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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
To further the natural membership of the community party the land "should be divided into small parcels among a lot of small owners."114 True to his Jeffersonian ideals, Berry believes that "a large population of small property holders offers the best available chance for local cultural adaptation and good stewardship of the land-provided that the property holders are secure, legally and economically, in their properties."115 Those same small, private landholders are thus ecologically justified so long as those "landed properties are democratically divided and properly scaled, and if family security in these properties can be preserved over a number of generations."116 In this way,
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[n]ot only will we make more apparent to successive generations the necessary identity between the health of human communities and the health of local ecosystems but we will also give people the best motives for caretaking and we will call into service the necessary local intelligence and imagination. Such an arrangement would give us the fullest possible assurance that our forests and farmlands would be used by people who know them best and care the most about them.117
This is not to say, however, that Berry's support of private property rights is unqualified. Indeed, he is "an uneasy believer" in private property in large part became "this right can be understood as the right to destroy property''-a right, he says, that does not exist.118 Private property comes replete with the "obligation to secure to the rest of us the right to live from that property," which is to say, private property can only be used in ways that do "not impair or diminish our rightful interest in it."119 But the fact that the landowner may not destroy or diminish private property out of concern or respect for society's rightful interest imposes "a concurrent obligation on the part of society as a whole ... to make the landowner able to afford not only to use the land but also to care properly for it."120 It is here that we have made our "grossest error."121
Whereas private property is afforded a place in the commonwealth as the most effective means of securing and caring for the land, Berry argues that the current "doctrine of private property ... acknowledges no commonwealth."122 By this, Berry means that if "landowners ... are accountable to their fellow citizens for their work, their products and their stewardship, then these landowners ... must be granted an equitable membership in the economy."123 And this, he says, Americans have failed to do. Instead, we have "stood an ancient pyramid on its tip," creating "an enormous population of urban consumers dependent on a tiny population of rural producers," whereby the natural members of the community party, the small and local landholders, are "poorly paid for their work and not paid at all for their stewardship."124 That pyramid's inversion, and the means by which it might be righted, are discussed below.
B. KILLING THE COMMONWEALTH
Berry's essay The Idea of a Local Economy125 provides a relatively straightforward explanation of how he understands the origins of the current "environmental crisis"126 and demise of the commonwealth. The crisis, he argues, has arisen "because the human household or economy is in conflict at almost every point with the household of nature."127 This conflict stems from our "economic oversimplification" by which "most people in our country ... have given proxies to the corporations to produce and provide all of their food, clothing, and shelter."128 Our increasing tendency to delegate the provision of our most basic needs to others-whether corporations or governments-erodes the commonwealth that Berry considers so vital to a healthy and sustainable environment. Just as the commonwealth rests upon four interconnected pillars, so too does Berry seem to recognize four interrelated causes of its death: corporations, the free market, globalization, and industrialization.129 To Berry, any attempt to correct the environmental crisis without addressing the economic assumptions underlying our "thoughtlessly given proxies" and the globalization of a free market economy dictated by corporate industry is bound to fail.130
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