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

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

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3. Globalization

Recognizing that the "idea of a global 'free market' economy, despite its obvious moral flaws and its dangerous political weaknesses, is now the ruling orthodoxy of the age,"156 Berry condemns the idea as nothing more than "sentimentality ... based in turn upon a fantasy."157 He rejects the global free market's underlying proposition "that the great corporations, in 'freely' competing with one another for raw materials, labor, and marketshare, will drive each other indefinitely, not only toward greater 'efficiencies' of manufacture, but also toward higher bids for raw materials and labor and lower prices to consumers."158 Indeed, Berry opposes the "ideal of competition" in as much as it "always implies, and in fact requires, that any community must be divided into a class of winners and a class of losers."159 Thus, he argues that instead of producing economic and social security, free market globalization threatens the commonwealth and stands poised as an inherent "enemy to the natural world, to human health and freedom, to industrial workers, and to farmers and others in the land-use economies ... ."160

More Articles of Interest: Response to Berry - Letters to the Editor; Stubbornness counts - Editor's Note - writer Wendell Berry - Brief Article -...; Good work: learning about ministry from Wendell Berry; Local Knowledge in the Age of Information1; The obligation of care: "saving the planet" means sticking with a place - and...

In Conservation and Local Economy, Berry describes this enemy threat and its resulting impact:

As people leave the community or, remaining in the place, drop out of the local economy, as the urban-industrial economy more and more usurps the local economy, as the scale and speed of work increase, care declines. As care declines, the natural supports of the human economy and community also decline, for whatever is used is used destructively.

....

... And now this great corporate enterprise, thoroughly uprooted and internationalized, is moving toward the exploitation of the whole world under the shibboleths of "globalization," "free trade," and "new world order."... The aim is simply and unabashedly to bring every scrap of productive land and every worker on the planet under corporate control.161

This threatening aim of the global economy-an economy "which is the property of a few supranational corporations"162-has now been "institutionalized in the World Trade Organization, which was set up ... to rule international trade on behalf of the 'free market'-which is to say on behalf of the supranational corporations-and to overrule, in secret sessions, any national or regional law that conflicts with the 'free market.'"163 However it may now be institutionalized, Berry resists the global economy as one "based upon cheap long-distance transportation" that serves as "the basis of the idea that regions and nations should abandon any measure of economic self-sufficiency in order to specialize in production for export of the few commodities or the single commodity that can be most cheaply produced."164 Thus, Berry concludes that "[wjhatever may be said for the 'efficiency' of such a system, its result (and I assume, its purpose) is to destroy local production capacities, local diversity, and local economic independence."165 In effect, the global free market assaults the local commonwealth and destroys its local economy and livelihood.

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

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

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