Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture

Kirschenmann: Getting to resilience - reordering our priorities

Back to Leopold Letter Summer 2011

By FRED KIRSCHENMANN, Leopold Center Distinguished Fellow

If we pursue limitless “growth” now, we impose ever-narrower limits on the future. If we put spending first, we put solvency last. If we put wants first, we put needs last. If we put consumption first, we put health last. If we put money first, we put food last. - Wendell Berry, 2010

In his new book, What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth (highly praised in the Forward by world-renowned economist Herman E. Daly), Wendell Berry suggests that if we want to live in a resilient, sustainable world – let alone leave one for future generations – we must begin reordering the central priorities of our culture. This collection of essays (some written recently, some published in the 1980s) provides us with a powerful and practical blueprint for radically rethinking the way we live on our lovely planet earth, assuming we care to be here much longer.

How we produce our food and characterize the relationship between nature and agriculture is at the heart of many of the priorities we need to reconsider. As Berry puts it, “we have allowed, and even justified as ‘progress’ a fundamental disconnection between money and food,” which leads us to the untenable conclusion “that if we have money we will have food, an assumption that is destructive of agriculture and food.” This conclusion has allowed both farmers and consumers to ignore the care of the essential resources of a resilient, sustainable food system, and encourages our destructive behavior. It has led us to the wholesale conclusion that “the world is conformable to our wants and we can be whatever we want to be.” It concludes that we are, as Aldo Leopold put it, the “conquerors” of the land community instead of acknowledging that we are simply “plain members and citizens.”

The exclusively money-driven food system journey we have been on for more than a century has taught us that Berry’s vision for a new economy, which puts community ahead of commodities, is “unrealistic.” But the more we contemplate the state of the world, the more it becomes apparent that we need to consider a different conversation based on new principles. Continuing to pursue our current priorities ultimately leads us to the “disastrous stupidity” (as Daly puts it) of selling a “bet on a debt as an asset.” This deeply flawed perspective fueled the recent Wall Street fiasco, to the great detriment of the entire global economy. It is now painfully apparent that this global economic disaster is contributing to the civic unrest spreading throughout the world. It is also increasingly apparent that the lack of food security often lies at the heart of that justifiable unrest.

Accordingly, the new food ethic that now needs to be incorporated into all of our “sustainable” food conversations must be expanded beyond the need to make healthy, affordable and satisfying food available for ourselves. We need to create a new economy that empowers citizens everywhere to achieve those same goals while at the same time attending to the moral obligations and practices that restore the land health essential to food “sustainability” for future generations. 

This new ethic must be incorporated into our concept of a “free market.” As Berry notes, in our current economic culture the word “free” “has come to mean unlimited economic power for some, with the necessary consequences of economic powerlessness for others” – a culture that has spurred incredible destruction of both people and land. Farmers have suffered hardships from this version of the free market all too often, for far too long. 

Amartya Sen, Lamont University Professor at Harvard, reminds us that this interpretation of the free market has emerged because of the “impoverishment” of recent modern economics resulting from “the distance that has grown between economics and ethics.” Sen proposes that economics “can be made more productive by paying greater and more explicit attention to the ethical considerations that shape human behavior and judgment.” Had Wall Street adopted that principle as a priority, the world might be in much less of an economic mess than it is today! Sen suggests that “economic issues can be extremely important for ethical questions, including the Socratic query, ‘How should one live?’” That brings us right back to the heart of Berry’s thesis. How do we achieve a “community economy” that includes a “sharing of fate” and “assures an economic continuity and a common interest”?

A human economy based on such shared values would lead us closer to the kind of “economics” that Aristotle envisioned: “the art of efficiently producing, distributing and maintaining concrete use values for the household and community over the long term” (Daly). Such a priority lies at the heart of any serious “sustainable” food system.

References:

Berry, Wendell, 2010. What Matters: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth. Berekely: Counterpoint Press.

Sen, Amartya, 1987. On Ethics and Economics. Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers.

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