A post at Heliophage links this Tim O'Reilly post which discusses the Berry essay mentioned in my previous post. Tim says:

The essence of Berry's argument is that we as a culture need to get away from single-issue movements to fix this or that, and instead embrace holistic thinking about how society as a whole should be organized to achieve our goals. As a farmer, essayist and poet, Berry's focus, is, of course, not on political organization, or industry, but on the more fundamental issue of where our food comes from and how best to produce it.

Talk about a narrow focus! Holistic thinking, if it means anything at all, must be far larger in scope than producing food. It's a big issue for me, but that's my trade and I'm well aware that it is only a small part of what holistic thinking must mean. Bad policy prescriptions are inevitable when focus is so narrow. Berry concludes that:

...we need diversified, small-scale land economies that are dependent on people. Therefore, we need people with the knowledge, skills, motives and attitudes required by diversified, small-scale land economies. . .

I AM NOT SUGGESTING, of course, that everybody ought to be a farmer or a forester. Heaven forbid! I am suggesting that most people now are living on the far side of a broken connection, and that this is potentially catastrophic. Most people are now fed, clothed and sheltered from sources toward which they feel no gratitude and exercise no responsibility. There is no significant urban constituency, no formidable consumer lobby, no noticeable political leadership, for good land-use practices, for good farming and good forestry, for restoration of abused land, or for halting the destruction of land by so-called “development”. . .

There are regions where small-scale agriculture makes sense, but that's only a small part of the story of agriculture. A more holistic approach is to, in effect, ask the land how it could best be treated. As a former Stegner fellow Berry ought to know this since Stegner wrote about the failures of settlement in the western USA that aped the style then current in the east. The small farm - forty acres and a mule - style of land subdivision made no sense in the semi-arid west. The important thing there wasn't the size of the farm, it was the nature of the watershed. The size and shape of a farm must reflect the size and shape of the watershed if it is to be viable.

Over time many of those government policy errors have been corrected as some farmers starved and quit while others prospered and expanded. Technology has played a big part in the later period.

Berry - and the legion of later day ignoramuses who swallow that nonsense - needs to expand his mind and think holistically. One size doesn't fit all. One agronomic system doesn't fit all. Diversity is inevitable and that makes miscegenation inevitable too. Many agronomic styles will coexist cheek by jowl unless brute force is used to prevent it.

That's what we have now. There are a comparatively small number of very large operations that produce the majority of the crops, and a comparatively large number of smaller operations that produce a little. This is the natural state of a diversified agronomic sphere in the 21st century.

Good land use is not a consumer issue. Sure, opportunistic politicians, entertainers (including poets) and zealots of every stripe can and do agitate seeking to profit from populist angst, but good land use will not result from such exploitation. To get good land use the people who actually do the jobs on the land are the ones who matter. They know more and they care more, and are in a position to put ideas into practice. They are neither aided nor amused by "back seat drivers".

You are simply mistaken if you believe that some combination of populist agitation and government regulation will result in improved land use. The bad land uses decried by such interest groups are the result of the agitation and machination of their spiritual ancestors. The best that such efforts can do is to make the next mess.

Think holistically, and that means historically too. Agricultural methods change over time. That history is as much a story of ever improving, ever more benign methods as it is of the remaining defects selected by activists as the whole of the story. What Berry and the others mining that populist vein are doing is politics. A very complex subject is reduced to a few stock ideas and phrases in a pseudo-naturalist dogma. They make a living at it but it has precious little to do with agriculture.

It's entertainment at best. I like his writing and steal some of his usages. I selectively quote him to make my points. But I do not mistake his views for informed analysis or holistic prescription. He has a pinhole vision, the very thing he accuses others of having. His pinhole may be a bit larger than some, but it's still far too small.