World Ark Magazine - January/February 2008 - (Page 17) World Ark: In both your fiction and your nonfiction you talk about community and its importance to healthy living. In your writing, this sense of community arises out of a connection to the land that generally comes from farming, from an agrarian lifestyle. I’m curious to know if you think that agrarianism is the only basis of a healthy community. I live in a big city, where there are great, old vibrant neighborhoods with a strong sense of community, but that isn’t based even remotely on farming. Wendell Berry: But it [that sense of community] is based, a good bit more than remotely, on eating. It’s based as immediately on eating as it can be. And so we don’t want to be led astray on labels. Agrarianism is a label, and you’ve always got to particularize it, but as those people in those neighborhoods become aware of all that’s implied by their need to eat—and their supposable wish to continue eating—they will come to a kind of urban agrarianism. Suppose they say, ‘We want a dependable supply of good food, produced in a way we can be assured is sustainable.’ If that kind of thinking gets loose in an urban neighborhood, you’ll probably have a few people who will go looking for local produce at the local farmers market. The next natural step is to wonder where they can get a quarter of beef produced locally. And maybe they become aware then that they don’t have a good local processing plant. So an agrarian awareness can spread in an urban neighborhood until its economy will be affected in elaborate and intelligent ways. The city, in that way, begins a collaboration, a cooperative relationship, with its own landscape. WA: So a healthy community really must be connected to the land in some way. WB: Well, I think so. It has to have a conscious and responsible connection to its sources, if its www.heifer.org sources are going to be maintained. Phoenix, say, is a bad model. It can’t hope to live from its desert landscape. It’s a sort of suspended population. Everything has to come in by longdistance transportation. A better model, if we want to look for a historical one, would be the Greek cities. The Greek city, I’ve read, did not consist simply of the built-up urban center. It consisted of that center and its tributary landscape. So, as I understand it, the Greek cities were full of granaries and other storage places for local food. It’s silly to sit in a modern city in a kind of idiot complacency and depend on the hidden hand or God or luck to bring food and the other necessities. So the intelligence—and we have a sufficient amount of intelligence at least to ask questions about what affects us most immediately—intelligence, if it’s in working condition, begins to ask, “Where is this stuff coming from?” And then it asks, “How much do I need?” And then, “Where can I get that much? Do I want to raise my children here and never ask whether they can have a safe food supply or not?” WA: You’ve been saying that for a long time, long before it became fashionable to say. WB: [Laughs] I’ve got it memorized. WA: Do you think that the main problem of industrialization is that it is isolating? That it removes people from the causes and effects of their actions, and contributes to neglect? WB: No, the main problem is the permanent depletion of resources. We’ve burnt fossil fuels at an astonishing rate. I’ve lived through the burning of nearly all the petroleum that has been burned, and that’s about half of it. And industry’s use of the fossil fuels has sort of been the pattern for its use of everything else. We’re using up topsoil as if it were not a one-time supply, as if it were an inexhaustible resource. The industrial economy has January/February 2008 | WORLD ARK 17 http://www.heifer.org
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