Fragments From Floyd

I read Wendell Berry's piece in Orion this week while my class was taking their exam. It so disturbed and challenged me that I know I pounded on the desk reflexively a couple of times. I am sure I must have muttered "Yes!" or "Amen!" audibly, and I wanted to stop them in their test-taking and tell them in Mr. Berry's words what I had tried in subtle ways to tell them all semester long: we are compromising our natural birthright for a pot of soup.

I determined before the exam was over that I would excerpt this essay at Fragments. While my students marked little black circles on their scoresheets, I marked all the simply worded, impeccably reasoned things the author said to me in the piece. And now that I am able to extract the best parts, I find there are few paragraphs unmarked. The pages are covered in thrice-circled sentences, exclamation marks and marginal notations. To excerpt from it could not possibly do justice to the message.

But it is my message, too. I cannot put it into words with Mr. Berry's eloquence and wisdom. But I see every day the consequences of the compromise of which he speaks. It makes me angry. It makes me very sad. And it makes me want to work harder in my own county to bring stewardship, not volume discounts. There is a culture war going on--at a strip mall or national forest near you. The author ends the piece saying "Our destructiveness has not been, and it is not, inevitable." We can do better. We must. And against my own best advice, because I know not many will take the time to read the entire essay, I will offer a few bits for your consideration:

It appears that we have fallen into the habit of compromising on issues that should not, and in fact cannot, be compromised. I have an idea that a large number of us, including even a large number of politicians, believe that it is wrong to destroy the Earth. But we have powerful political opponents who insist that an Earth-destroying economy is justified by freedom and profit. And so we compromise by agreeing to permit the destruction only of parts of the Earth, or to permit the Earth to be destroyed a little at a time -- like the famous three-legged pig that was too well loved to be slaughtered all at once...

Sooner or later, governments will have to recognize that if the land does not prosper, nothing else can prosper for very long. We can have no industry or trade or wealth or security if we don't uphold the health of the land and the people and the people's work...

There are such things as economic weapons of massive destruction. We have allowed them to be used against us, not just by public submission and regulatory malfeasance, but also by public subsidies, incentives, and sufferances impossible to justify...

We have failed to acknowledge this threat and to act in our own defense. As a result, our once-beautiful and bountiful countryside has long been a colony of the coal, timber, and agribusiness corporations, yielding an immense wealth of energy and raw materials at an immense cost to our land and our land's people. Because of that failure also, our towns and cities have been gutted by the likes of Wal-Mart, which have had the permitted luxury of destroying locally owned small businesses by means of volume discounts...

As the poor deserve as much justice from our courts as the rich, so the small farmer and the small merchant deserve the same economic justice, the same freedom in the market, as big farmers and chain stores. They should not suffer ruin merely because their rich competitors can afford (for a while) to undersell them...