[alt.activism] Global thinking and local thinking

bgeer@silver.lcs.mit.edu (Ben Geer) (06/26/91)

Out of Your Car, Off Your Horse: Twenty-seven propositions about
global thinking and the sustainability of cities

by Wendell Berry, _The Atlantic Monthly_, February 1991

I. Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible.  Those who
have "thought globally" (and among them the most successful have been
imperial governments and multinational corporations) have done so by
means of simplifications too extreme and oppressive to merit the name
of thought.  Global thinkers have been, and will be, dangerous
people.  National thinkers tend to be dangerous also; we now have
national thinkers in the northeastern United States who look upon
Kentucky as a garbage dump.

II. Global thinking can only be statistical.  Its shallowness is
exposed by the least intention to do something.  Unless one is
willing to be destructive on a very large scale, one cannot do
something except locally, in a small place.  Global thinking can only
do to the globe what a space satellite does to it: reduce it, make a
bauble of it.  Look at one of those photographs of half the earth
taken from outer space, and see if you recognize your neighborhood.
If you want to _see_ where you are, you will have to get out of your
space vehicle, out of your car, off your horse, and walk over the
ground.  On foot you will find that the earth is still satisfyingly
large, and full of beguiling nooks and crannies.

III. If we could think locally , we would do far better than we are
doing now.  The right local questions and answers will be the right
global ones.  The Amish question "What will this do to our
community?" tends toward the right answer for the world.

IV. If we want to put local life in proper relation to the globe, we
must do so by imagination, charity, and forbearance, and by making
local life as independent and self-sufficient as we can--not by the
presumptuous abstractions of "global thought."

V. If we want to keep our thoughts and acts from destroying the
globe, then we must see to it that we do not ask too much of the
globe or of any part of it.  To make sure that we do not ask too
much, we must learn to live at home, as independently and
self-sufficiently as we can.  That is the only way we can keep the
land we are using, and its ecological limits, always in sight.

VI. The only sustainable city--and this, to me, is the indispensable
ideal and goal--is a city in balance with its countryside: a city,
that is, that would live off the _net_ ecological income of its
supporting region, paying as it goes all ecological and human debts.

VII. The cities we have now are living off ecological principal, by
economic assumptions that seem certain to destroy them.  They do not
live at home.  They do not have their own supporting regions.  They
are out of balance with their supports, wherever on the globe their
supports are.

VIII. The balance between city and countryside is destroyed by
industrial machinery, "cheap" productivity in field and forest, and
"cheap" transportation.  Rome destroyed the balance with slave labor;
we have destroyed it with "cheap" fossil fuel.

IX. Since the Civil War, perhaps, and certainly since the Second
World War, the norms of productivity have been set by the fossil-fuel
industries.

X. Geographically, the sources of the fossil fuels are rural.
Technically, however, the production of these fuels is industrial and
urban.  The facts and integrities of local life, and the principle of
community, are considered as little as possible, for to consider them
would not be quickly profitable.  Fossil fuels have always been
produced at the expense of local ecosystems and of local human
communities.  The fossil-fuel economy is the industrial economy par
excellence, and it assigns no value to local life, natural or human.

XI. When the industrial principles exemplified in fossil-fuel
production are applied to field and forest, the results are
identical: local life, both natural and human, is destroyed.

XII. Industrial procedures have been imposed on the countryside
pretty much to the extent that country people have been seduced or
forced into dependence on the money economy.  By encouraging this
dependence, corporations have increased their ability to rob the
people of their property and their labor.  The result is that a very
small number of people now own all the usable property in the
country, and workers are increasingly the hostages of their
employers.

XIII. Our present "leaders"--the people of wealth and power--do not
know what it means to take a place seriously: to think it worthy, for
its own sake, of love and study and careful work.  They cannot take
any place seriously because they must be ready at any moment, by the
terms of power and wealth in the modern world, to destroy any place.

XIV. Ecological good sense will be opposed by all the most powerful
economic entities of our time, because ecological good sense requires
the reduction or replacement of those entities.  If ecological good
sense is to prevail, it can do so only through the work and the will
of the people and of the local communities.

XV. For this task our currently prevailing assumptions about
knowledge, information, education, money, and political will are
inadequate.  All our institutions with which I am familiar have
adopted the organizational patterns and the quantitative measures of
the industrial corporations.  _Both_ sides of the ecological debate,
perhaps as a consequence, are alarmingly abstract.

XVI. But abstraction, of course, is what is wrong.  The evil of the
industrial economy (capitalist or communist) is the abstractness
inherent in its procedures--its inability to distinguish one place or
person or creature from another.  William Blake saw this two hundred
years ago.  Anyone can see it now in almost any of our common tools
and weapons.

XVII. Abstraction is the enemy _wherever_ it is found.  The
abstractions of sustainability can ruin the world just as surely as
the abstractions of industrial economics.  Local life may be as much
endangered by "saving the planet" as by "conquering the world."  Such
a project calls for abstract purposes and central powers that cannot
know, and so will destroy, the integrity of local nature and local
community.

XVIII. In order to make ecological good sense for the planet, you
must make ecological good sense locally.  You can't act locally by
thinking globally.  If you want to keep your local acts from
destroying the planet, you must think locally.

XIX. No one can make ecological good sense for the planet.  Everyone
can make ecological good sense locally, _if_ the affection, the
scale, the knowledge, the tools, and the skills are right.

XX. The right scale in work gives power to affection.  When one works
beyond the reach of one's love for the place one is working in, and
for the things and creatures one is working with and among, then
destruction inevitably results.  An adequate local culture, among
other things, keeps work within the reach of love.

XXI. The question before us, then, is an extremely difficult one: How
do we begin to remake, or to make, a local culture that will preserve
our part of the world while we use it?  We are talking here not just
about a kind of knowledge that _involves_ affection but also about a
kind of knowledge that comes from or with affection--knowledge that is
unavailable to the unaffectionate, and that is unavailable to anyone
as what is called information.

XXII. What, for a start, might be the economic result of local
affection?  We don't know.  Moreover, we are probably never going to
know in any way that would satisfy the average dean or corporate
executive.  The ways of love tend to be secretive and, even to the
lovers themselves, somewhat inscrutable.

XXIII. The real work of planet-saving will be small, humble, and
humbling, and (insofar as it involves love) pleasing and rewarding.
Its jobs will be too many to count, too many to report, too many to
be publicly noticed or rewarded, too small to make anyone rich or
famous.

XXIV. The great obstacle may be not greed but the modern hankering
after glamour.  A lot of our smartest, most concerned people want to
come up with a big solution to a big problem.  I don't think that
planet-saving, if we take it seriously, can furnish employment to
many such people.

XXV. When I think of the kind of worker the job requires, I think of
Dorothy Day (if one can think of Dorothy Day herself, separate from
the publicity that came as a result of her rarity), a person willing
to go down and down into the daunting, humbling, almost hopeless
local presence of the problem--to face the great problem one small
life at a time.

XXVI. Some cities can never be sustainable, because they do not have
a countryside around them, or near them, from which they can be
sustained.  New York City cannot be made sustainable, nor can
Phoenix.  Some cities in Kentucky or the Midwest, on the other hand,
might reasonably hope to become sustainable.

XXVII. To make a sustainable city, one must begin somehow, and I
think the beginning must be small and economic.  A beginning could be
made, for example, by increasing the amount of food bought from
farmers in the local countryside by consumers in the city.  As the
food economy became more local, local farming would become more
diverse; the farms would become smaller, more complex in structure,
more productive; and some city people would be needed to work on the
farms.  Sooner or later, as a means of reducing expenses both ways,
organic wastes from the city would go out to fertilize the farms of
the supporting region; thus city people would have to assume an
agricultural responsibility, and would be properly motivated to do so
both by the wish to have a supply of excellent food and the fear of
contaminating that supply.  The increase of economic intimacy between
a city and its sources would change minds (assuming, of course, that
the minds in question would stay put long enough to be changed).  It
would improve minds.  The locality, by becoming partly sustainable,
would produce the thought it would need to become more sustainable.
--
Ben Geer
bgeer@silver.lcs.mit.edu