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.
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