He believed the renewal of rural communities would come from the people who live and work there. His 2008 Bradley Center remarks offer foundations some characteristically pointed advice about where, whom, and how they should help.
Wendell Berry, who died earlier this week, delivered the edited remarks below during a conference, “People, Patterns, and Philanthropy in Rural America,” at the Hudson Institute’s Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal on June 30, 2008.
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I’m unable to establish the date precisely—and I’m leaving out early oppressive economic history to say this—but we seem to have decided around the time of World War II that we would have an urban industrial economy, abandoning the land along with the land’s economies and people to whatever exploitation might be visited upon them. The results have been the virtual destruction of the human life of the land along with extensive ecological and geographic damage, some of which is irreparable. The ongoing practice of mountaintop removal and valley fill mining in Appalachian coal fields, like the ongoing pollution and other damages of factory farming, show us that our present willingness to destroy our country is without limit and is limitlessly heartless.
By political inanity, left and right, we have been living under a policy of cheap food—cheap at any cost—founded foursquare upon a policy of cheap energy—cheap at any cost. The flaw in those policies is that when you cheapen a product with no other aim or consideration than to make it cheap, you will eventually destroy the supply. If cheap energy is your aim, then you destroy the land and the people to cheapen energy at any cost, and you destroy as well other sources of energy which cannot be produced so cheaply or by favored industries, or the costs of which cannot be so readily externalized.
If cheap food is your aim and you cheapen it at any cost, then after only 60 or so years, you arrive at a situation that would be comical if it were a shade or two less dark. Even if most of your farmland were still capable of producing the best food—which it is not—you have nearly totally destroyed the culture and know-how that might have produced food in the best way. Country people who were once primarily producers for themselves and others have become primarily consumers, entirely dependent on the industrial system—and always to their detriment.
Now the people who wanted an urban industrial economy without the bother of a rural, agrarian economy have what evidently they wanted: universal pollution and bad health; expensive water, milk, and gasoline; farmland priced beyond the reach of farmers; a doubtful future for eating; and everything too far away. That is our situation. Do I see any possibility of hope in it? I do. But so far as I can see, there is little hope at present in our political and economic institutions whose dominant impulse now almost necessarily is to lull the public by denial and delay.
Hoping to do better
What I see that is hopeful is what I’ve been calling “leadership from the bottom.” Mainly, I believe that without funding from governments or foundations, without official permission or approval or even awareness, many people are now working hard to bring farming, ranching, and forestry into line with ecological principles; to apply appropriate standards of judgment to their work; and to restore local economies—beginning with food. The people who are doing this work started doing it typically because they saw the almost-perfect destructiveness of industrialism, and they hoped to do better.
If in fact they did better and have continued to do so, that’s because by doing better morally and ecologically they also did better economically. I want to give you a quick example. This is from a leaflet published by the Firth Family Foundation. Troy Firth and his family in Pennsylvania have done well in forestry, and they’ve now founded their own foundation. This is their paragraph on land management:
Unlike other conservation organizations, we’re actively managing our properties to increase ecosystem health and timber quality, which go hand in hand. Our operations have been independently certified by the Forest Stewardship Council as sustainable for ecosystems, local communities, and the forest product industry. We use a unique system of timber management, “worst first forestry,” designed to mimic natural selection. These uneven-aged forests become a mosaic of trees in different age and size classes. This in turn provides a diversity of habitat and environmental quality that is rare in working timberlands. By logging with horses rather than large, invasive machinery, we’re able to minimize the amount of disturbance to the forest and essentially eliminate the damage associated with conventional logging.
Now that description of management would put most academic foresters’ teeth on edge. They wouldn’t be associated with the use of horses in the woods under any circumstances. They’d just be too embarrassed. (Laughter.) It would be too “retro.” But here’s the bottom line: A 2006 study by LandVest showed that the Firths averaged 11% annual return on their timberlands for the previous 20 years. That’s not a fact that the academic foresters would like to put in their pipe and smoke.
I have two pieces of advice for foundations wishing to donate money toward rural improvements: Give none at all to universities. Give none to governments above the level of counties and towns. Addressing issues of policy and regulation at the state and national levels doesn’t matter much at present. The policy of the corporations is to buy as much as they need of the governments and make them their agents. This nullifies other policies.
I believe that the best and very likely the only hope for the health and productivity of our land rests upon the renewal and stabilization of rural communities and rural livelihoods, and that these in turn rest upon the development of socially and ecologically coherent, diverse, land-based local economies. I do not mean that such economies ought to be or can be fully independent. I do mean that goods produced locally should be processed locally; that local people should benefit first and fully from their land, knowledge, and work; that no product should be produced for export at the cost of permanent damage to the land or people; and that no product should be exported until the local need for it has been met.
From what I have seen and heard, the most-pressing need now in the development of local economies is for processing facilities to prepare local products for local consumption or use. In the food economy, this is a need for small-scale, local, ecologically benign slaughter and meat-processing facilities.
Specific requests from local experts
I asked Kentuckians for the Commonwealth and another Kentucky group, the Community Farm Alliance, to tell me what they would do with more money if they had it. I’m going to read their list. This is from Kentuckians for the Commonwealth:
1. Projects and programs that facilitate local ownership and management of land and natural assets and promote management of those assets in ways that provide livelihoods for communities and sustain the resources for the long term. This involves a change in understanding about to whom these resources belong and whom their use would benefit.
2. Leadership programs geared toward building the capacity of citizens and leaders in rural communities and regions to do long-term economic development planning.
3. Efforts to better integrate rural economies with urban economies in the same region by connecting supply chains, building local food markets, and providing urban support for ecosystem services provided cities by rural areas.
4. Efforts that support entrepreneurship as a strategy to enhance self-reliance and diversify rural economies, including education and training programs, access to capital, and technical assistance.
5. Initiatives to increase incomes and business viability in rural areas by building value chains particularly focused on natural assets—food, forest products, and renewable energy—with greater value-added processing focused particularly on higher-end niche markets and certified sustainable products.
I’ll enter a little dissent on that one. If I were arguing with my friends at Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, which I do sometimes, I would urge caution on this higher-end market business. I think one of the weaknesses of, say, the organic-farming economy has been the dependence on a premium from rich people.
6. Programs that promote arts and creativity from youth to adults as a vehicle for developing skills and capacities, exploring life in the community, and envisioning a future.
7. Efforts to change public policies that subsidize destructive natural-resource extraction and allow externalization of costs onto rural communities and the land.
8. Public transportation.
And this is the list—a little longer—from the Community Farm Alliance.
1. Money for general support is always short.
They need the money in order to keep up buildings, to keep up the value of their properties.
2. Education in rural areas about reasons to support local food and farm issues.
3. Statewide fair-trade policy, funds to help farmers get a fair return on products.
4. Money to use the media for education of the public on food issues.
5. Money to hire a media person and a coordinator of all Community Farm Alliance programs, and for more organizers always.
6. Money to help articulate a vision or mission for 10 to 20 years down the road, not only fighting problems now.
7. Funds to help keep farmlands in farm use, to help young people farm.
8. Funding to help get locally raised food into the schools statewide.
9. Help in distribution of state farm products throughout the state—processing facilities are critical, and value-adding is necessary.
10. Help in increasing membership, rebuilding local rural groups, since urban support has grown.
And this is something a little bewildering but a little encouraging, too: All of a sudden, the support for Community Farm Alliance has begun to come more from the cities than the country.
11. Help put policies in place to support local food economies.
12. One young man said that $20,000 would fund a three-way conference meeting to reorder, reconsider, and so forth. He said that they just never have such a possibility—funding for a meeting.
13. Need a vehicle so volunteers don’t wear theirs out.