Russell Arben Fox's report on Wendell Berry's appearance at the Land Institute

Hearing Wendell Berry

I wonder how others would respond to Berry’s approach to “knowledge,” and the role which local human knowledge can play, should play, but often doesn’t play, in keeping the land community (which is all of us, in our respective places) healthy. On the one hand, Berry treats knowledge as something best recognized as limited, beyond our grasp, and therefore humbling: we should approach our ecosystem with a sense of our ignorance, and approach cautiously most scientific, technological, or economic enterprises as a result. But on the other hand, it is, in fact, “knowledge” in the most common-sensical use of the term, that he speaks of: we have a need to know–to have real practical knowledge–about the soil, about the black willows, about all that begins with the solar power embedded in that which grows and that which we consume. To treat that knowledge casually, or less than holistically, is a sin against the natural world. The student of F.A. Hayek, or other apostles of the unregulated market (including, to a limited degree, Adam Smith himself), would on the contrary argue that the knowledge which Berry speaks of isn’t real, or isn’t relevant, or isn’t obtainable–not in the way he speaks of it, anyway. We can’t know the actual “value” of the soil, or the black willow, or the mountaintop; we can only know (and this only indirectly, through the repeated operations of selling and buying) the price of these goods, and thus their relative (and mostly after-the-fact) value to other operations (commercial fishing, riverside property development, coal production, “environmental” tourism, etc.). Ignorance, in this sense, isn’t humbling, it is empowering: see how much we can do, even given all we don’t know! There is no, or at least not very much, sustainability implied in such a model; it means something can be used up (and perhaps regretted, or expensively repaired later), because their is always something more–more oil, more energy, more willow trees, more land. Berry spoke of how used up Kentucky’s biodiversity had become, and that while there is reason for hope–another lesson of the soil, which receives the seeds and gives them life, year after year: there is always hope–there is also much, much terrible work to be taken up by those who care.