Think Local

By Chris Hoffman

Wendell Berry will be 78 years old this year. He has lived on his 125-acre farm in Kentucky since 1965. He is an academician, a prolific author, and an outspoken critic of things cultural and economic. He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and a recipient of The National Humanities Medal, among other awards. He is also a farmer and strong advocate of rural communities and traditional family farms.

On the Ukiah Blog of the Mendo Island Journal, he writes: “A community economy is not an economy in which well-placed persons can make a ‘killing.’  It is an economy whose aim is generosity and a well-distributed and safeguarded abundance.”

Some of Berry’s principles for the integrity and renewal of local economies and communities:

1. Always ask of any proposed change or innovation: What will this do to our community? How will this affect our common wealth?

2. Always include local nature – the land, the water, the air, and native creatures – within the membership of the community.

3. Make sure that money paid into the local economy circulates within the community and decrease expenditures outside the community.

4. A sustainable rural economy depends on consumers loyal to local products – an economy that is more cooperative than competitive.

More than 10 years ago, Berry published a piece in Orion Magazine on “The Idea of a Local Economy,” which rests upon two principles: neighborhood and subsistence. He discussed a “total economy” in which critical choices that once belonged to individuals and communities become the purview of corporations in which state and national governments begin to act as agents of the global economy, thus undermining the rights and liberties of citizenship.

Originally concerned about the danger of great concentrations of wealth and power in industrial corporations, the government used various means to limit this wealth and power, including laws against trusts and monopolies, the principle of collective bargaining, and the progressive income tax, as well as tariffs on cheap imported goods – all justified by the government’s obligation to protect the lives, livelihoods, and freedoms of its citizens. All of these means have now been either abandoned or significantly defanged.

The means for people to defend themselves against inadequate government protection and excessive corporate power and wealth comes through the implied Social Contract of the U.S. Constitution: powers not exercised by government return to the people. If the government will not protect the lives, livelihoods, and freedoms of its people, then the people must protect themselves.

Berry believes the way for people to protect themselves is by developing a local economy, beginning with the idea of a local food economy, which shortens the distance between producers and consumers, to make the local economy benefit the local community, to preserve the livelihoods of local farm families and farm communities, to give consumers influence over the quality of their food, and to preserve the land. In doing so, people begin to see the difference between a local business that shares the fate of the local community and a large absentee corporation that is set up to escape the fate of the local community ruined by corporate malfeasance.

As Berry says, “To be a consumer in the total economy, one must agree to be totally ignorant, totally passive, and totally dependent on distant supplies and self-interested suppliers.  From the standpoint of corporations, the corporate economy brings unprecedented economic growth, but from the standpoint of the land and its local populations … [a corporate economy brings] destruction and slavery. Without prosperous local economies, the people have no power and the land no voice.”

This is the crossroads at which we in CNY now find ourselves, both in terms of the threat of the gas companies and other corporate predators and the promise of nascent farms engaged in a struggle to preserve the land by working it to produce real food for the people who live here.

The choices we make as citizens, consumers, farmers, landowners and members of various levels of municipal government will determine our collective fate. For those of us working to support local agriculture in many different ways, it is a life or death struggle.

For those who see only dollar signs or the so-called promise of economic “development” to cure New York’s economic woes, be warned that there is a severe price to pay for such shortsightedness.  If we make the effort, we can find guiding wisdom from points near and far, including from a wise old man who lives in Kentucky.

Chris Hoffman lives in the village of Sherburne in her 150+ year-old house where she caters to the demands of her four cats, attempts to grow heirloom tomatoes and herbs and reads voraciously. She passionately pursues various avenues with like-minded friends to preserve and protect a sustainable rural lifestyle for everyone in Central New York.