Tragedy of the Commonwealth and the Vision of Wendell Berry, The

Georgetown International Environmental Law Review, Spring 2006 by Stewart, Nathaniel

All through that summer the work of the farm went like clockwork. The animals were happy as they had never conceived it possible to be. Every mouthful of food was an acute positive pleasure, now that it was truly their own food, produced by themselves and for themselves, not doled out to them by a grudging master.... They met with many difficulties-for instance, later in the year, when they harvested the com, they had to tread it out in the ancient style and blow away the chaff with their breath, since the farm possessed no threshing machine-but the pigs with their cleverness and Boxer with his tremendous muscles always pulled them through.

-George Orwell, Animal Farm1

I. INTRODUCTION

A prolific essayist, novelist, poet, and fanner, Wendell Berry is regarded as a sage in the Jeffersonian tradition,2 a twentieth-century Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur.3 He calls out from atop his seventy-five acre Kentucky farm as "our foremost apostle of the agrarian ideal"4 in the hope of saving his land, his culture, and his local community. In the truest sense, Wendell Berry is a wordsmith, Grafting his poetry and prose with a pencil and a pad of paper, his wife transcribing his scrawl on a Royal standard typewriter from 1956.5 Though something of a Luddite-a modifier that Berry does not find insulting6-his contribution to the national dialogue on matters of the environment, ecology, property, and the moral course of the American people has not been overlooked.7

Indeed, since the turn of the century Berry has been cited in over three dozen law journals8 and his prose has been published, quoted, and discussed in national periodicals spanning the spectrum of environmental, political, and theological debate,9 including The Nation,10 The Progressive,11 Social Justice,12 First Things,13 Commonweal,14 and The Christian Century.15 Anthologized alongside America's most revered naturalists and conservationists,16 "one of the few contemporary authors worthy of mention in the same breath with that triumvirate of immortals, Thoreau, Muir and Leopold,"17 Berry's writings on stewardship and sustainability continue to inform the American struggle with ecology, consumption, and land use.18 Kimberly K. Smith's book, Wendell Berry and the Agrarian Tradition, examines Berry's "neglected writings" on the agrarian tradition and small farmers and "their critical roles in preserving not only the best of our humanity and sense of community but also our essential link to a sustainable agriculture."19 Environmental law scholar Eric Freyfogle has observed that "Berry's special contribution lies in his linkage of environmental decline with moral emptiness, in his refusal to fragment issues of land health from issues of human health, communal morality, and spiritual redemption."20 Thus, for many, Berry "sounds a responsive chord among readers who agree that the time has come to resist the ongoing stampede to promote the autonomous individual... ."21

Wendell Berry is a visionary. He foresees the tragedy of the "commonwealth," the sickness unto death of the agrarian economy, with its faith, knowledge, and affection for place and land; he mourns the passing of the small, agrarian community. He writes in an effort to preserve the commonwealth, to stave its death for as long as he can on the chance that it might someday be restored. For Berry, the health of the land, the wilderness, and the environment is inextricably bound to "the health of the surrounding economic landscapes and human communities,"22 and his writings aim to convince his audience that saving the commonwealth is necessary for saving the land, and vice versa.

Nevertheless, the environmental law community has made little attempt to analyze Berry's prescription for land use and property ownership. A closer look at his writings ultimately reveals that despite their great aesthetic and nostalgic appeal, Berry's proposals suffer some grave deficiencies. First, many of his land use policies, if adopted, would constitute a radical shift in our property law-perhaps a shift that Berry would welcome, but one that would likely have the unintended effect of destabilizing communities and estates in land rather than making them more secure.23 For example, implementing much of his property rights scheme would effectively turn all fee simple land ownership into a kind of life estate with a proscription on waste.24 Unfortunately, Berry does not account for the legal and economic upheaval that such a significant reform would create, and instead he writes of property owners holding the land in "trust" without ever sketching even the basic legal contours of his plan.

Beyond this, Berry embraces the merits of localized, "intimate" knowledge and warns against the corresponding dangers of remote and corporate land ownership.25 Yet his writings create the distinct impression that the most localized knowledge, the personal knowledge an individual owner exercises over his property, is not to be trusted and, in fact, should defer to the more-or-less "corporate" and distant interest of the commonwealth in the distribution and dispossession of land. Here, apparently, the community, not the person, knows best-a proposition that may be true, but one that Berry never squares with his preference for personal over corporate knowledge nor supports with an ounce of evidence.