Wendell Berry Wisdom

My economic point of view is from ground-level. It is a point of view sometimes described as “agrarian”.

We have assumed increasingly over the last five hundred years that nature is merely a supply of raw materials, and that we may safely possess those materials merely by taking them.

From Thoreau to Hemingway and his successors, a great deal of sympathy and interest has been given to the individual as pariah or gadfly or exile.

A community identifies itself by an understood mutuality of interests. But it lives and acts by the common virtues of trust, goodwill, forbearance, self-restraint, compassion, and forgiveness.

To encourage spending with no regard at all to what is being purchased may be pro-finance, but it is anti-economic.

(assuming, of course, that the minds in question would stay put long enough to be changed). It would improve minds. The locality, by becoming partly sustainable, would produce the thought it would need to become more sustainable.

…would be properly motivated to do so both by the wish to have a dependable supply of excellent food and by the fear of contaminating that supply. The increase of economic intimacy between a city and its sources would change minds

XXVIII. To make a sustainable city, one must begin somehow and I think the beginning must be small and economic. A beginning could be made, for example, by increasing the amount of food bought from farmers in the local countryside by consumers in the city.

…on the other hand, might reasonably hope to become sustainable.

XXVI. Some cities can never be sustainable at their present levels of population because they do not have a countryside around them or near them from which they can be sus-tained. New York City cannot be made sustainable, nor can Phoenix. Some cities in Kentucky or the Midwest,…

…presence of the problem--to face the great problem one small life at a time.

XXV. When I think of the kind of worker the job requires, I think of Dorothy Day (if one can think of Dorothy Day herself, separate from the publicity that came as a result of her rarity), a person willing to go down and down into the daunting, humbling, almost hopeless local…

can furnish employment to many such people.

XXIV. The great obstacle may be not greed but the modern hankering after glamour. A lot of our smartest, most concerned people want to come up with a big solution to a big problem. I don't think that planet-saving, if we take it seriously, …

XXIII. The real work of planet-saving will be small, hum-ble, and humbling, and (insofar as it involves love) pleasing and rewarding. Its jobs will be too many to count, too many to report, too many to be publicly noticed or rewarded, too small to make anyone rich or famous.

…even to the lovers themselves, somewhat inscrutable.

XXII. What, for a start, might be the economic result of local affection? We don't know. Moreover, we are probably never going to know in any way that would satisfy the average dean or corporate executive. The ways of love tend to be secretive and, …

about a kind of knowledge that comes from or with affection-knowledge that is unavailable to the unaffectionate and that is unavailable to anyone in the form of " information."

XXI. The question before us, then, is an extremely difficult one: How do we begin to remake, or to make, a local culture that will preserve our part of the world while we use it? We are talking here not just about a kind of knowledge that involves affection but also…