Berry on Community

I am convinced that a lack of community causes many problems in our culture. My thoughts on this are evolving, but have been heavily influenced lately by Wendell Berry, an author from Kentucky who was recommended to me by a friend because of Berry's interest in the local community.

Berry takes my concerns about lack of community a step further than I have been able to take them, and he provides a framework of language that is quite helpful. I do not see Berry as infallible on the subject. Actually, I disagree with many of his perspectives emphatically. But he has propelled my thinking to a different level, and for that I am incredibly grateful.

I will post two or three blogs on his essay, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, soon. In the meantime, here is an excerpt from this essay that I love.

...community is a locally understood interdependence of local people, local culture, local economy, and local nature.(Community of course, is an idea that can extend itself beyond the local, but it only does so metaphorically. The idea of a national or global community is meaningless apart from the realization of local communities.)

A community identifies itself by an understood mutuality of interests. But it lives and acts by the common virtues of trust, goodwill, forbearance, self-restraint, compassion, and forgiveness. If it hopes to continue on as a community it will wish to--and will have to--encourage respect for all its members, human and natural. It will encourage respect for all stations and occupations. Such a community has the power--not invariably but as a rule--to enforce decency without litigation. It has the power, that is, to influence behavior. And it exercises this power not by coercion or violence, but by teaching the young and by preserving stories and songs that tell (among other things) what works and does not work in a given place." 

 More soon...

(Thanks to Elena for the recommendation on this essay by the way. I am grateful.)

Community: The problem of abstractness

Failing to understand the origin of the food that we eat is more than just a health hazard, it's an economic problem.

As the cost of food rises around the world, consumers are beginning to search for alternatives to the grocery store. The search through farmers markets leads us to an interesting discovery; the land that we live on cannot grow all of the food that we eat.

Believe it or not, the salmon from the grocery store do not swim in the lakes of Missouri, nor does sugar cane grow in Colorado, nor coffee anywhere in North America. In fact, the land directly surrounding most of our cities could not sustain the foods that the cities eat.

This situation not only creates an abstractness to the food that we eat, in that we know very little about our foods quality, but it also leaves us without an alternative source. If we knew 3 dairy farmers, we would have an alternative source to milk. As it stands, we only know the grocery stores, leaving us very few options if the price of milk were to change like the price of petroleum.

I have no reason to believe that this will cause any immediate problems, but the abstractness increases the risk. My thoughts on this are still developing. More to come.