One of the most prescient, intelligent, passionate voices defending rural lands and rural agriculture has been lifelong Democrat Wendell Berry (though Wendell will tell you that he has no allegiance to any one party). The current Democratic Party appears to have no use for the considered wisdom of this Kentucky farmer, just as it has abandoned Martin Luther King, Jr., Thomas Jefferson, and the Kennedy legacy.
(It appears that the Biden Administration wishes Robert F. Kennedy dead rather than permit him breathing room in public discussions: Biden refuses to provide him with Secret Service protections.)
It is ironic that conservatives are now dismissed as racists for invoking King, vaccine deniers for heeding Kennedy’s cautions against Big Pharma, and as a threat to democracy for standing on the (liberal) Supreme Court precedents about race, free speech, equal protection, and other long-standing fundamental liberties. In this “what was good is now evil, and what was evil is now good” atmosphere, the conservationist voice of farmer Berry has been neglected in favor of fear, increased government domination, and subsidizing corporations to “save” humanity.
This, too, was forecast by the iconic Berry, who warned that totalitarian industrialism would devour an uninformed, complacent population that abandoned local culture and agrarian distributism in favor of zoo-like “consumerism” and techno-dependency. Wendell particularly cautioned against trusting Big Ag and processed foods with our health and food security. One need not be a farmer to see that Americans are addicted to cheap, sickening, highly-processed “foods” from which rodents walk away after a quick sniff of disdain.
The Left has not heeded the herald Berry; he has essentially been canceled in a bizarre ideological scourge of national self-contempt. But his words stand ever more strongly every day the nation moves toward that complete dependency on grid, government, and goons against which he raised a strident-if-ignored alarum. Consider Wendell’s wisdom, in contrast to the so-called “progressive” rescue of the nation through environmental histrionics and Draconian Green New )Marxist) Deal strangulation.
On Rewilding
Mr. Berry criticizes the “moral assumptions of the culture of exploitation,” noting in his essay The Conservation of Nature and the Preservation of Humanity, that “The most persistent and dangerous of these is the assumption that some parts of the world can be preserved while others are abused or destroyed.”
Vermont in 2023 enacted legislation that embraces this exact folly. The “Community Resilience and Biodiversity Protection Act” sets a goal to ‘conserve’ 30% of all land in the Green Mountain State by 2030, and 50% by 2050. Small wonder land prices have nearly doubled, increasing homelessness and dashing the dreams of the young – from which Vermont progressives will ‘rescue’ them by taxing property and income to construct ‘affordable’ housing that costs taxpayers a fortune.
Vermont is merely aping President Biden’s “30 by 30” Executive Order, which “put[] the climate crisis at the center of United States foreign policy and national security.” The Order urgently expands industrial manufacturing of (polluting) renewable energy gadgetry, while “empowering workers by advancing conservation, agriculture, and reforestation.”
Neither workers nor agriculture are empowered when land is withdrawn from agrarian stewardship for so-called ‘conservation and reforestation.’ The President’s plan calls to set aside 30% of the country’s land by 2030. He claims this is “acting on science,” but Wendell Berry offers a more rural-informed perspective:
“If in order to protect our forest land we designate it a commons or commonwealth separate from private ownership, then who will care for it? The absentee timber companies who see no reason to care about local consequences? The same government agents and agencies who are failing at present to take good care of our public forests? Is it credible that people inadequately skilled and inadequately motivated to care well for the land can be made to care well for it by public insistence that they do so?
“The answer is obvious: you cannot get good care in the use of land by demanding it from public officials…. The idea that a displaced people might take appropriate care of places is merely absurd. ….If we want the land to be cared for, then we must have people living on and from the land who are able and willing to care for it….” (“Private Property and the Common Wealth,” delivered as a speech at a conference on “The Forest Commons” on March 31, 1995.”
The soil science is clear: well-managed, rotationally-grazed cows nurture the soil microbiome, prevent erosion, retain precious water, and sequester far more carbon dioxide than forests – permanently, and without peddling ‘carbon credit’ pollution indulgences to corporations. The argument for rewilding is “merely absurd.”
On “Renewable” Energy Technology
A persistent admonition in Wendell’s writing is to measure the ‘externalized costs’ of consumption, yet that is exactly what has been avoided like the bubonic plague by climate ‘science’ advocates. All things measured in carbon dioxide (“net-zero”) ignores water and soil pollution in mining operations for rare earth materials (lithium), the coal plants constructed in China to create solar panels and EVs, or the disposal costs of all these taxpayer-subsidized boondoggles. Ignored also by elitist academics is the steadily growing dependency for heat, travel, and electricity that these carbon-centric plans entail.
Berry’s jeremiads caution always against trusting the very same technologies that have erased small farms from the landscape and enslaved Americans – to poisoned food, pharmaceuticals (to counter the illnesses caused by toxic foods and packaging), drug addiction, urban squalor, suburban alienation from the land, etc. – to deliver them from this predicament by way of yet more polluting technologies. GMOs toxify and kill soils, and increase erosion and water loss, but the climate cult’s horns are instead aimed at cows and other livestock that can feed us without the intercession of Bill Gates, John Kerry, or Klaus Schwab.
Foreshadowing massive government outlays for EVs, solar panels, and heat pumps, Wendell observed thirty years ago:
“We can safely predict that for a long time there are going to be people in places of power who will want to solve our local problems by inviting in some great multinational corporation. They will want to put millions of dollars of public money into an “incentive package” to make it worthwhile for the corporation to pay low wages for our labor and to pay low prices for, say, our timber. It is well understood that nothing excites the glands of a free-market capitalist as the offer of a government subsidy.
“But before we agree again to so radical a measure, producing maximum profits to people who live elsewhere and minimal, expensive benefits to ourselves and our neighbors, we ought to ask if we cannot contrive local solutions for our local problems, and if the local solutions might not be the best ones.” (From Conserving Forest Communities, delivered as a speech at the Kentucky Forest Summit, 9/29/1994
Rural Americans will be impoverished by renewable energy as energy costs rise and their traditional self-reliance is dismantled. They are being impoverished now: EVs and solar panels are regressively financed on the backs of low- and middle-income taxpayers, justified by claims that these innovations will “help the poor.” The serpent is in the Garden: that rural Kentucky farmer warned us to close our ears.
Climate Alarmism
Wendell Berry does not believe that grand government plans will ever do more than create grander government-seeded calamities. An outspoken critic of the Green New Deal, his words in The Art of Loading Brush (2019) caution humanity against precisely the climate fear-mongering that is paralyzing critical thought today:
“A multitude of people, including scientists and other experts, have devoted themselves exclusively to the threat of climate change. It is a great “movement.” I am not a climate change denier…. But I certainly am a critic of the climate change movement, and for what I consider good reasons.
“My foremost reason is that when so many people are devoted so exclusively to a single fear, the movement ceases to have the quality of prudence or provision, and takes on the character of a fad. ….The great question now needing to be asked is how to move from protest, fear, anger, or guilt to the actual accomplishment of good work.
“The problem with prediction, no matter how scientifically respectable it might be, is its power to bring on first a fear and then a movement that can be popularized into a fad. But of all the bad motives none may be worse or more hopeless than fear. Nobody, I think, has ever done good work because of fear. Good work is done by knowing how and by love. Love requires faith, courage, patience, and steadiness, none of which can come from fear. Also it appears to be impossible to sustain for very long even the most reasonable fear of a future catastrophe.
“….I believe we have got to understand how the great, one-cause, fear-motivated climate change movement, for example, can become a major distraction, not only from better ways of problem solving and better ways of working and thinking, but also from the local causes of climate change—which has, after all, only local causes.” (pp. 70-72)
Voices of reason are too often eclipsed by voices of doom. Al Gore was, and remains, precisely the headless-chicken alarmist to scold Americans into slow death and quick enslavement. The supply of food, like the causes of pollution, has always been best grounded in local, widely distributed plots under intergenerational stewardship and individual responsibility. Neither “local” problem will be cured by despotic rule.
A global famine will soon displace climate change as the “one-cause, fear-motivated” distraction to corral yet more of humanity into total industrial captivity. If only Wendell Berry’s words were heeded, humanity might have averted the unfolding terrors of which he was a preeminent harbinger.
