Wendell berry, what are people for?

Wendell berrys essays What are People For? and The Work of Local Culture twain examine the conjure uping profession, which has in recent years been demeaned as the untaught population falls and large agribusiness replaces smaller family farms. Berry argues in both pieces that solid ground is non an outdated lifestyle, but a inevitable profession. In What Are People For? Berry discusses the exodus from farm to metropolis since World War II, attributing it to failures in agriculture.However, he disagrees with claims that failed farmers deserve their lot, or that the farm population has a large surplus he comments that It is apparently open to say that there are too many farmers, if one is non a farmer (123). Berry maintains that our farm get down no longer has generous caretakers (124) and that the uncouth exodus has harmed both urban and coarse America alike. agribusiness has not only harmed small farmers but overly the crud itself, and displaced rural people are not often absorbed into the urban economy.Berry sees kingdom as a necessary occupation, which is needed even to a greater extent(prenominal) desperately in light of soil erosion and other damage do to fertile agricultural land. It is not simply a job or lifestyle, but a crucial stewardship of nature. Farming is a skill, and well-managed farms and healthy soil are proof agribusiness reliance on machinery and destructive methods whitethorn be modern but ultimately counterproductive. What people are for, he implies, is to work and maintain the land.In The Work of Local Culture, Berry makes a more developed argument in favor of human stewardship of farmland and claims that a good local culture of farm people is required to arrange this important work. He sees farmers not simply as a rural dweller, but as skilled professionals better able to manage agricultural land than big businesses, beca role they possess intimidate, detailed association of the land, from the weather to its native processes and its smallest attributes. Land is becoming rapidly despoiled, and only knowledgeable farmers can assuage this danger.Practically speaking, he writes, human society has no work more important than this (155). Farmers form the local culture, which he assigns as the history of the use of the place and the knowledge of how the place may be lived in and utilize (166). It is based less on money than on community, shared knowledge and experiences, and rapidly vanishing skills of managing the land. The local culture can and must educate others in how to maintain and use fertile land, generate its avow economy, and maintain its sense datum of community.Farming is more than a job, but also an important part of a rural way of life that is vanishing rapidly (and should not). Himself a farmer, Berry sees acres not simply in economic terms, but almost as an art or craft, requiring skills and attention to more than just economics. He does not pit city against country and argue for the latters transcendency instead, he sees their interdependence and spends relatively little time condemning urbanites.He also thinks rural dwellers are themselves partly to blame they connive in their own ruin . . . and allow their economic and social standards to be set by television and salesmen and outside experts (157). Berrys essays convey the importance of farming as a vocation devoted to caring for the land and providing a butt upon which society is based. It involves more than simply growing food or raising livestock it forms the foundation of rural communities and entails important skills required to happen land productive.In his view, agribusiness and modern economics are no diversify for the skills of a traditional farmer equipped with intimate knowledge of the land He does not disparage cities or modernity, preferring instead to firmly define and defend the agrarian way of life as the weakened foundation of American society a foundation that urgently needs rep air. Berry, Wendell. What Are People For? San Francisco North Point Press, 1990.