Conservation is Good Work

Conservation is Good Work by Wendell Berry

Berry argues that prevailing conservation is inadequate because it focuses separately on preserving spectacular wilderness, managing resources meant for use, and correcting obvious industrial disasters. Parks often protect dramatic, economically marginal landscapes while leaving farms, grasslands, woodlots, and other productive places vulnerable to exploitation. Renewable resources such as soil and forests can endure and improve through careful use, but industrial methods treat them as if they were exhaustible fuels, using them up for profit. Public attention to catastrophes such as spills, poisoning, extinctions, and destruction of wilderness can obscure the countless smaller abuses that make such disasters possible. Industrial agriculture, for example, depends on chemicals, machinery, waste, distant supply systems, and consumer demand for cheap, luxurious, out-of-season food. The damage is not exceptional but systemic. Political action remains necessary, yet government policy cannot by itself repair a society whose private households and communities accept the same wasteful economy. Berry contends that conservation must become a matter of daily life and local work. People should examine how they live, what they buy, what they waste, and what they have others do on their behalf. The word “environment” falsely suggests a world outside humanity; people are made of the world they eat, drink, and breathe, and they belong to a Creation that makes claims upon them. Abstract terms such as “biocentrism” and “deep ecology” fail to express the particular attachments of settled people to named rivers, fields, towns, creatures, and neighbors. The proper name for humanity’s connection to the earth is work, specifically “good work.” Good work honors its materials, its place, its craft, its product, and its user. It is modestly scaled, attentive to local differences, and humble before what cannot be known. Modern society instead relies on “bad work”: impersonal, crudely defined labor that neither understands nor honors its dependence on the earth. People are implicated not only by work they perform but by the destructive work they commission through their purchases. A global economy makes consumers dependent on systems whose origins and harms they cannot know. It lets one place satisfy its wants by ruining another: forests are clear-cut, mountains strip-mined, and oil extracted far from those who consume the resulting houses, electricity, and transportation. An economy without limits has no discipline, and a government powerful enough to regulate every abuse might itself become intolerably controlling. The necessary response is therefore both public and private: people must shorten supply lines and limit their economic geography so they can understand and take responsibility for the ground from which they live. Berry calls for local economic strategies based on consumer choice and community health. People should buy only what they need, do more for themselves, seek help from neighbors, favor local stores and good products over distant chains and poor ones, keep money circulating locally, and invest in small farms, shops, and useful businesses. Wealth should be measured less by bank accounts than by healthy neighborhoods and durable relationships. Food offers the clearest opportunity. People can grow some of their own food, seek locally grown food, deal directly with farmers, and refuse products raised through dangerous or destructive methods. Acquaintance between consumers and producers can encourage healthier, more diverse agriculture, create local processing industries, and support responsible work. Forest economies likewise need local, properly scaled wood-products industries whose workers depend on forests remaining healthy for generations; locally maintained technologies, including draft horses in some cases, would serve both woods and communities better than large machinery. Recreation, too, should be localized. Farmers and forest owners should receive incentives to preserve wildlife habitat, trails, campsites, woodlands, and stream margins for nearby users. Rather than spending money on distant vacations, people and conservation groups can support local landowners and countryside. Through local buying power, practical initiative, and affection for place, conservationists and small farmers can become allies. The aim is not merely to conserve the world as something apart, but to protect it by learning to live responsibly within it.

By Wendell Berry · First published 2019 · Genre: Environmental Essay, Nonfiction, Conservation Literature · 5,599 words

First lines

THERE ARE, as nearly as I can make out, three kinds of conservation currently operating. The first is the preservation of places that are grandly wild or "scenic" or in some other way spectacular. The second is what is called "conservation of natural resources"-that is, of the things of nature that we intend to use: soil, water, timber, and minerals. The third is what you might call industrial troubleshooting: the attempt to limit or stop or remedy the most flagrant abuses of the industrial system. All three kinds of conservation are inadequate, both separately and together.

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environmentalism · conservation · sustainable agriculture · rural life · ecology · land stewardship · farming · local communities · agrarianism · environmental ethics · social criticism · industrialization

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