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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
Thus, private and local landholders, not public servants or governmental bureaucrats, engender the kind of care and respect for the land that Berry desires. Indeed, public ownership, with its inevitably remote oversight and disproportionately large holdings, would seem to manifest the same objectionable characteristics as corporate ownership. Therefore, well aware of the "dangers to the common wealth and health inherent in private property rights," Berry nevertheless has "too little faith in the long-term efficacy of public stewardship."197 He finds it difficult "to imagine the conditions under which highly competent and responsible public stewardship of land that is in use might be maintained for many generations and through the inevitable changes of politics and economics."198
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This concern for the commonwealth and the productive use of the land over "many generations" informs Berry's second condition upon private property, namely, that property may be privately held so long as families remain secure in their properties for several generations.199 As with his concern for limited appropriation, Berry's second principle for private ownership lies within the seven rules of land use and depends upon Berry's supposition that for land to be used properly people "must feel that the land belongs to them, that they belong to it," and that this "mutuality of belonging" is "unthreatened."200 From this it follows that people must "reasonably expect to live on it as long as they live," and, furthermore, that their heirs will likewise "live on it as long as they live."201 Thus, he concludes "that any public program to preserve land or produce food is hopeless if it does not tend to right the balance between numbers of people and acres of land, and to encourage long-term, stable connections between families and small farms."202 Such an effort, he concedes, has never succeeded in this country, and Berry laments the relative rarity of America's second and third generation farms.203 It is "our crying need," he writes, "for an agriculture in which the typical farm would farmed by the third generation of the same family."204 Those farms would provide that prescribed sense of "mutual belonging" as families would pass on and inherit land to and from loved ones, instilling a deeper respect for and continuity with the land and its ecosystem.
Unable to "say exactly what kind of agriculture that would be," however, Berry speculates that an agriculture abiding by this principle would enhance "certain good possibilities."205 Considering six of those possibilities, he finds the most significant to be the "lengthening of memory" that would reduce the land's "cost of a trial-and-error education for every new owner."206 Berry suggests that within such agriculture, "the land would not be overworked to pay for itself at full value with every new owner"; that land owners would "take good care of the land, not for the sake of... 'the future' or 'posterity,' but out of particular love for living children and grandchildren"; that barns and fences and "human establishments]" would be well-built and more permanent, thereby reducing waste and reconstruction costs; that families would develop the "concept of enough," and responsibly determine how much land, livestock, power, and produce are enough for a given farm and community; and, finally, such agriculture would foster a local culture that "would begin in work and love."207 Although, as Berry asks rhetorically, "Who could say what that would be?"208
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