An Argument for Diversity

An Argument for Diversity by Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry argues that the health of land, communities, culture, and thought depends on diversity rooted in the unique character of particular places. Drawing on the northern corner of Henry County, Kentucky, he describes a varied countryside of uplands, bluffs, slopes, and creek and river bottoms, each requiring different forms of use and care. Although some land is suited to grazing, some to carefully limited crops, some to forest, and some to intensive cultivation, industrial agriculture and the national economy have treated the region chiefly as a source of exportable raw materials. This economy rewards exploitation, draws money and capable young people away, pressures farmers into off-farm work, and replaces human labor with chemicals, machinery, and purchases that further damage farms and land. Berry rejects the assumption that money alone measures economic success. Off-farm employment may increase a family’s cash income, but it can destroy the household’s former cooperation, deepen dependence on an economy hostile to farming, and encourage erosion, pollution, wasteful logging, and neglect. He calls instead for a diversified local economy that produces food, timber, fish, and other goods for local and nearby consumption, while adding value through small-scale enterprises such as creameries, canneries, mills, saw mills, and furniture factories. Such industries should remain small enough not to damage the countryside’s quiet, beauty, health, or ecology. Waste and pollution would be treated not as unavoidable costs but as evidence that correction is necessary. Though this program may be dismissed as utopian, Berry insists that it is more realistic than an economy that considers communities and places expendable. He proposes a practical law: as the quality of use increases, the scale of operations must decline, tools become simpler, and methods and skills become more complex. No universal formula can determine the best use of a particular landscape. Good land use must arise from sustained experience between particular people and particular land, requiring more varieties of plants and animals, as well as more human skills, methods, and forms of work. Berry criticizes centralized experts who develop agricultural and forestry policies without intimate regard for local places or people. Whether such policies are called industrial, conventional, organic, or sustainable, they are destructive when they ignore the union of individual users with individual lands. He argues that a “beloved country” must be used with affection, because affection makes people see both the particular reality of a place and the inadequacy of prevailing practices. Universities, in his view, have contributed to the problem. The sciences are destructive when their objectivity excludes affection and permits economists to disregard whether families love their farms or animal scientists to disregard animal suffering. The humanities are also weakened when they treat art as self-contained, detached from truth, moral consequence, and the world. Both sciences and humanities become preoccupied with professional careers, procedures, promotion, technology, publication, and grants rather than the actual health of a country. Berry calls for their reunion around the practical, moral, cultural, ecological, and spiritual problems of beloved places, joined with local knowledge and ordinary speech rather than deference to outside experts. He illustrates common culture’s value through John W. Jones, a North Middletown bank president who loaned money to local high-school graduates seeking college educations, trusting them without formal security. Every loan was repaid, demonstrating a community knowledge of character and reciprocity that formal economics does not adequately recognize. He offers Bennie Yeary as a deeper example of local wisdom. Yeary had managed his forest since 1944 by cutting only where needed, without “robbing” the land, and believed he retained as much timber as when he began. He also built water breaks into his farm road over many years, using rocks removed from his fields; the work improved both road and fields and prevented erosion. Such knowledge cannot be reduced to books or abstract principles because it is developed through long use, skilled adjustment, patience, and responsibility to a place. Berry concludes that diversity of land, species, work, and culture cannot endure without a diversity of people capable of living fittingly in their own places. Proper land use is both science and art, knowledge and action, and it includes preserving some places in wildness as well as achieving sustainable productivity elsewhere. Yet people like Yeary, whose labor embodies this union of care, skill, and local understanding, have little standing in modern intellectual life. Recognizing their worth, Berry contends, would renew both the life of the mind and the life of the country.

By Wendell Berry · First published 2019 · Genre: Environmental Essay, Agrarian Essay, Political Essay · 5,537 words

First lines

Elegant solutions will be predicated upon the uniqueness of place.

JOHN TODD

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environmentalism · agriculture · rural life · localism · sustainability · biodiversity · community · ecology · conservation · industrialization · social criticism · land ethics

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