A Return to the Local: You Stay Home Too.

• Position: Interview

Wendell Berry, a Kentucky farmer, essayist, and poet, argues that the basis of a sustainable economy is the vitality of local economies, which are fundamentally different from the omnipresent global system now swallowing up local enterprise all over the world. Some of his comments offer arresting challenges to prevailing beliefs, and we excerpt a few of them here. The questions Berry addresses (boldface type) were suggested by comments he made in a recent speech:

As the world's growing environmental crisis becomes more publicized, is there a risk that it is also being too simplified?

The "environmental crisis" has happened because the human household or economy is in conflict at almost every point with the household of nature. We have built our household on the assumption that the natural household is simple and can be simply used. We have assumed increasingly over the last five hundred years that nature is merely a supply of "raw materials," and that we may safely possess those materials by taking them.... And so we will be wrong if we attempt to correct what we perceive as "environmental" problems without correcting the economic oversimplification that caused them.

What do you mean by "economic oversimplification?"

What has happened is that most people in [the developed world] have given proxies to the corporations to produce and provide all of their food, clothing, and shelter. Moreover, they are rapidly giving proxies to corporations or governments to provide entertainment, education, child care, care of the sick and elderly, and many other kinds of "service" that once were carried on informally and inexpensively by individuals or households or communities....

The trouble with this is that a proper concern for nature and our use of nature must be practiced, not by our proxy-holders, but by ourselves.... The "environmental crisis," in fact, can be solved only if people, individually and in their communities, recover responsibility for their thoughtlessly given proxies.

Doesn't the proxy given to corporations require them to be responsive to the values of consumers they sell to, as communicated to them through the market?

We live, as we must sooner or later recognize, in an era of sentimental economics and, consequently, of sentimental politics. Sentimental communism holds in effect that everybody and everything should suffer for the good of "the many" who, though miserable in the present, will be happy in the future for exactly the same reasons that they are miserable in the present.

Sentimental capitalism is not so different from sentimental communism as the corporate and political powers claim. Sentimental capitalism holds in effect that everything small, local, private, personal, natural, good, and beautiful must be sacrificed in the interest of the "free market" and the great corporations, which will bring unprecedented security and happiness to "the many"--in, of course, the future....

Communism and "free-market" capitalism both are modern versions of oligarchy. In their...