Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
In other words, slavery imposed severe limits on black people, and these limits,
according to Berry, served to extinguish any hint of ambition or any hope of reprieve,
thereby creating the conditions necessary to produce what he describes as a positive
outcome: a culture and an outlook that allowed black people to fully appreciate the
beauty and joy of lifelong hard manual labor in the fields, uncontaminated by any sense
of ambition. In The Hidden Wound Berry writes movingly of his memory of Nick, a black
laborer on his grandfather's farm who, according to Berry, was possessed of consider-
able dignity “because there was a very conscious peace and faithfulness that he made
between himself and his lot” (Berry 1989, 23). To Berry, Nick personifies something to
aspire to:
In these times one contemplates it with the same sense of hope with which one con-
templates the sunrise or the coming of spring: the image of a man who has labored all
his life and will labor to the end, who has no wealth, who owns little, who has no hope
of changing, who will never “get somewhere” or “be somebody,” and who is yet rich
in pleasure, who takes pleasure in the use of his mind ! Isn't this the very antithesis
of the thing that is breaking us in pieces? Isn't there a great rare humane strength in
this—this humble possibility that all our effort and aspiration is to deny?
(Berry 1989, 75)
In Berry's portrayal, Nick stands as a moral exemplar because he was someone who
(at least in Berry's telling) never rebelled, never even questioned the system, never had
any ambition, never aspired for anything more, never longed for a different world, but
found joy and beauty and grace, living and working as an farm laborer, entirely within
the constraints and limits that the community and the locality had imposed on him. In
Berry's view, the most outstanding quality that Nick possessed was that—unlike the Rev.
Martin Luther King Jr.—he did not have a dream.
The Heroic Third World Peasant
The vision of American pastoralism with its ideology of limits and its deep suspicion of
scientific and technological progress, as exemplified by Wendell Berry's writings, forms an
important pillar in the ideology of the alternative food movement. Another important and
mutually reinforcing pillar is the vision of heroic Third World peasants, who are portrayed
as heroes of the planet, living joyous lives of bucolic peace and contentment, close to nature
and to God—very different from the unhappy and unsustainable lives of those in the West.
One of the most prominent purveyors of this vision of heroic Third World peas-
ants is the Indian environmentalist and food activist Vandana Shiva. Hailed for “plac-
ing women and ecology at the heart of the modern development discourse” (Right
Livelihood Award 1993), the essence of Shiva's message is that human development
and progress are fundamentally evil, particularly for those in the non-Western world.
 
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