Excerpted from The Art of Loading Brush by Wendell Berry (October 2017). Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press.

I want to say something about the decline, the virtual ruin, of rural life, and about the influence and effect of agricultural surpluses, which I believe are accountable for more destruction of land and people than any other economic “factor.” This is a task that ought to be taken up by an economist, which I am not. But economists, even agricultural economists, farm-raised as many of them have been, do not live in rural communities, as I do, and they appear not to care, as I do, that rural communities like mine all over the country are either dying or dead. And so, only partly qualified as I am, I will undertake this writing in the hope that I am contributing to a conversation that will attract others better qualified. 

I have at hand an article from the Wall Street Journal of February 22, 2016, entitled “The U.S. Economy Is in Good Shape.” The article is by Martin Feldstein, “chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Ronald Reagan . . . a professor at Harvard and a member of the Journal’s board of contributors.” Among economists, Prof. Feldstein appears to be somewhere near the top of the pile. And yet his economic optimism is founded entirely upon current measures of “incomes,” “unemployment,” and “industrial production,” all abstractions narrowly focused. Nowhere in his analysis does he mention the natural world, or the economies of land use by which the wealth of nature is made available to the “American economy.” Mr. Feldstein believes that “the big uncertainties that now hang over our economy are political.” 

But from what I see here at home in the watershed of the Kentucky River, and from what I have seen and learned of other places, I know that industrial agriculture is in serious failure, which is to say that it is not sustainable. Projecting from the damages of the comparatively brief American histories of states such as Kentucky and Iowa, one must conclude that the present use of the farmland cannot be sustained for another hundred years: The rates of soil erosion are too high, the runoff is too toxic, the ecological impoverishment is too great, the surviving farmers are too few and too old. To anybody who knows these things, by witness of sight or by numerical measures, they would appear to qualify significantly the “good shape” of the economy. I conclude that Prof. Feldstein does not know these things, but is conventionally ignorant of them. Like other people of privilege for thousands of years, far more numerous now than ever before, he appears to take for granted the bounty of nature and the work that provides it to the human economy.

In remarkable contrast to the optimism of Prof. Feldstein, the New York Times of March 10, 2016, printed an article, “Who’s Killing Global Growth?” by Steven Rattner, “a Wall Street executive and a contributing opinion writer.” Mr. Rattner’s downhearted assessment, like Prof. Feldstein’s upbeat one, is based upon measures that are entirely economic or monetary, quantitative, and abstract: “financial markets,” “projections for future growth,” “wages,” “consumer spending,” “rising supply,” “disappointing demand,” etc. The “global growth” Mr. Rattner has in mind is purely financial and is without reference to the effect of such “growth” upon the health and the welfare of the globe’s actual people and other creatures. Like Prof. Feldstein, Mr. Rattner appears to suppose, consciously or not, that the natural world and human workers will continue to supply their necessary goods without limit and to the allure simply of money. 

I have at hand also a sentence from the New York Review of Books, September 24, 2015, by James Surowiecki, another highly credentialed economist. Mr. Surowiecki is reviewing among others a book by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Bruce C. Greenwald, Creating a Learning Society: A New Approach to Growth, Development, and Social Progress. This book, the reviewer says, “is dedicated to showing how developing countries can use government policy to become high-growth, knowledge-intensive economies, rather than remaining low-cost producers of commodities.” I have kept this sentence in mind because of the problems it raises, all relating to my concern about the damages imposed by national and global “economies” upon land and people. Mr. Surowieki’s sentence seems to be highly condensed and allusive, a sort of formula for increasing economic growth—or, as it actually says, for turning countries into economies. The sentence no doubt is clear to economists, but it has put me to some trouble. My interest is not in the analyses and theories of these economists, since they seem mainly to ignore the natural world and the human communities that are my concern. I am interested here in their public language, by which they reveal what they accept, and expect most others to accept, as axioms—what one might call their lore or more accurately their faith.

I assume, then, that by “low-cost producers of commodities” Mr. Surowiecki means  “poorly paid producers of cheap commodities,” that these commodities are material goods or raw materials produced from the land, that “knowledge-intensive economies” are based upon the abilities to exploit, trade, add value to, and market the cheaply produced commodities. Apparently it is taken for granted that this improving formula applies to all developing countries, their people, their land, and their natural resources, without regard to differences or distinctions among them. Such disregard of local and personal differences is a major article of this faith. It takes for granted furthermore that a knowledge-intensive economy, by causing growth, development, and social progress, will change a developing country into a developed country, and that this will be an all-around improvement. From the standpoint of industrial economists and their clients, this apparently is self-evident and unquestionable. It becomes immediately and urgently questionable from the standpoint of a dweller in a rural countryside who is bound to the land and the community by ties of history, family, and affection.

Here we arrive at a fundamental division of interest and allegiance, as probably also at the difference between two kinds of mind. The attention of these economists and others like them is directed as a matter of course to the monetary economy and to what, according to their abstract measurements, is good or bad for it. The attention of settled dwellers, at home in their chosen or hereditary places, is directed partially to the monetary economy, of course, and often in fear or sufferance, but their attention is directed also, out of natural affection and solicitude, to their places, the particular, unique, and irreplaceable patches of ground under their feet. Another difference involved here, if the settled dwellers are farmers, is that between people whose livelihoods are primarily dependent upon salaries and people whose livelihoods are primarily dependent upon the weather. 

The settled dwellers, then, in their natural desire to remain settled, and facing the “promises” of development, certainly are going to have questions for the developers, and the first would be this: What is the net good that industrial economists, their employers, and their clients appear customarily to credit to growth, development, and “social progress”? In the United States, since at least the Civil War, and ever more rapidly after World War II, we have achieved industrial versions of all of those goals. But almost nobody is asking what is the worth of that achievement after we deduct its ecological and human costs. We have, in fact, been turning our country into an economy as fast as possible, and we have been doing so by an unaccounted squandering of its actual, its natural and its cultural, wealth.

As a second question, we should ask why commodities, the material goods that support our life, and the work of producing them, should be “low cost” or significantly cheaper than the goods and services of a “knowledge-intensive economy.” There is no reason to believe that the present market values of technological (developmental) knowledge and of commodities are absolute or in any way permanent. Nor is there reason to believe that such issues of value are, or can be, reliably settled by the free market of our present economy, or by any market. The good health of the land economies is a value that a market as such cannot consider and cannot protect. Moreover, agribusiness in all of its aspects is a knowledge-intensive system, which uses knowledge ruthlessly to control and exploit land and people. 

Apparently it is assumed that a country’s economy of commodity-production, which could be as diverse as the country’s climate and soils permit, can safely be replaced or further depreciated by an economy of knowledge only. And so, as a third question, we must ask how secure and how beneficent is a one-product economy. Is the market for knowledge infinite in its demand, or can it be over-supplied and depressed, as the one-product economy of coal in the Appalachian coal fields has often been? And it hardly needs to be said that in the Appalachian coal fields the benefits of the coal economy to a rich and distant few has never adequately been measured against its impoverishment of the local people and their land. 

Perhaps no outsider—no visiting expert, no dispassionate observer, certainly no outside investor—will notice the inherent weakness and cruelty of a one-product economy in a region or a country. But the adverse effects will certainly be visible and acutely feelable to the resident insiders. 

Those who live and must make their lives within the boundary of such an economy experience daily the readiness of their political leaders to endorse and excuse the destructiveness of “the economy,” as well as the public unwillingness to remedy or compensate the damages to the land and the people. The Appalachian coal economy has not only inflicted immeasurable and immeasurably lasting ecological and social damage to its region, but it has also distracted attention and care from the region’s other assets: its forests, soils, streams, and the (too often exported) talents of its people.

And so a fourth question: How, even in a knowledge-intensive economy, even unendingly “growing” and wealthy, are the people’s needs for food, clothing, and shelter to be met? Does the development of a highly lucrative knowledge economy entirely eliminate the need for the fundamental economies of subsistence? Do people eat and wear knowledge? Do they sleep warm in it? I know very well what the far-seeing economists will answer: People earning large salaries from “high-growth, knowledge-intensive economies” will buy their material subsistence from “low-cost producers of commodities” at home or, if not at home, then elsewhere. It is assumed that where there is a demand, and enough money, there will be unfailingly a supply, and this is another article of the industrial economic faith: The land and its “resources” will be always with us, and so will the poor who will dig, hack, and whittle an everlasting supply of low-cost commodities until they can be replaced by knowledge-intensive machines that will dig, hack, and whittle, no doubt on solar energy, faster and at a lower cost.

And so we come to question five: Do the economists of development ever attempt a fair assessment, or any assessment, of the value to a knowledge-intensive economy of a dependable local supply of life-supporting commodities? The answer, so far as I have learned, is that the developmental economists do no such thing. Their dream of human progress calls simply for the replacement of the commodity economy by the knowledge economy, and that is that. As evidence, let us consider a review of our economic past and future, “Moving On from Farm and Factory,” by Eduardo Porter, in the New York Times of April 27, 2016. Mr. Porter’s premise is that the economies of farming and manufacturing, as a fixed and final consequence of historical trends, are now obsolete, or nearly so, and his statistics are sufficiently precipitous:

Over the course of the 20th century, farm employment in the United States dropped to 2 percent of the work force from 41 percent, even as output soared. Since 1950, manufacturing’s share has shrunk to 8.5 percent of nonfarm jobs, from 24 percent. 

To this state of things Mr. Porter grants something like half an approval. Whereas nearly all of the “work force” once employed in farming have been “liberated . . . from their chains,” he thinks that “the current transition, from manufacturing to services, is more problematic.” Though for workers in the United States there are “options: health care, education, and clean energy, just to name a few,” these options “present big economic and political challenges.” The principal challenges will be to get the politicians to abandon their promises of an increase of employment in manufacturing, and then to provide the government help necessary to make “the current transition from manufacturing to services” without too much rebellion by workers “against the changing tide.” Mr. Porter’s conclusion, despite these challenges, is optimistic:

Yet just as the federal government once provided a critical push to move the economy from its agricultural past into its industrial future, so, too, could it help build a postindustrial tomorrow. 

Mr. Porter’s article, which clearly assumes the agreement or consent of a large number of his fellow economists and fellow citizens, rests upon the kind of assumptions that I have been calling articles of faith. Though it is certain that a lot of people, economists and others, are putting their faith in these assumptions, they are nonetheless entirely groundless. The assumptions, so far as I can trace them out, are as follows:

1.   The economy of a country or a nation needs only to provide employment; it does not matter at what. And so of course no particular value can be assigned to the production of commodities.

2.  So long as there is enough employment at work of some kind, a country or a nation can safely dispense with employment in sustainable farming and manufacturing, which is to say a sustainable dependence upon natural resources and the natural world.

3.  Farming has little economic worth. It is of the past, and better so. Farm work involves no significant responsibilities, and requires no appreciable intelligence, knowledge, skill, or character. It is, as is often said, “mind-numbing,” a servile condition from the “chains” of which all workers, even owners who work on their own farms, need to be “liberated.” 

4.  The “output” of industrial agriculture will continue to “soar” without limit as ever more farmers are “liberated from their chains” by technology, and as technologies are continuously succeeded by more advanced technologies. 

5.   There is no economic or intrinsic difference between agriculture and industry: A farm is no more than a factory; a plant or an animal is no more than a machine or a substance. 

6.  The technological advances that have disemployed so many people from farming and manufacturing will never take away the jobs of service or postindustrial workers. 

7.  History, including economic history, is a forward motion, a progress, made up of irreversible changes. These changes can be established absolutely and forever in so little time as a century or two. Thus the great technological progress since perhaps the steam engine—a progress enabled by the fossil fuels, war, internal combustion, external combustion, and a sequence of poisons—will carry us right on into the (climactic? everlasting?) “postindustrial tomorrow.”

8.  The need for “health care, education, and clean energy, just to name a few,” will go securely on and on, supplying without limit the need for jobs, whereas the need for food, clothing, shelter, and manufactured goods will be supplied by what?

Now I must tell why, as a comparatively prosperous and settled resident of my home country in the United States, I should be as troubled as I am by the faith or superstition or future-fantasy of the economists of so-called development. My family and I live, as we know and fear, in what the orthodox economists consider a backward, under-developed, and to-be-developed country. This is “rural America,” the great domestic colony that we have made of our actual country, as opposed to the nation, the government, and the economy. This particular fragment of it is called “The Golden Triangle,” a wedge of country bounded by the three interstate highways connecting Louisville, Lexington, and Cincinnati. The three are connected also by rail and by air. The Triangle is bounded on its northwest side also by the Ohio River. Because it is so fortunately located with respect to transportation and markets, this area is thought (by some) to be “Golden,” which is to say eminently suited to (future) development.

The landscapes within the Triangle are topographically diverse— rolling uplands, steep valley sides, fairly level bottomlands—all, though varyingly, fragile and vulnerable to various established abuses. The soils are fertile, productive, responsive to good treatment, but much diminished by erosion and misuse in the years of “settlement,” severely eroded in some places, still eroding in others. The native forest is predominantly hardwood, much diminished and fragmented, suffering from diseases and invasive species, largely undervalued, neglected or ill-used, but potentially of great economic worth if well used and cared for. The watercourses are numerous, often degraded, mostly polluted by silt or chemicals or both. There is, in most years, abundant rainfall.

The three cities seem generally to be prospering and expanding, but are expectably troubled by social disintegration, drugs, poverty, traffic congestion, and violence. The towns, including county seats, are in decay or dead, preyed upon by the cities and chain stores, diseased by urban and media culture, cheap energy, family disintegration, drugs, and the various electronic screens.

Especially during the early decades of the tobacco program, the farming here was highly diversified and, at its best, exemplary in its husbanding of the land. Because of the program, tobacco was the basis of a local agrarian culture that was both economically and socially stabilizing. The farms were mostly small, farmed by their resident families and neighborly exchanges of work. In addition to tobacco and provender for the households, they produced (collectively and often individually) corn, small grains, hogs, chickens and other poultry, eggs, cream, milk, and an abundance of pasture for herds of beef cattle and flocks of sheep. 

The tobacco program with its benefits ended in 2004. Though it served growers of a crop that after the Surgeon General’s report of 1965 could not be defended, the program itself was exemplary. Both the people and the land benefitted from it. By the combination of price supports with production control, limiting supply to anticipated demand, the program maintained the livelihoods of the small farms, and so maintained the livelihoods of shops and stores in the towns. It gave the same protection on the market to the small producer as to the large. By limiting the acreage of a high-paying crop, it provided a significant measure of soil conservation. Most important, it supported the traditional family and social structure of the region and its culture of husbandry.

For once and for a while, then, the farmers of this region stood together, stood up for themselves, and secured for themselves prices reasonably fair for one of their products. The tobacco program, once and for a while, gave them an asking price, with results in every way good.

Before and after the program, which was their program, they have had simply to accept whatever the buyers have been pleased to offer. When producers of commodities have no asking price, the result is plunder of both land and people, as in any colony. By “asking price” I mean a fair price, as determined for example by “parity,” which would enable farmers to prosper “on a par with” their urban counterparts; a fair price, then, supported by bargaining power.

After the demise of the tobacco program, and with it the economy and way of life it had preserved and stood for, this so-favored Triangle and its region have declined economically, agriculturally, and socially. The tobacco that is still grown here is grown mainly in large acreages under contracts written by the tobacco companies, and primarily with migrant labor. Most of the farms that are still working are mainly or exclusively producing beef cattle—which is good, insofar as it gives much of our vulnerable countryside the year-round protection of perennial pastures and hay crops, but it is a far cry from the old diversity of crops and livestock. Of much greater concern is the continuous planting of large acreages of soy beans and corn, a way of farming unsuited to our sloping land (or, in fact, to any land), erosive, toxic, requiring large expenditures of money for uncertain returns. For such cropping the fences are removed, making the land useless for grazing. Farms are being sub-divided and “developed,” or cash-rented for corn and beans. 

The land is no longer divided and owned in the long succession, by inheritance or purchase, of farmer after farmer. It has now become “real estate,” ruled by the land market, owned increasingly by urban investors, or by urban escapees seeking the (typically short-lived) consolation and relaxation of “a place in the country.” The government now subsidizes land purchases by some young farmers, “helping” them by involving them in large long-term debts and in ways of farming that degrade the land they may, late in their lives, finally own. For many young people whose vocation once would have been farming, farming is no longer possible. You have to be too rich to farm before you can afford a farm in my county.

Only a few years ago, I received a letter from a man extraordinarily thoughtful, who described himself as an ex-addict whose early years were spent under the teaching and influence of a family elder, in the tobacco patches of a neighborhood of small farms. Caught up by the centrifugal force of a disintegrating community and way of life, he drifted into addiction, from which, with help, he got free. He wrote to me, I think, believing that I should know his story. People, he said, were wondering what comes after the tobacco program. He answered: drug addiction. He was right. Or he was partly right. His answer would have been complete if he had added screen addiction to drug addiction.

As long as the diverse economy of our small farms lasted, our communities were filled with people who needed one another and knew that they did. They needed one another’s help in their work, and from that they needed one another’s companionship. Most essentially, the grownups and the elders needed the help of the children, who thus learned the family’s and the community’s work and the entailed duties, pleasures, and loyalties. When that work disappears, when parents leave farm and household for town jobs, when the upbringing of the young is left largely to the schools, then the children, like their parents, live as individuals, particles, loved perhaps but not needed for any usefulness they may have or any help they might give. As the local influences weaken, the outside influences grow stronger. 

And so the drugs and the screens are with us. The day is long past when most school-age children benefitted from work and instruction that gave them in turn a practical assurance of their worth. They have now mostly disappeared from the countryside and from the streets and houseyards of the towns. In this new absence and silence of the children, parents, teachers, church people, and public officials hold meetings to wonder what to do about the drug problem. The screen problem receives less attention, but it may be the worst of the two because it wears the aura of technological progress and social approval.

The old complex life, at once economic and social, was fairly coherent and self-sustaining because each community was focused upon its own local countryside and upon its own people, their needs, and their work. That life is now almost entirely gone. It has been replaced by the dispersed lives of dispersed individuals, commuting and consuming, scattering in every direction every morning, returning at night only to their screens and carryout meals. Meanwhile, in a country everywhere distressed and taxed by homelessness, once-used good farm buildings, built by local thrift and skill, rot to the ground. Good houses, that once sheltered respectable lives, stare out through sashless windows or have disappeared.