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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
As with his proposal to limit land holdings to a modest and proper scale, Berry fails to articulate how he would ensure that there are people living on and from the land who are able and willing to care for it, or what legal policies regarding the transfer of property or estate taxes he would implement in order to make generations of families more secure in their properties. To be sure, creating or altering the legal constructs to enhance that generational security would seem rife with intricate complications and involve any number of laws relating to contracts, taxes, property, wills, trusts, and estates. section IV will briefly discuss several implications of implementing these first two elements of Berry's limited property rights scheme.209
What remains, however, is Berry's admonition that the private property right should not and-in his opinion-does not include the right to "destroy" property,210 nor to "impair or diminish our interest in it."211 For Berry, the idea of the commonwealth acknowledges "that we all have a common interest in the land, an interest that precedes our interest in private property."212 As evidence he argues that "[i]f we have the 'right to life,' as we have always supposed, then that right must stand upon the further right to air, water, food, clothing, and shelter."213 From this, Berry writes, "[i]t follows that every person exercising the right to hold private property has an obligation to secure to the rest of us the right to live from that property"214-a deduction reminiscent of Jacques Rousseau's understanding that "[i]n whatever manner the acquisition is made, the right which each individual has over his own property is always subordinate to the right which the community has over all; without which there would be no solidity in the social bond, nor any real force in the exercise of sovereignty."215 Thus, each landholder-whether public or private-must only use the land "in such a way as to not impair our rightful interest in it."216 That rightful interest of us all to live from the land, even land owned and used by others, means, as Berry correctly recognizes, that "[t]he present owners ... only have the land in trust, both for all the living who are dependent on it now, and for the unborn who will be dependent on it in time to come."217 According to Berry, this view represents the first of the "only two philosophies of land use" of which he is aware, namely, "that the earth is the Lord's ... [and] it belongs to those yet to be born as well as to those now living,"218 with the other, of course, being the philosophy of exploitation.219 From this perspective, the standards by which we determine if the land is "destroyed," or our collective interest "impaired," is fertility and the land's continued ability to produce for both the present and the future.220
Exactly what the land must be able to produce Berry seems reluctant to say, but it is reasonable to suppose that Berry means that the land must be able to produce and reproduce whatever is "appropriate" to it.221 He contrasts the fertile, healthy land of the "good farm" with the "desolation" and "industrial vandalism" of the strip mine as an example of the kind of activity that private property rights should not protect.222 Of the Kentucky strip mines, he writes:
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