Cultivating an Ecological Conscience: Essays from a Farmer Philosopher

Challenges Facing Philosophy as We Enter the Twenty-first Century: Reshaping the Way the Human Species Feeds Itself

290 Challenges Facing Philosophy as We Enter the Twenty-first Century Reshaping the Way the Human Species Feeds Itself If you destroy the economies of household and community, then you destroy the bonds of mutual usefulness and practical dependence without which the other bonds will not hold.1 —Wendell Berry I’d like to begin with a disclaimer. While my academic training is theology, my energies in the past twenty-five years have been devoted to farming. And while I have tried to emulate Thomas Jefferson’s vision of the ideal American farmer who is also a philosopher, I confess I have not risen to his standard of farming by day and reading the classics in Greek at night. So my observations about food and farming are more informed by the earthworm and plow than by Plato or Husserl. I can only hope that what I have to offer in some small way contributes to the legacy of Willard Eddy and to the important work that philosophy needs to undertake today. Anyone working to reshape the food system as we enter the twentyfirst century might be seen as working on a solution for which there is no problem. For decades now, most of our major food-related institutions, such as the USDA, FDA, the American Grocers Association, agricultural commodity groups, and even land-grant universities have assured us that our food system is the envy of the world. Our agriculture not only produces the safest, most nutritious food in the world, it does so more efficiently than any other. Americans now spend less than 10 percent of their earned This is a transcript of the talk Frederick Kirschenmann gave for the annual Willard O. Eddy Lecture, Colorado State University, Ft. Collins, Colorado, September 28, 2000. During his fifty-six years at Colorado State, Eddy founded the honors program and the philosophy department, and he is credited with promoting interdisciplinary study and international understanding. 291 Challenges Facing Philosophy income on food, less than any other country in the world. Supermarket shelves bulge with more food than we could hope to eat. Concern about potential food shortages in a world of rapidly expanding human population may be justified, but for the immediate future, farmers are oversupplying most key commodity markets to the point of depressing farm prices below their cost of production. So where is the problem? The growing number of problems related to our food and agriculture industry can perhaps be clustered into three groups: loss of goodwill, ecological degradation, and too many humans relative to the number of farmers. Loss of Good Will First, agriculture has a public perception problem. Throughout most of this continent’s history, agriculture was perceived as a public good. For Native Americans, who occupied this continent for almost fifteen thousand years before Europeans arrived, agriculture was perceived as a way to keep everyone in the village fed while disturbing nature as little as possible. For many tribes, the goal was to follow a code of conduct that satisfied both ancestors and descendants for at least seven generations. Agriculture was a critical part of that public trust. In the early 1600s, the Puritans arrived with a very different vision for agriculture. They considered it their divine mandate to “tame the wilderness and establish the Kingdom of God.” Clearing the trees and plowing the prairie to plant neat rows of corn was integral to their perceived destiny to create a new social order in this “new” land. That frame of mind still influences us today. It has remained, as Sidney Mead observed, “a constant part of the ideological structure of the nation.”2 While that peculiar mindset is part of the problem, the Puritans (and many since then) have perceived agriculture’s role in taming the wilderness to make room for God’s kingdom as a public good. For most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, agriculture was key to creating a democratic republic. A country of landholding farmers, beholden to no one, would ensure that everyone could speak their minds and vote their conscience. Thomas Jefferson was a principal promoter of this vision, and it was certainly in his mind when he signed the Louisiana Purchase . In the twentieth century, the industrial vision of agriculture focused on producing food and fiber with a dramatically reduced labor force, to “free” as many citizens as possible to engage in other professional pursuits 292 Cultivating an Ecological...