World Ark Magazine - January/February 2008 - (Page 18) made lots of estrangements and divorces. It has divorced people from the land because it needed to shift them around. It needed a labor supply, and it didn’t believe it needed people on farms. So you had factory centers that drew people in by depreciating their economies at home and appreciating the economies somewhere else. Industrialism also separated utility and beauty. If a thing was functional, it didn’t make any difference how it looked, and I think you can go only so far with that. If a thing is ugly, I think we need to ask questions about it. How did it get that way? What else is wrong? We know that a great ugliness has accompanied industrialization. I’ve read that the mill towns in England were beautiful as long as they were water-powered because the mill owners lived in the towns. And so for their own pleasure, they saw that the towns looked we’re utterly dependent on destruction and the services and amenities have declined. My great-grandfather had better public transportation than I do, and better mail service. WA: Which was what? WB: The train, just a few miles away, and the river. He could walk down here from Port Royal, get on a boat, and go anywhere in the world. Never set foot on a vehicle he owned himself. The train station was a short buggy ride away. WA: You and your wife lived in New York City for a while before moving back here. Do you think your way of thinking about all this would have evolved in the same way if you hadn’t come back? “That’s observing what Sir Albert Howard calls the Law of Return. And it is a law. What you take you’ve got to give back, or else what Howard called the Wheel of Life won’t turn. The wheel turns through birth, growth, maturity, death, decay and back to birth. Round and round. If you don’t keep that wheel turning, you finally exhaust the land.” —Wendell Berry good, with shade trees and flowers and that sort of thing. When they started running on steam, using coal, the coal smoke blackened everything and ruined the air. The owners moved away. And that removed any effective motive to make the towns beautiful. The owners’ living circumstances then were separated from the workers’ circumstances. Another disastrous divorce. Industrialization functioned as a way to siphon the wealth of the countryside into the pockets of owners and investors as quickly and cheaply as possible. Caretaking has not been a part of the deal at all. We’ve reconciled ourselves to this destructiveness and adapted our lives to it, so that now WB: Coming back here has certainly made me aware of what is going on in a way that I couldn’t have been anywhere else. I know the history here pretty well. I know the local life has declined. Port Royal probably never had more than a hundred people. There were 16 economic enterprises in Port Royal when my mother was a girl and 12 when I was a boy. There were two grocery stores, and my grandparents divided their patronage of those stores to the penny. Now there’s only the bank and a store and the post office. If the store went, the bank and the post office would probably go, too. So we would go down like some other little villages around here. In a hundred years, we would go from a sort of self-sufficient www.heifer.org 18 January/February 2008 | WORLD ARK http://www.heifer.org
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