The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry

by Wendell Berry

We are not asking what is the best way to farm everywhere in the world, or everywhere in the United States, or everywhere in Kentucky or Iowa. We are asking what is the best way to farm in each one of the world’s numberless places, as defined by topography, soil type, climate, ecology, history, culture, and local need. And we know that the standard cannot be determined only by market demand or productivity or profitability or technological capability, or by any other single measure, however important it may be. The agrarian standard, inescapably, is local adaptation, which requires bringing local nature, local people, local economy, and local culture into a practical and enduring harmony.

The specialization of production induces specialization of consumption. Patrons of the entertainment industry, for example, entertain themselves less and less and have become more and more passively dependent on commercial suppliers. This is certainly true also of patrons of the food industry, who have tended more and more to be mere consumers – passive, uncritical, and dependent. Indeed, this sort of consumption may be said to be one of the chief goals of industrial production. The food industrialists have by now persuaded millions of consumers to prefer food that is already prepared. They will grow, deliver, and cook your food for you and (just like your mother) beg you to eat it. That they do not yet offer to insert it, prechewed, into your mouth is only because they have found no profitable way to do so. We may rest assured that they would be glad to find such a way. The ideal industrial food consumer would be strapped to a table with a tube running from the food factory directly into his or her stomach.

There is, then, a politics of food that, like any politics, involves our freedom. We still (sometimes) remember that we cannot be free if our minds and voices are controlled by someone else. But we have neglected to understand that we cannot be free if our food and its sources are controlled by someone else. The condition of the passive consumer of food is not a democratic condition. One reason to eat responsibly is to live free.

Like industrial sex, industrial eating has become a degraded, poor, and paltry thing. Our kitchens and other eating places more and more resemble filling stations, as our homes more and more resemble motels. ‘Life is not very interesting,’ we seem to have decided. ‘Let its satisfactions be minimal, perfunctory, and fast.’ We hurry through our meals to go to work and hurry through our work in order to ‘recreate’ ourselves in the evenings and on weekends and vacations. And then we hurry, with the greatest possible speed and noise and violence, through our recreation for what? To eat the billionth hamburger at some fast-food joint hell-bent on increasing the ‘quality’ of our life? And all this is carried out in a remarkable obliviousness to the causes and effects, the possibilities and the purposes, of the life of the body in this world.

Our kitchens and other eating places more and more resemble filling stations, as our homes more and more resemble motels. ‘Life is not very interesting,’ we seem to have decided. ‘Let its satisfactions be minimal, perfunctory, and fast.’ We hurry through our meals to go to work and hurry through our work in order to ‘recreate’ ourselves in the evenings and on weekends and vacations. And then we hurry, with the greatest possible speed and noise and violence, through our recreation for what? To eat the billionth hamburger at some fast-food joint hell-bent on increasing the ‘quality’ of our life? And all this is carried out in a remarkable obliviousness to the causes and effects, the possibilities and the purposes, of the life of the body in this world.

The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared or fast food, confronts a platter covered with inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality. And the result is a kind of solitude, unprecedented in human experience, in which the eater may think of eating as, first, a purely commercial transaction between him and a supplier and then as a purely appetitive transaction between him and his food.

It would not do for the consumer to know that the hamburger she is eating came from a steer who spent much of his life standing deep in his own excrement in a feedlot, helping to pollute the local streams, or that the calf that yielded the veal cutlet on her plate spent its life in a box in which it did not have room to turn around. And, though her sympathy for the slaw might be less tender, she should not be encouraged to meditate on the hygienic and biological implications of mile-square fields of cabbage, for vegetables grown in huge monocultures are dependent on toxic chemicals – just as animals in close confinement are dependent on antibiotics and other drugs.

The consumer, that is to say, must be kept from discovering that, in the food industry – as in any other industry – the overriding concerns are not quality and health, but volume and price. For decades now the entire industrial food economy, from the large farms and feedlots to the chains of supermarkets and fast-food restaurants, has been obsessed with volume. It has relentlessly increased scale in order to increase volume in order (presumably) to reduce costs. But as scale increases, diversity declines; as diversity declines, so does health; as health declines, the dependence on drugs and chemicals necessarily increases.

Eaters, that is, must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used. This is a simple way of describing a relationship that is inexpressibly complex. To eat responsibly is to understand and enact, so far as one can, this complex relationship. What can one do? Here is a list, probably not definitive: 1. Participate in food production to the extent that you can. If you have a yard or even just a porch box or a pot in a sunny window, grow something to eat in it. Make a little compost of your kitchen scraps and use it for fertilizer. Only by growing some food for yourself can you become acquainted with the beautiful energy cycle that revolves from soil to seed to flower to fruit to food to offal to decay, and around again. You will be fully responsible for any food that you grow for yourself, and you will know all about it. You will appreciate it fully, having known it all its life. 2. Prepare your own food. This means reviving in your own mind and life the arts of kitchen and household. This should enable you to eat more cheaply, and it will give you a measure of ‘quality control’: you will have some reliable knowledge of what has been added to the food you eat. 3. Learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is produced closest to your home. The idea that every locality should be, as much as possible, the source of its ...

Some, I know, will think it bloodthirsty or worse to eat a fellow creature you have known all its life. On the contrary, I think it means that you eat with understanding and with gratitude. A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one’s accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes. The pleasure of eating, then, may be the best available standard of our health. And this pleasure, I think, is pretty fully available to the urban consumer who will make the necessary effort.

Eating with the fullest pleasure – pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance – is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.

The coming of the tractor made it possible for a farmer to do more work, but not better. And there comes a point, as we know, when more begins to imply worse. The mechanization of farming passed that point long ago – probably, or so I will argue, when it passed from horse power to tractor power.

Speed is everything now; just jump on the tractor and way across the field as if it’s a dirt-track. You see it when a farmer takes over a new farm: he goes in and plants straightway, right out of the book. But if one of the old farmers took a new farm, and you walked round the land with him and asked him: “What are you going to plant here and here?” he’d look at you some queer; because he wouldn’t plant nothing much at first. He’d wait a bit and see what the land was like: he’d prove the land first. A good practical man would hold on for a few weeks, and get the feel of the land under his feet. He’d walk on it and feel it through his boots and see if it was in good heart, before he planted anything: he’d sow only when he knew what the land was fit for.’

Granted that there is always plenty of room to disagree about farming methods, there is still no way to deny that in the first quotation we have a description of careless farming, and in the second a description of a way of farming as careful – as knowing, skillful, and loving – as any other kind of high workmanship. The difference between the two is simply that the second considers where and how the machine is used, whereas the first considers only the machine. The first is the point of view of a man high up in the air-conditioned cab of a tractor described as ‘a beast that eats acres.’ The second is that of a man who has worked close to the ground in the open air of the field, who has studied the condition of the ground as he drove over it, and who has cared and thought about it.

Those machines, like the ones that followed them, were labor savers. They may seem old-timey in comparison to today’s ‘acre eaters,’ but when they came on the market they greatly increased the amount of work that one worker could do in a day. And so they confronted us with a critical question: How would we define labor saving? We defined it, or allowed it to be defined for us by the corporations and the specialists, as if it involved no human considerations at all, as if the labor to be ‘saved’ were not human labor. We decided, in the language of some experts, to look on technology as a ‘substitute for labor.’ Which means that we did not intend to ‘save’ labor at all, but to replace it, and to displace the people who once supplied it. We never asked what should be done with the ‘saved’ labor; we let the ‘labor market’ take care of that. Nor did we ask the larger questions of what values we should place on people and their work and on the land. It appears that we abandoned ourselves unquestioningly to a course of technological evolution, which would value the development of machines far above the development of people.

Suppose, then, that in 1945 we had valued the human life of farms and farm communities 1 percent more than we valued ‘economic growth’ and technological progress. And suppose we had espoused the health of homes, farms, towns, and cities with anything like the resolve and energy with which we built the ‘military-industrial complex.’ Suppose, in other words, that we had really meant what, all that time, most of us and most of our leaders were saying, and that we had really tried to live by the traditional values to which we gave lip service. Then, it seems to me, we might have accepted certain mechanical and economic limits. We might have used the improved horse-drawn tools, or even the small tractor equipment that followed, not to displace workers and decrease care and skill, but to intensify production, improve maintenance, increase care and skill, and widen the margins of leisure, pleasure, and community life. We might, in other words, by limiting technology to a human or a democratic scale, have been able to use the saved labor in the same places where we saved it.

At work in a factory, workers are only workers, ‘units of production’ expending ‘man-hours’ at a task set for them by strangers. At work in their own communities, on their own farms or in their own households or shops, workers are never only workers, but rather persons, relatives, and neighbors. They work for those they work among and with. Moreover, workers tend to be independent in inverse proportion to the size of the circumstance in which they work. That is, the work of factory workers is ruled by the factory, whereas the work of housewives, small craftsmen, or small farmers is ruled by their own morality, skill, and intelligence. And so, when workers work independently and at home, the society as a whole may lose something in the way of organizational efficiency and economies of scale. But it begins to gain values not so readily quantifiable in the fulfilled humanity of the workers, who then bring to their work not just contracted quantities of ‘man-hours,’ but qualities such as independence, skill, intelligence, judgment, pride, respect, loyalty, love, reverence.

I am aware that all this is exactly the sort of thinking that the technological determinists will dismiss as nostalgic or wishful. I mean it, however, not as a recommendation that we ‘return to the past,’ but as a criticism of the past; and my criticism is based on the assumption that we had in the past, and that we have now, a choice about how we should use technology and what we should use it for. As I understand it, this choice depends absolutely on our willingness to limit our desires as well as the scale and kind of technology we use to satisfy them. Without that willingness, there is no choice; we must simply abandon ourselves to whatever the technologists may discover to be possible. The technological determinists, of course, do not accept that such a choice exists – undoubtedly because they resent the moral limits on their work that such a choice implies. They speak romantically of ‘man’s destiny’ to go on to bigger and more sophisticated machines. Or they take the opposite course and speak the tooth-and-claw language of Darwinism. Ex-secretary of agriculture Earl Butz speaks, for instance, of ‘Butz’s Law of Economics’ which is ‘Adapt or Die.’ I am, I think, as enthusiastic about the principle of adaptation as Mr. Butz. We differ only on the question of what should be adapted. He believes that we should adapt to the machines, that humans should be forced to conform to technological conditions or standards. I believe that the machines should be adapted to us – to se...

People cannot live apart from nature; that is the first principle of the conservationists. And yet, people cannot live in nature without changing it. But this is true of all creatures; they depend upon nature, and they change it. What we call nature is, in a sense, the sum of the changes made by all the various creatures and natural forces in their intricate actions and influences upon each other and upon their places. Because of the woodpeckers, nature is different from what it would be without them. It is different also because of the borers and ants that live in tree trunks, and because of the bacteria that live in the soil under the trees. The making of these differences is the making of the world.

Humans, like all other creatures, must make a difference; otherwise, they cannot live. But inlike other creatures, humans must make a choice as to the kind and scale of the difference they make. If they choose to make too small a difference, they diminish their humanity. If they choose to make too great a difference, they diminish nature, and narrow their subsequent choices; ultimately, they diminish or destroy themselves. Nature, then, is not only our source but also our limit and measure.

In nature we know that wild creatures sometimes exhaust their vital sources and suffer the natural remedy: drastic population reductions. If lynxes eat too many snowshoe rabbits – which they are said to do repeatedly – then the lynxes starve down to the carrying capacity of their habitat. It is the carrying capacity of the lynx’s habitat, not the carrying capacity of the lynx’s stomach, that determines the prosperity of lynxes. Similarly, if humans use up too much soil – which they have often done and are doing – then they will starve down to the carrying capacity of their habitat. This is nature’s ‘indifferent’ justice. As Spenser saw in the sixteenth century, and as we must learn to see now, there is no appeal from this justice. In the hereafter, the Lord may forgive our wrongs against nature, but on earth, so far as we know, He does not overturn her decisions.

we are up against an American convention of simple opposition to nature that is deeply established both in our minds and in our ways. We have opposed the primeval forests of the East and the primeval prairies and deserts of the West, we have opposed man-eating beasts and crop-eating insects, sheep-eating coyotes and chicken-eating hawks. In our lawns and gardens and fields, we oppose what we call weeds. And yet more and more of us are beginning to see that this opposition is ultimately destructive even of ourselves, that it does not explain many things that need explaining – in short, that it is untrue.

We know, then, that the conflict between the human and the natural estates really exists and that it is to some extent necessary. But we are learning, or relearning, something else, too, that frightens us: namely, that this conflict often occurs at the expense of both estates. It is not only possible but altogether probable that by diminishing nature we diminish ourselves, and vice versa.

Such conflicts – like the old one between hawk-defenders and chicken-defenders – tend to occur between people who use nature indirectly and people who use it directly. It is a dangerous mistake, I think, for either side to pursue such a quarrel on the assumption that victory would be a desirable result. The fact is that people need both coyotes and sheep, need a world in which both kinds of life are possible. Outside the heat of conflict, conservationists probably know that a sheep is one of the best devices for making coarse foliage humanly edible and that wool is ecologically better than the synthetic fibers, just as most shepherds will be aware that wild nature is of value to them and not lacking in interest and pleasure.

Most conservationists now take for granted that humans thrive best in ecological health and that the test or sign of this health is the survival of a diversity of wild creatures. We know, too, that we cannot imagine ourselves apart from those necessary survivals of our own wildness that we call our instincts. And we know that we cannot have a healthy agriculture apart from the teeming wilderness in the topsoil, in which worms, bacteria, and other wild creatures are carrying on the fundamental work of decomposition, humus making, water storage, and drainage. ‘In wildness is the preservation of the world,’ as Thoreau said, may be a spiritual truth, but it is also a practical fact.

What I am aiming at – because a lot of evidence seems to point this way – is the probability that nature and human culture, wildness and domesticity, are not opposed but are interdependent. Authentic experience of either will reveal the need of one for the other. In fact, examples from both past and present prove that a human economy and wildness can exist together not only in compatibility but to their mutual benefit.

I am saying, in other words, that this little visit between the hawk and me happened because the kind and scale of my farm, my way of farming, and my technology allowed it to happen. If I had been driving a tractor in a hundred-acre cornfield, it would not have happened.

we can be true to nature only by being true to human nature – to our animal nature as well as to cultural patterns and restraints that keep us from acting like animals. When humans act like animals, they become the most dangerous of animals to themselves and other humans, and this is because of another critical difference between humans and animals: whereas animals are usually restrained by the limits of physical appetites, humans have mental appetites that can be far more gross and capacious than physical ones. Only humans squander and hoard, murder and pillage because of notions.

The noblest or the most base of creatures

In the hurry of technological progress, we have replaced some tools and methods that worked with some that do not work. But we also need culture-borne instructions about who or what humans are and how and on what assumptions they should act. The Chain of Being, for instance – which gave humans a place between animals and angels in the order of Creation – is an old idea that has not been replaced by any adequate new one. It was simply rejected, and the lack of it leaves us without a definition. Lacking that ancient definition, or any such definition, we do not know at what point to restrain or deny ourselves. We do not know how ambitious to be, what or how much we may safely desire, when or where to stop. I knew a barber once who refused to give a discount to a bald client, explaining that his artistry consisted, not in the cutting off, but in the knowing when to stop. He spoke, I think, as a true artist and a true human. The lack of such knowledge is extremely dangerous in and to an individual. But ignorance of when to stop is a modern epidemic; it is the basis of ‘industrial progress’ and ‘economic growth.’ The most obvious practical result of this ignorance is a critical disproportion of scale between the scale of human enterprises and their sources in nature.

If the human economy is to be fitted into the natural economy in such a way that both may thrive, the human economy must be built to proper scale. It is possible to talk at great length about the difference between proper and improper scale. It may be enough to say here that that difference is suggested by the difference between amplified and unamplified music in the countryside, or the difference between the sound of a motorboat and the sound of oarlocks. A proper human sound, we may say, is one that allows other sounds to be heard. A properly scaled human economy or technology allows a diversity of other creatures to thrive. ‘The proper scale,’ a friend wrote to me, ‘confers freedom and simplicity … and doubtless leads to long life and health.’ I think that it also confers joy. The renewal of our partnership with nature, the rejoining of our works to their proper places in the natural order, reshaped to their proper scale, implies the reenjoyment both of nature and of human domesticity.

Once we grant the possibility of a proper human scale, we see that we have made a radical change of assumptions and values. We realize that we are less interested in technological ‘breakthroughs’ than in technological elegance. Of a new tool or method we will no longer ask: Is it fast? Is it powerful? Is it a labor saver? How many workers will it replace? We will ask instead: Can we (and our children) afford it? Is it fitting to our real needs? Is it becoming to us? Is it unhealthy or ugly? And though we may keep a certain interest in innovation and in what we may become, we will renew our interest in what we have been, realizing that conservationists must necessarily conserve both inheritances, the natural and the cultural.

The survival of wilderness – of places that we do not change, where we allow the existence even of creatures we perceive as dangerous – is necessary. Our sanity probably requires it. Whether we go to those places or not, we need to know that they exist. And I would argue that we do not need just the great public wildernesses, but millions of small private or semiprivate ones. Every farm should have one; wildernesses can occupy corners of factory grounds and city lots – places where nature is given a free hand, where no human work is done, where people go only as guests. These places function, I think, whether we intend them to or not, as sacred groves – places we respect and leave alone, not because we understand well what goes on there, but because we do not.

What I have been implying is that I think there is a bad reason to go to the wilderness. We must not go there to escape the ugliness and the dangers of the present human economy. We must not let ourselves feel that to go there is to escape. In the first place, such an escape is now illusory. In the second place, if, even as conservationists, we see the human and the natural economies as necessarily opposite or opposed, we subscribe to the very opposition that threatens to destroy them both. The wild and the domestic now often seem isolated values, estranged from one another. And yet these are not exclusive polarities like good and evil. There can be continuity between them, and there must be.

When the human estate becomes so precarious, our only recourse is to move it back toward the estate of nature.

Contrary to the premise of agribusiness advertisements and of most expert advice, farmers do not thrive by production or by ‘skimming’ a large ‘cash flow.’ They cannot solve their problems merely by increasing production or income. They thrive, like all other creatures, according to the difference between their income and their expenses.

‘It is good to have Nature working for you,’ said Henry Besuden, the dean of American Southdown breeders. ‘She works for a minimum wage.’ That is true. She works at times for almost nothing, requiring only that we respect her work and give her a chance, as when she maintains – indeed, improves – the fertility and productivity of a pasture by the natural succession of clover and grass or when she improves a clay soil for us by means of the roots of a grass sod. She works for us by preserving health or wholeness, which for all our ingenuity we cannot make. If we fail to respect her health, she deals out her justice by withdrawing her protection against disease – which we can make, and do.

no good thing is destroyed by goodness; good things are destroyed by wickedness. We may identify that insight as Biblical, but it is taken for granted by both the Greek and the Biblical lineages of our culture, from Homer and Moses to William Blake. Since the start of the industrial revolution, there have been voices urging that this inheritance may be safely replaced by intelligence, information, energy, and money. No idea, I believe, could be more dangerous.

These are bad times for motherhood – a kind of biological drudgery, some say, using up women who could do better things. Thoreau may have been the first to assert that people should not belong to farm animals, but the idea is now established doctrine with many farmers – and it has received amendments to the effect that people should not belong to children, or to each other. But we all have to belong to something, if only to the idea that we should not belong to anything. We all have to be used up by something. And though I will never be a mother, I am glad to be used up by motherhood and what it leads to, just as – most of the time – I gladly belong to my wife, my children, and several head of cattle, sheep, and horses. What better way to be used up? How else to be a farmer?

We all have to be used up by something.

How does she know so much? How did all this come about? Instinct. Evolution. I know those words. I understand the logic of the survival of the fittest: good mothering instincts have survived because bad mothers lost their calves: the good traits triumphed, the bad perished. But how come some are fit in the first place? What prepared in the mind of the first cow or ewe or mare – or, for that matter, in the mind of the first human mother – this intricate, careful, passionate welcome to the newborn? I don’t know. I don’t think anybody does. I distrust any mortal who claims to know. We call these animals dumb brutes, and so far as we can tell they are more or less dumb, and there are certainly times when those of us who live with them will seem to find evidence that they are plenty stupid. And yet, they are indisputably allied with intelligence more articulate and more refined than is to be found in any obstetrics textbook. What is one to make of it? Here is a dumb brute lying in dung and straw, licking her calf, and as always I am feeling honored to be associated with her.