The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry

by Wendell Berry

The exclusive standard of productivity destroys the formal integrity of a farm just as the exclusive standard of longevity destroys the formal integrity of a life. The quest for higher and higher production on farms leads almost inevitably to specialization, ignoring the natural impulsion toward diversity; specialization in turn obliterates local proprieties of scale and proportion and obscures any sense of human connection. Driven by fashion, debt, and bad science, the desire for more overrides completely the idea of a home or a home place or a home economy or a home community. The desire for quantity replaces the desire for wholeness or holiness or health. The sense of right proportion and scale cannot survive the loss of the sense of relationship, of the parts to one another and to the whole. The result, inevitably, is ugliness, violence, and waste.