Rules for Rural Radicals

Wendell Berry is a wonderful poet and a serious champion of the ecology. I was tooling around the internets that Al Gore created the other day and came across this fragment of one of his poems entitled The Gathering:

At my age my father
held me on his arm
like a hooded bird
and his father held him so ....

. . . . . . . .

My son
will know me in himself
when his son sits hooded on
his arm and I have grown
to be brother to all
my fathers, memory
speaking to knowledge
finally, in my bones.

Brought tears to my eyes, as I'd just been blogging about the line from Pillar to the Sky where one of the builders of Stonehenge suddenly finds himself in the company of his father's father's father and his son's son's son. Seeing Al Gore's AIT makes me wonder if as far forward as I can go is my son's son. Will there be human life on Earth beyond that?

Here are Wendell Berry's rules for sustainable communities, particularly rural communities:



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

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

Always ask how local needs might be supplied from local sources, including the mutual help of neighbours.

Always supply local needs first (and only then think of exporting products - first to nearby cities, then to others).

Understand the ultimate unsoundness of the industrial doctrine of 'labour saving' if that implies poor work, unemployment, or any kind of pollution or contamination.

Develop properly-scaled, value-adding industries for local products to ensure that the community does not become merely a colony of the national or global economy.

Develop small-scale industries and businesses to support the local farm and/or forest economy.

Strive to supply as mush of the community's own energy as possible.

Strive to increase earnings (in whatever form) within the community for as long as possible before they are paid out.

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

Make the community able to invest in itself by maintaining its properties, keeping itself clean (without dirtying some other place), caring for its old people, and teaching its children.

Sees that the old and young take care of one another. The young must learn from the old, not necessarily, and not always, in school. There must be no institutionalised childcare and no homes for the aged. The community knows and remembers itself by the association of old and young.

Account for costs now conventionally hidden or externalised. Whenever possible, these must be debited against monetary income.

Looks into the possible uses of local currency, community-funded loan programmes, systems of barter, and the like.

Always be aware of the economic value of neighbourly acts. In our time, the costs of living are greatly increased by the loss of neighbourhood, which leaves people to face their calamities alone.

A rural community should always be acquainted and interconnected with community-minded people in nearby towns and cities.

A sustainable rural economy will depend on urban consumers loyal to local products. Therefore, we are talking about an economy that will always be more cooperative than competitive.