Building an Economy From the Soil Up

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 94
Wendell Berry, What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth

What would a fair and just economy look like? This isn’t a new question. It isn’t even new since the Great Recession, when reckless speculation proved much American economics was founded on air. People of wisdom and learning have asked that question since at least Adam Smith and Karl Marx, and come no closer to an answer that satisfies everyone. Poet and farmer Wendell Berry suggests we’ve been looking in the wrong direction.

Berry, who has worked the same stretch of Kentucky highland his entire life, grounds his economy in judicious management of resources; and for him, the foremost resource is land. His use of “land” broadly encompasses water and air, forests and pastures, which humans must manage, not merely use. Humans arise from land, and humans create money; any economy that places money first inverts, and thus destroys, the natural order.

America, and the world generally, has fallen under sway of “autistic industrialism,” in Berry’s words, a laser-focused belief that man-made technologies will solve everything. This finds its apotheosis in a financial services industry that sees its dollar-sign output as superior to whatever it places a price on. And it works exclusively through creating ever increasing demands: Berry writes, “Finance, as opposed to economy, is always ready and eager to confuse wants and needs.”

Likewise, this economic model has concentrated land-use decisions in the hands of putative experts who don’t work the land. Chemical companies, government bureaucrats, and absentee landlords uniformly overrule the hard-won experience of people who once owned and husbanded the land they worked. This creates a vast gulf between who receives the short-term benefits of land exploitation, and who pays the long-term price.

This book comprises two sections. The first, shorter section involves five essays and speeches Berry delivered in the immediate wake of the 2008 financial services disaster. His primary target, however, isn’t bankers; it’s a culture-wide malaise that systemically mistakes money for value. This produces a breakdown that isn’t merely industrial, but moral: “We tolerate fabulous capitalists who think a bet on a debt is an asset.”

Wendell Berry

Berry’s second section involves older essays, dated from 1985 to 2000, about ways he sees an intimate connection between American economic values and our respect for the land. He witnesses how agricultural mismanagement has resulted in massive topsoil erosion; how mineral mismanagement has strip-mined coal, leaving behind hollow mountains and toxic rivers; how community mismanagement has separated individuals from the neighbors they live among.

These aren’t incidental losses, either. We cannot replace lost topsoil by dumping new dirt and saturating it with petroleum-based fertilizers, because topsoil is a complex relation of earth, organisms, and organic matter, that we don’t really understand. But those who profit from mismanagement care little for understanding, Berry writes: “The advocates and suppliers of agri-industrial technologies have encouraged us to think of agriculture as an enterprise occurring on top of the ground.”

Berry admits revising America’s economy to reflect the values it has already consumed won’t be easy. In some places he says he doesn’t know how economists could implement his vision. In others he has some insight, but admits the needed changes won’t be easy. They mostly involve changes in ownership and allotment: local businesses, local people, and smallholding farmers who own the land they manage.

This necessarily involves placing value on the invaluable. Currently, traits like family and community, or the good of preserving heirloom skills, have no economic value, because they don’t have a GDP price. But we’re currently witnessing the long-term consequences of their loss, in devaluation of land, business, and family; in rising health costs for people worked like machines; in food substantially lacking nutritional value.

This book doesn’t involve much factual data-wrangling; Berry’s interest lies in philosophical foundations, not actuarial spreadsheets. However, I cannot ignore statistical evidence demonstrating his accuracy. Journalist George Pyle has written that postage-stamp-sized farms pay their own bills, avoid chemical runoff, and remain in families better than massive, 10,000 acre industrial farms. Small, distributed agricultural economies have measurable value, but only when we measure in the long term.

Berry’s essentially Distributist model would seem familiar to G.K. Chesterton, whose motto, “three acres and a cow,” makes sense here. (“Forty acres and a mule” wouldn’t be inappropriate.) To Berry, like Chesterton, economic justice requires humans to directly control, and make decisions about, their living, and both philosophers see such control beginning with how we manage land. The ripples, though, extend throughout the economy.