From the essay “Renewing
Husbandry,” by Wendell Berry; as published in Orion magazine. Read the article at: http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/160/
“To rate the farm family merely as
“labor” and its domestic plants and animals merely as “production” is thus an
oversimplification, both radical and destructive.”
As I was scanning through essay titles in Orion magazine
online a few jumped out at me. This one
in particular because of its author. I
encountered Berry’s writings in a
Christian morality course in college and found them to be interesting and
well-written, to be descriptively compact.
No worries, this essay, and really much of his writings have no specific
mention of Christianity and any religious connotation comes only from subtext
or the recognition of where perhaps some of his ideas stem. The second thing that drew me to this essay
was the context. It is about husbandry,
essentially, and our lost relation to the land as well as to the animals we
raise for food. As someone who cares
deeply about the state and method of agriculture nowadays I was intrigued. While the essay was published back in 2005, I
feel it is even more applicable today. Berry's main point is simply that we cannot continue the agriculture business as is today.
“It
has become clear, in short, that we have been running our fundamental economic
enterprise by the wrong rules. We were wrong to assume that agriculture could
be adequately defined by reductionist science and determinist economics.” What Mr. Berry hints at here and explains in
depth later is that by turning agriculture into a mere science and means to an
economic ends, we have destroyed the intrinsic value of farming and everything
involved. The change from “soil
husbandry” to “soil science” and “animal husbandry” to “animal science” in
universities was a symbol of the oversimplification that greedy economics had
forced upon agriculture. Berry discusses
how at one time farmers and people in general really, understood the complex
relationship between human beings and the land and animals that we rely on and
which rely on us for survival. With the
industrialization of agriculture, or the arrival of agribusiness, came the
mechanization of all involved—the animals, the crops, the harvest, and the
workers and owners of the farm.
“Mechanical farming makes it easy
to think mechanically about the land and its creatures. It makes it easy to
think mechanically even about oneself, and the tirelessness of tractors brought
a new depth of weariness into human experience, at a cost to health and family
life that has not been fully accounted.”
In my opinion this is one of the truest statements about our
society. I don’t feel that the
mechanization that Berry speaks
of in the passage is meant to stay within the boundaries of agriculture. If we go back and look at the Industrial
Revolution and its social impacts we find not only thriving business, but
disease and poverty, child labor and over-worked and underpaid laborers. We find, arguably, the collapse of stable
ecology as well. I perhaps need not even
say it and will not push forward with it, but: Upton Sinclair’s “The
Jungle.”
I think it is terribly important that we stop and really
analyze the implications of viewing the world and all its contents as machines. Denial of the fact that our economy does so
is simply lying, no matter if it’s for one’s own peace of mind, or for the
interest of maintaining the ‘comfort’ that one has found within the
system. I am not attempting to stand on some
moral high ground here, but is it not tragic when society views its fellow
human beings, and the animals with which we share the Earth, and the Earth
itself as a simple machine set to perform a task, not think, not act outside
that set task, or to view our fellow creatures as mere means to a bloated
stomach rather than living, feeling animals?
Egocentricism is a dangerous thing, especially when it is part of the
collective behavioral model.
““animal science” without
husbandry forgets, almost as a requirement, the sympathy by which we recognize
ourselves as fellow creatures of the animals. It forgets that animals are so
called because we once believed them to be endowed with souls. Animal science
has led us away from that belief or any such belief in the sanctity of animals.
It has led us instead to the animal factory which, like the concentration camp,
is a vision of Hell.” While it may be
risky to bring the subject of factory farming to light, I am willing to do it. I will, however, keep it short and avoid
dipping into the subject of animal rights.
The factory farm, like the polar bear, is a symbol of what has happened
to our world. Greed and over-consumption
led to over-‘production’ and thus a gross exploitation of resources, labor, and
the animals themselves.
Can a person
really be proud of being part of a society that is responsible for the
destruction of the value of the worker, agriculture, ecology, and respect for
the Earth’s other inhabitants? Or do we
want to work toward change and perhaps be able to sustain the planet for many
generations of humans? Wendell Berry’s final point is that it is, or
we will find very soon that it is, necessary to return to a system of husbandry
and leave the industrialization we have come to know so well behind in order for society to as we know it, or should know it rather, to be sustained.