Title: Another Turn of the Crank
Author: Wendell Berry
Date: 1995
Publisher: Counterpoint / Publishers Group West
ISBN: 1-887178-28-7
Length: 109 pages
Quote: “[C]onsumers...are beginning to see that a system of food production that is dependent on massive applications of drugs and chemicals cannot, by definition, produce ‘pure food.’”
The thing I can’t understand about Wendell Berry is why his books seem to be better known in Washington, D.C., than in my home town. I suspect prejudice may be involved. Virginians who didn’t go to Berea College can form a habit of looking down on Kentucky. Big mistake. By way of correction, I’ll disclose that Berry is one of the few contemporary thinkers (as distinct from reporters) George Peters used to read regularly; when I miss working on his FacTapes, I read Berry. It would be hard to think seriously about the role of farming and hand crafts in the twenty-first century without reading Berry.
Wendell Berry wrote many different kinds of things: biography, fiction, poetry, literary criticism, and practical essays about his farm in Henry County that used to be published in Organic Gardening & Farming; but Another Turn of the Crank is a sort of quick summary of his philosophy.
It’s a Green book, of course. Finding myself frequently out of step with people in the Green Party, I’d even go so far as to say that Another Turn of the Crank is, for me, the Green book. I’ve written about Sick Greens, Bitter Greens, Hazy Greens, Poison Greens, Fluorescent Greens...this book defines what I’d call True Green ideas at their best. Except for the last one, the points made in this book repeat ideas Berry has written about at greater length in other books, but this is the book that pulls his politics and philosophy into a coherent order:
1. “Nothing that I have written here should be construed as an endorsement of either of our political parties as they presently function...The ‘conservatives’ believe that an economy that favors its richest and most powerful participants will yet somehow serve the best interest of everybody. The ‘liberals’ believe just as irrationally that a merely competitive economy, growing always larger in scale and controlled by fewer and fewer people, can be corrected by extending government charity to the inevitable victims: the dispossessed, the unrepresented, and the unemployed.” (Pages ix-x.) “Communists and capitalists are alike in their contempt for country people...Moreover, the old opposition of country and city, which was never useful...is, in fact, damaging to everybody involved.” (Pages 15-16.) Berry predicts that the real political issue of the twenty-first century will be between the current powerful support for an unsustainable global economy and the efforts of small farmers to preserve a sustainable local economy.
2. “A reader would also be in error who concluded, from this book’s reiterated wish to restore local life by meas of local economies, that it is ‘antigovernment.’ On the contrary, one of the fundamental purposes of these essays is to serve the cause of democratic government as established by the Constitution...[C]entral planning is of a piece with absentee ownership and does not work...The proper role of a government is to protect its citizens and its communities against...economic conquest just as much as conquest by overt violence.” (Pages x-xi.)
3. “I believe that for many reasons—political, ecological, and economic—the best intelligence and talent should be at work and at home everywhere in the country. And therefore, my wishes for our schools are opposite to those of the present-day political parties.” (Page xi.)
4. “Now that the issue of sustainability has arisen so urgently...we can see that the correct agricultural agenda following World War II would have been to continue and refine the already established connection between our farms and the sun...Instead, the adopted agenda called for a shift...to the expensive, filthy, and limited energy of the fossil fuels...It called also for the displacement of nearly the entire farming population.” (Page 2) “[F]armers...must learn—or learn again—to farm in ways that minimize their dependence on industrial supplies. They must diversify, using both plants and animals. They must produce, on their farms, as much as the required fertility and energy as they can. So far as they can, they must replace purchased goods and services with natural health and diversity and with their own intelligence...If farmers hope to exercise any control over their markets...then they will have to look to local markets. The long-broken connections between towns and cities and their surrounding landscapes will have to be restored.” (Page 5.)
5. “Always ask of any proposed change or innovation: What will this do to our community? How will this affect our common wealth? Always include local nature—the land, the water, the air, the native creatures—within the membership of the community. Always ask how local needs might be supplied from local sources...Always supply local needs first. (And only then think of exporting their products, first to nearby cities, and then to others...Develop small-scale industries and businesses to support the local farm and/or forest economy. Strive to produce as much of the community’s own energy as possible.” (Page 19.)
6. “To say that the right of private property has often been used to protect individuals and even global corporations in their greed is not to say that it cannot secure individuals in an appropriate economic share in their country.” (Page 49.)
7. “[N]ot just forest land but all land, private and public, farmed and forested, is ‘natural.’ All land is natural and all nature is a common wealth.” (Page 54.)
8. “[Y]ou cannot get good care in the use of the land by demanding it from public officials...If we want the land to be cared for, then we must have people living on and from the land who are able and willing to care for it.” (Page 55.)
9. “We have tried...preferring ourselves to the exclusion of all other creatures, with results that are manifestly disastrous. And now, conscious of those faults, we are tempted to correct them by denigrating ourselves...[W]e cannot be made kind toward our fellow creatures except by the same qualities that make us kind toward our fellow humans. The problem obviously is that we are not well practiced in kindness toward our fellow humans...especially, I think, toward human children...who are being aborted or abandoned, abused, drugged, bombed, neglected, poorly raised, poorly fed, poorly taught, and poorly disciplined. Many of them will not only find no worthy work but no work of any kind.” (Pages 78-79.)
10. “I am moreover a Luddite...not ‘against technology’ so much as I am for community. When the choice is between the health of a community and technological innovation, I choose the health of the community.” (Page 90.)
11. “Why should rest and food and ecological health not be the basic principles of our art and science of healing? Is it because the basic principles already are technology and drugs?” (Page 98.)
12. “[W]e had better understand: sex and fertility are joined...sex and the world are joined.” (Page 81.)
Obviously, any book that tries to make these points in 109 pages is going to be a slow, dense, serious read even for True Greens to whom the ideas are familiar. This book includes some witty remarks and some anecdotes, but it’s much “heavier” than its small physical size suggests.
There are points on which it’s possible for True Greens to disagree with this book. Berry complains about the plight of small farmers and small business owners trying to obtain loans and credit from big-chain banks. George Peters would have said, and now I would say, that these individuals’ problem is their need to remain independent of the banks in the first place. Berry thinks the Internet destroys communities; online readers probably think it helps build communities. Minor points, these.
Then there’s a point of word usage on which Berry disagrees with most of the English-speaking world. All the English-speaking countries had a postwar baby boom. While the “Baby Boomer” generation in the U.K. was shaped by growing up in economic hardship, and the “Baby Boomer” generation in the U.S. was shaped by growing up in economic “boom times,” there is at least a general agreement that "Boomers" are people born between 1945 and 1970.
Berry, who was born in 1934, learned the slang word “boomer” at the time when it referred to the semi-nomadic lifestyle of those who always rushed toward the sites of the brief economic “booms” created as Americans discovered and exploited our natural resources. He opposes “boomers” to the “stickers” or “nesters” who wanted to stay in one place, use its resources prudently, and form social bonds with neighbors. He admits that these tendencies probably coexist in most of us, and feels that morality requires us to check any “boomer” tendencies we have and strengthen our “nester” tendencies--our topophilia. What Berry means by “boomer” is fairly close to what I mean by “greedhead,” what some other Greens mean by “land-rapers,” and what several people, a hundred years ago, seem to have meant by “capitalist.” In any case, it’s not a demographic defined by date of birth...and it’s not a thing anybody wants to be.
So far as I know, every time Berry has used the word “boomer” in this idiosyncratic, obsolete way he’s taken a page or two to define what he means, so confusion is not possible for those who read the whole book or article. I mention this point for the benefit of those random readers who try to judge a book by reading a page somewhere in the middle, who may have thought Berry was insulting their age group. He’s not...we’ve been his best students and biggest fans.
I’m tempted to say that everyone needs to read