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

III. SAVING THE COMMONWEALTH

"All right, " thought the Devil. "We will have a tussle.

I'll give you land enough; and by means of that land

I will get you into my power."

-Leo Tolstoy, How Much Land Does a Man Need?177

Despite an underlying pessimism for the prospects of saving the commonwealth and the environment, Berry remains hopeful that "[o]ur destructiveness has not been, and it is not, inevitable."178 He urges a change of cultural perspective, economic habits, and moral allegiance in order to find "our way into health."179 Stemming from his conviction that "[h]umans don't have to live by destroying the sources of then- life," Berry believes "[a]ll of us ... can be moved by love of our land to rise above the greed and contempt of our land's exploiters."180 In some respects, it should already be clear that much of how Berry sees this shift and the land's salvation lies within his agrarian ideals of the commonwealth and its local knowledge and affection for place that serve as an antidote to the current globalized, corporate, industrial, and free market economy. But Berry recognizes that "we will have to do more than merely change our minds. We will have to implement a different kind of education and a different kind of economy."181 In offering that "different economy" as an alternative to the industrialized society and the competition of the free market, however, Berry's agrarian approach also prescribes a cure for the dying commonwealth with profound implications for America's long-held notions of private property rights, economies-of-scale, and the current trend toward free trade and surplus production. This section explores Berry's prescriptions for saving the commonwealth: first, through a re-working of our traditional and legal understandings of private property, and second, through his protectionist policies intended to guard the local economy against the encroachments of corporations and international markets.

A. PRIVATE PROPERTY & THE RULES OF LAND USE

With the small acreage "good farm" providing the "model of good land use,"182 Berry's agrarianism depends upon "a way of thought based on land" and an economy that requires the land to be "divided among many owners and users."183 He hales the "small [landholder who maintains a significant measure of economic self-determination on a small acreage" as the "central figure" of the agrarian scheme and the viable alternative to industrialization.184 Berry is skeptical that our current property rights doctrine can adequately care for the land,185 a doctrine that views land in purely economic terms and allows property owners to "destroy" and divide land essentially as they please. To Berry, "A man who would value a piece of land strictly according to its economic worth is precisely as crazy, or as evil, as the man who would make a whore of his wife."186 Thus, he proposes what he considers to be "the rules of land use."187

Berry's rules of land use include limiting private property rights, justifying them only insofar as the property is "democratically divided and properly scaled," with "the family secur[e] in these properties ... over several generations,"188 and only so long as the right does not include the "right to destroy property"189 or to "diminish our rightful interest in it."190 Given the private landholder's role in preserving the commonwealth, these conditions in Berry's property rights theory are worth considering.