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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
The central figure of agrarian thought has invariably been the small owner or small holder who maintains a significant measure of economic self-determination on a small acreage. The scale and independence of such holdings imply two things that agrarians see as desirable: intimate care in the use of the land, and political democracy resting upon the indispensable foundation of economic democracy.65
Depicting the agrarian ideal, and in contrast to the modern industrial economy,66 Berry offers the "good farm."67 By "farm," Berry makes clear he means
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a place that is used diversely and conservingly, that grows animals as well as plants, that is of a size appropriate to the needs and the available energy of a family ... where you put up hay and harvest grain for feed ... and where you have chores to do ....68
The good farm "preserves the land in production without diminishing its ability to produce."69 It is measured by a fertility that "preserves the interest of the future"70 and provides a "model of good land use."71 Agrarianism, epitomized in the good farm, "proposes an economy of necessities rather than an economy based upon anxiety, fantasy, luxury, and idle wishing. It proposes the independent, free-standing citizenry that Jefferson thought to be the surest safeguard of democratic liberty."72 But most significantly, the agrarian economy "proposes an agriculture based upon intensive work, local energies, care, and long-living communities-that is, to state the matter from a consumer's point of view: a dependable, long-term food supply."73
To illustrate, Berry describes Tom and Ginny Marsh's "excellent homestead."74 A quintessential "good farm," the Marsh home has "considered the questions of scale, balance, proportion, unity, [and] utility;"75 "[n]othing is too big or too little;"76 "balance has been the aim or standard;"77 and "[t]he designing of their place has been inseparable from their living in it."78 These qualities comprise
an exemplary subsistence farm. Of [the Marshes'] 12Î/2 acres, all but four are wooded. Two of the acres are in pasture. The rest of the space is taken up by buildings, garden, berry beds, and fruit trees. Because their acreage is so small, the Marshes have had to work carefully at the problems of design and scale. Everything had to be put in the right place or it would be in the way of something else. And it had to be the right size or they would run out of room.79
Ideally, then, the excellent homestead is where "[t]he natural character of the place has been respected, and yet it has been made to accommodate gracefully the various necessities of a family's life and work."80 The agrarian economy, however, represents more than an ideal in Berry's thinking, and goes beyond presenting an alternative, countervailing idea to the industrial megaplex. It is an imperiled cornerstone in Berry's commonwealth that aims toward "generosity and a well-distributed and safeguarded abundance,"81 and "it alone can promise us the continuity of attention and devotion without which the human life of the earth is impossible."82
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