Preserving Wildness by Wendell Berry

THE ARGUMENT over the proper relation of humanity to nature is becoming, as the sixties used to say, polarized. And the result, as before, is bad talk on both sides. At one extreme are those who sound as if they are entirely in favor of nature; they assume that there is no necessary disjuncture or difference between the human estate and the estate of nature, that human good is in some simple way the same as natural good. They believe, at least in principle, that the biosphere is an egalitarian system, in which all creatures, including humans, are equal in value and have an equal right to live and flourish. These people tend to stand aloof from the issue of the proper human use of nature. Indeed, they have begun to use "stewardship" (meaning the responsible use of nature) as a term of denigration.

At the other extreme are the nature conquerors, who have no patience with an old-fashioned outdoor farm, let alone a wilderness. These people divide all reality into two parts: human good, which they define as profit, comfort, and security; and everything else, which they understand as a stockpile of "natural resources" or "raw materials," which will sooner or later be transformed into human good. The aims of these militant tinkerers invariably manage to be at once unimpeachable and suspect. They wish earnestly, for example, to solve what they call "the problem of hunger"-if it can be done glamorously, comfortably, and profitably. They believe that the ability to do something is the reason to do it. According to a recent press release from the University of Illinois College of Agriculture, researchers there are looking forward to "food production without either farmers or farms. " (This is perhaps the first explicit acknowledgment of the program that has been implicit in the work of the land-grant universities for forty or fifty years.)