The World-Ending Fire, is a phrase Wendell Berry uses to characterise the dominant and all prevailing juggernaut of corporate industrialism. This book is a compilation of a lifetimes writing of articles, essays and talks about the many ways that the 'big is always better' economic philosophy behaves as an insensitive, fundamentally cruel and destructive force. Wiping lives, livelihoods and now threatening to remove life itself off the earth.
His focus in terms of a solution always returns to agriculture. How we treat the land, the way we grow our food being the fundamental indicator for what is good or bad in our society. Wendell Berry constantly extols the role of maintaining a sense of belonging to a place and working the land in a more synchronous relationship with what nature provides. Under standing natures limits and not living beyond them. To cease using machine metaphors to describe yourself, your psychology and what it is you do. Its not helpful to conceive a living being or nature in this way, but it is indicative of how progressive industrialism conceptions have entered the lexicon of our language.
The problem for all of us is that we are deeply enmeshed and dependent upon the lifestyle that corporate industrialism provides. But we are cushioned and left unaware of the true cost of it. We have been brought up no longer knowing where the food on our plates comes from. What the damage to nature and to other peoples lives is. We are taught to actually not care, to become insensitive to the effect maintaining our western lifestyle has upon others and global ecology.
My interest whilst reading The World-Ending Fire wavered depending on the Chapter. I flipped from feeling engaged to boredom a lot. Berry is thorough, rarely succinct and to the point. In short he can go on and on at length. Its in the nature of compilations as opposed to the singlular vision of a composed treatise, there can be a degree of repetitious argument. Going over the same or similar ground. There are, however, some superbly argued essays here The Way of Ignorance, The Total Economy and In Distrust of Movements, are three personal favourites.
Berry strongly states that there should be no big solutions to our current malaise. Its all down to us. There is the danger we don't as individuals realise quite how radical the change required of us is, and merely tinker with the existing economics of our lives and not think it through or carry it out thoroughly enough.
In the essay The Future of Agriculture he suggests seven things to do :-
1) Don't work or think on a heroic scale, but on a scale proper to our limited abilities. We must not break things we cannot fix. There is no justification, ever, for permanent ecological damage.
2) Abandon the homeopathic delusion that the damages done by industrialisation can be corrected by more industrialisation.
3) Quit solving our problems by 'moving on' Stay put, learn where we are geographically, historically and ecologically.
4) Learn the sources and costs of our own economic lives.
5) Give up the notion we are too good to do our own work and clean up our own messes. Work done for us by wage slavery or enslaving nature is unacceptable.
6) By way of correction, make local, locally adapted economies, based on local nature, local sunlight, local intelligence and local work
7) Understand that these measures are radical. They go to the root of our problem. They cannot be performed for us by any expert, political leader, or corporation.
CARROT REVIEW 5/8
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