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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
All of this potential for upheaval stands in stark contrast to Berry's call for stable, well-rooted communities that adhere to land and tradition out of a free affection.268 It is unclear whether Berry has considered those potentialities, or finds them too remote, or whether he believes the benefits of his proposals vastly outweigh them, but the legal and economic implications of his suggestions are too profound to overlook.
B. THE PROBLEM OF PROGNOSTICATION: THE IDIOT & THE SAOE
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A tension lies within Berry's trust and respect for the "local knowledge" of the landholder-by which he means "intimacy" or experiential knowledge-and his distrust for that same landholder's ability to make an "informed decision," or even to possess the best and most accurate knowledge for governing his own affairs.269 On the one hand, Berry seems to preach that local knowledge knows best, and that individuals, not remote bureaucracies or corporations, are best equipped to know the intricacies and details of a given problem and, therefore, that they are best equipped to find a solution. As such, perhaps Berry would agree with F.A. Hayek's understanding of "the basic fact that it is impossible for any man to survey more than a limited field, to be aware of the urgency of more than a limited number of needs."270 Thus, writes Hayek, "the ends about which he can be concerned will always be only an infinitesimal fraction of the needs of all men"271 But for Berry; that same limited, experiential, local knowledge that would seem to allow individuals to make their own well-informed decisions is insufficient to permit a free exchange of commodities or an unencumbered use of privately held land. That men are not angels, as James Madison observed, and therefore require the force of law is not disputed;272 but Berry's call for land use restrictions and his protectionist schemes aimed at preserving the commonwealth economy manifest a profound distrust for individual decisionmaking.
First, the idea that society, through law or commonwealth, must "democratically divide" property into small parcels and thereby limit the amount of land that one landholder may own strongly suggests that individuals are incapable of determining for themselves how and how much to purchase and maintain.273 That the individual owner might have the best knowledge of his own capacities or that he might have interests in and designs for the land that differ from Berry's seem not to count for much. It seems more important, in Berry's vision, that the commonwealth prevent individuals from acquiring what he considers too much land than that those individuals have the freedom to do so. Likewise, Berry's attempts to limit land use and deny private owners the right to "destroy" the land with strip mines or clear-cutting, for instance, implicitly suggest that someone or something other than the property-holder knows which uses are to be preferred and which are unacceptable. Furthermore, Berry's idea that the living hold the land in trust for the unborn,274 and that therefore future generations curtail the rights of the living, removes the decisionmaking power from the landholder and places it with someone more equipped to guard the rights of future landholders, namely, the State or, if Berry prefers, the commonwealth. Were individual landholders trusted to make decisions not only for themselves, but also in the interests of their heirs, the sort of legally imposed restriction that Berry proposes would be unnecessary to preserve those future rights and interests. Instead, Berry distrusts the landowner (whose interest in the land has already vested) to govern his land with an eye toward both the present and the future and would rather that the law dictate his present decisionmaking in order that he not harm the future.
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