Wendell Berry on the Problem of Private Land Ownership

"We share a common health....

....If we have the "right to life" as we have always supposed, then that right must stand upon the further right to air, water, food, clothing, and shelter.

It follows that every person exercising the right to hold private property has an obligation to secure to the rest of us the right to live from that property...an obligation to use it in such a way as to not impair or diminish our rightful interest in it.

 But --and here is the catch-- that obligation on the part of the landowner implies a concurrent obligation on the part of society as a whole. If we give our proxy to the landowner to use-- and as is always implied, to take care of -- the land on our behalf, then we are obliged to make the landowner able to afford not only to use the land but also to care properly for it.

This is where the grossest error of our civilization shows itself. In giving a few farmers our proxies to produce food in the public behalf for very little economic return we have also given them our proxies to care for the land in the public behalf for no economic return at all. This is our so-called cheap-food policy, which is in fact an antifarming policy, an antifarmer policy, and an antiland policy.

We hold the land under a doctrine of private property that in practice acknowledges no common health."

---from Another Turn of the Crank.  Essays by Wendell Berry.

Expanding Ethics to Include Animals?

Source.

Tonight is another night in a hotel room somewhere in a small town in New Mexico, bordered by train tracks and highway. I hear calves lulling in the trailer parked back of my bathroom window, and I can hear the train long after it is gone, singing on tracks miles up the mountain.




The sun sinks low over green hills and high cumulus clouds tilt and light on fire and everything tumbles into purple ashes until the stars come out. The cows say moo over and over again. There are ten each in the upper and lower half trailer lined with hay; they look innocent in a manger scene.




In the ecologist literature (article by David Barash) I read that we are all one, that every atom in me was once in other creatures, and every action I take affects everything else. Of course, we all know this from interacting with other humans, but the key to understanding our current culture is that we don't (yet) interact with rain like we do with a human.




We listen to weather forecasts of the rain's behavior, what experts think it might do. No one does that for other people. We know other people are too complex for 3-dimensional weekend forecasts. Or, take earthquakes. Great beyond comparison to a human body, but in scale of effect like a governor or a president or a war, maybe. Sure its possible to speculate about their arrival, but when they do arrive only their presence matters. Or cherry blossom season, when everyone goes outside to say hello to mother nature, a homecoming parade for a season and a life-force, back after a long sojourn to more southern climes. The Navajo consider it extremely rude to not greet the rising sun. Would you ignore your own grandmother?




"If we see individuals, we don't see that they are only intersections of an infinite tapestry of connections. So ecologists do not speak of the bear or the forest, but the bear-forest ecosystem."