"The "business" of agriculture, is destroying us. And we, as a nation,
have let it. Wendell Berry notes that a failure to live up to our own
beliefs is often at fault. We rail against the McDonaldization of the
food industry, but still eat at McDonalds. We complain about factory
stores taking over our communities, but still shop at Wal-Mart. We are
saddened by the demise of local businesses, but still don't support
them. If we don't begin to reinforce our beliefs with action, who
will? As Calvin Coolidge once said, the buck indeed stops here.
We've lost something else by trading the life of the land for the life
of the corporation. Sitting behind a desk in windowless offices with
stagnant air has become a the new way of life for most people.
Applauding each new technological "innovation" has been seen as the
greatest advancement of a "civilized" people. But listen to Woody
Woodraska, writing in Acres USA:
'What if the picture that's been drawn of medieval peasant life as
basically nasty, brutish and short is a cultural con job put out by the
rationalists and the materialists, the ones who shortly would have
something to sell us? What if life on a subsistence level has joys and
satisfactions outweighing the challenges? What if people used to have
time to laugh and sing? What if there were still people in the world
who could catch the memory of this and show it to us?'"
