Response to Randi Rashkover (2): This Land is
Your Land
Willie Young,
Endicott College
Randi Rashkover's essay raises an important
question regarding the relationship of prophetic
discourse to issues regarding land. Do the prophetic
calls for justice for the poor, in invoking the
jubilee, necessarily forget the role of
resting/restoring the land? And how should one think
about land, in relation to issues of justice?
In reading her essay, I kept wondering: what is
the connection between restoring the land and
democracy? What are the political dimensions of a
liturgical conception of land? One entry into these
questions is the central place that land occupies in
the work of Wendell Berry, as it figures as a thread
linking creation, democracy, and community. His
approach to caring for the land, and his emphasis on
local economy, both lend significance to what it
might mean to restore the land, in the context of the
jubilee; moreover, such restoration is crucial for
his conception of democracy, enabling alternative
approaches to questions of racial and economic
justice.
I mention Berry, as well, because his work
occupies a distinctive place in discussions of
traditionalism and democracy. While Berry is
traditionalist—like Hauerwas, Milbank, and
MacIntyre—Jeffrey Stout praises his work
highly—declaring The Unsettling of America the
"best book on environmental ethics," and The
Hidden Wound a central work on race in
America.[1] In this light, relating
his work on land to Randi's liturgical re-figuring of
land will indirectly situate her scriptural reasoning
in relation to Stout's pluralistic approach to
democratic discourse.
1. The Land as Gift: Cultivating
humanity
If, as Rashkover suggests, one considers the land
as gift, then this requires recognizing that the land
is entrusted to one. It is given, but not simply for
whatever use one chooses. Rather, land is given to
serve God—and, in Genesis, for stewardship. This
suggests that our fulfillment lies in a certain
relation to the land, which is neither outright
possession (which would be exploitive and
destructive), nor simply selling for profit, nor a
simply "scenic" preservation that would not be
integrated with serving human goods. The proper use,
then, requires that the land can be given to others.
A gift, to rephrase Derrida, does not have a single
recipient, but one must receive it as if one is to
give it again.
However, as a gift, the land also has its own
integrity—its history, composition, and vitality. It
is a particular place, with its own unique features.
To fail to recognize these fails to appreciate the
gift, and can prevent continued transmissions. It is
only through diligent care for the land, practiced
over time and perhaps over generations, that one
could come to know this history, and see the land
display its integrity. But, moreover, to see that the
land has a history and life that go beyond its human
use, points us toward the Sabbath of resting the
land, and letting it be restored and healed.
2. Resting the Land
If the jubilee celebrates the Sabbath, and thus
serves as a period of rest, what does this mean for
resting the land? For whose sake does it rest? Does
it rest from supporting and sustaining humanity, or
so it may glorify God?
In Berry's work, resting the land draws together a
number of practices. One rests the land through crop
rotation, preventing the soil's exhaustion. One does
not overproduce, in the name of economic security and
low urban food prices, using practices which strip
more bushels of topsoil from the land per acre than
the land yields in produce. Resting the land,
moreover, requires attention to its patterns,
rhythms, and idiosyncracies, so as to let it produce
what it can "because that is what the land can
produce at the least cost for the longest
time."[2]
Another form of resting the land is to allow its
"wildness" to grow, permitting spaces in which the
land's vitality can flourish free of human
use.[3] Such resting of the
land, as part of the life cycle of a farm, contrasts
strongly with the modern practice of agribusiness.
Nowhere is the contrast stronger than in Berry's
novel, Remembering, which chronicles a
(largely autobiographical) journey from the thickets
of modern agriculture to a return to caring for the
land, and to an alternative vision of human
community. Thus, resting the land may be a part of
the jubilee, and recognizing the intrinsic goodness
of creation. But, again, what is the connection with
democracy?
Being Neighborly: Local Economies
The question of the survival of the family farm and
the farm family is one version of the question of
who will own the country, which is, ultimately, the
question of who will own the people. Shall the
usable property of our country be democratically
divided, or not? If many people do not own the
usable property, then they must submit to the few
who do own it. They cannot eat or be sheltered or
clothed except in submission...To renounce the
principle of democratic property, which is the only
basis of democratic liberty, in exchange for
specious notions of efficiency or the economics of
the so-called free market is a tragic folly.
[4]
One of the crucial features of the jubilee is, as
Rashkover has pointed out, the return of the land to
its owners. Those who have sold land, to get out of
debt, or because of poverty, are thus restored to
ownership. It is, then, as Robert Gibbs pointed out
in a
previous issue of this journal, a vision of a
community in which families reside on independent
plots of land, and this is central to the community
as a whole.
In Berry's work, such a vision of community is
inseparable from restoring the land: only through
maintaining family farms, of an appropriate scale,
can one give the land the care and attention needed
to rest it properly. Thus, farms of 80-100 acres—as
opposed to 2,000 on modern industrial farms—are of
the appropriate size, and he chronicles how they
support families in ways that avoid debt and provide
for rich community life (at an admitted economic
cost). On such a scale, twenty-five families could
farm efficiently the land currently farmed by one
family, distributing the property of the area far
more widely than is currently the case.
As the quote above indicates, it is in such
property ownership that Berry sees the possibility of
an enriched democratic discourse. Without it, the
Jeffersonian politics which sees each family as
independent, on some level, from broader economic
forces, would fail. Local economies which served
their communities, and become self-sufficient through
their crop diversity, would be more resistant to
economic pressures which have driven many families
out of farming, and which press industrialization in
ways that (Berry argues) may render human labor, and
thus humans, irrelevant. On small plots, citizens
could have the freedom and resources to speak up and
resist forces that threaten to overwhelm all values
other than the almighty dollar. Local economies
create the material conditions for democratic
discourse, as power and property are not concentrated
in the hands of a few.
Moreover, though its sentimentality must be
acknowledged, this vision of small farms is also a
vision of neighborliness. When Berry describes the
work on small farms, it is work that is often done
together, with neighbors helping one another. Local
economies are fundamentally noncompetitive, based on
cooperation rather than competition. The shared
work—shared between neighbors, between races, and
between men and women, create bonds of solidarity, as
well as occasions for conversation. Technology, as
part of the competitive economy, divides workers from
one another—rendering some surplus to
requirements—and divides people from the land itself,
preventing the engagement that enables a considered
respect for the land itself.
These are just some preliminary thoughts on the
significance that the land may hold for prophetic
discourse. Does the jubilee call for an environmental
ethic? Does it ask us to rethink labor and land,
along with practices of lending, as part of the
ordering, or economy, of creation? The questions
raised by Berry's vision are not, I think, the
questions many would initially associate with a
scriptural reasoning approach to questions of land.
But, in thinking through the material, economic
conditions with which democratic discourse may rise
or fall, it highlights other aspects of this issue
which demand consideration, and I'd like them to have
a hearing.
I would add that there are clearly a number of
democratic issues which the communities held up by
Berry failed to address—most notably, as he himself
would admit, the issue of race. And yet, here,
perhaps scriptural reasoning, as a modification of a
traditional practice, provides a suitable analogy for
re-visioning communities. In SR, we are all "landed"
on our own traditions—in proximity to one another,
and working together, and yet still fundamentally
independent in how we order our worlds. We may learn
from one another, and the shared labor has its own
value. Perhaps, then, the challenge becomes not
simply to have local economies, but to have
religiously and culturally diversified local
economies, so that the bonds of work and solidarity
described above would extend to address problems left
unresolved. That is a far larger issue than can be
tackled here, and it really can't be addressed by one
person. But perhaps these issues provide a path
towards such discussions.
ENDNOTES
[1] Jeffrey Stout,
Democracy and Tradition, p. 134.
[2] "A Good Farmer of the Old
School," in Home Economics (San Francisco:
North Point Press, 1987), 158.
[3] See "Preserving Wildness,"
in Home Economics, and "Margins" in The
Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture
(New York: Avon, 1977).
[4] "In Defense of the Family
Farm," in Home Economics, p. 165.
Title Page |
Archive
© 2006, Society for Scriptural
Reasoning
|
