Earth in Mind by David W. Orr

Author:David W. Orr [Orr, David W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781597268981
Publisher: Island Press
Published: 2013-03-22T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Agriculture and the Liberal Arts

It is incumbent on us to take special pains . . . that all the people, or as many of them as possible, shall have contact with the earth and that the earth’s righteousness shall be abundantly taught.

—LIBERTY HYDE BAILEY

UNTIL quite recently much of what people knew about the natural world they learned from the experience of growing up on a farm or by periodic visits to nearby farms. For all of their flaws, farms were schools of a sort in natural history, ecology, soils, seasons, wildlife, animal husbandry, and land use. The decline of ecologically diverse farms and the experience of the natural world that they fostered explains in large part, I think, the increasing gap between the broad support for environmental causes evident in public opinion polls and a growing ignorance of how ecosystems work and how private consumption and economic growth destroy the environment. In other words, the sharp decline in the number of farms and the shift toward industrial farming has had serious consequences for our collective ecological intelligence.

To be sure, the experience of farm life varied greatly with the quality of the farm and differences in individual perceptivity, intelligence, and skill. Moreover, in the absence of vital rural communities, farm life was sometimes tedious, narrow, and parochial. On balance, however, I believe that it was mostly otherwise. But in either case farms did what no other institution has ever done as well. They taught directly, and sometimes painfully, the relationship between our daily bread and soil, rainfall, animals, biological diversity, and natural cycles, which is to say land stewardship. They also taught the importance of the human qualities of husbandry, patience, hard work, self-reliance, practical skill, and thrift. However imperfectly, farms served as a reality check on human possibilities in nature that urban societies presently lack.

The decline of small family farms and rural communities might still be justified as the necessary price for efficiency. However, it is evident that unfair taxation and lavish subsidies for large scale had more to do with the demise of small farms than did their alleged failure to produce or to make a profit (Strange, 1988). On behalf of a short-term, devil-take-the-hindmost economics we destroyed farms and rural communities, which have been the historical ballast for stable societies. We have good reason to agree with Aldo Leopold (1991) that social “stability seems to vary inversely to the mental distance from fields and woods” (p. 286).

At its best, traditional farming and rural life were, in Jacquetta Hawkes’s (1951) perception, “a creative, a patient and increasingly skilful love-making that had persuaded the land to flourish” (p. 202). In contrast, the industrialization of agriculture was “an upsurge of instinctive forces comparable to the barbarian invasions ... designed to satisfy man’s vanity, his greed and possessiveness, his wish for domination” (p. 203). As agriculture became more industrialized, the number of farms declined, and with them, rural communities. Remaining farms became larger, ecologically less diverse, more expensive to operate, and more vulnerable to economic and ecological forces beyond the control of farmers.

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