a decent life providing food for the local community.

As a young boy growing up in the 1960s, I would help my father on our farm. It failed in the end largely because (I now believe) my father did not understand the value systems that were replacing the values he had come to learn in the 1940s and '50s. One evening he took me into the nearby woods. After an hour or so of work we emerged from the woods each carrying a bundle of straight branches my father had cut. He felt very proud of the work because he had found for “free” some useful material out of which he built cages for chickens.

My father, even though he did not have the words to express it at the time embodied the values of frugality, care, husbanding of local resources, understanding of animals and natural growth cycles, the stewardship of local geographic features such as fertile land and streams — and the abundance of branches in nearby woodland.

He did not sufficiently realize that first prize would not go to the farmer who found material growing in his woods, but that it would go to the farmer who would take on heavy debt to buy large numbers of pre-manufactured cages and other equipment to house tens of thousands of chickens rather than my father's 35 or 40 (and incidentally, force his neighbours out of business — the “price” of “progress”).

This is but one small example that helps us see that in the last 70 years we have moved to a consumer economy where resources are more or less thoughtlessly plundered in the faith that some “invisible hand” (as economist Adam Smith named it) will lift the material fortunes of us all. And it has. But at a cost to the environment that haunts everyone who dares to think on it; haunts us because the reality is that without a healthy environment, our economies are doomed.

But is it too late to reconnect with values that have been nearly forgotten? And even if we can reconnect with them, has the world changed so much that to make use of them would mean looking ridiculous? To be continued...

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