Wendell Berry: Local Economies to Save the Land and the People

[eridani]

http://inthesetimes.com/rural-america/entry/17778/local-economies-to-save-the-land-and-the-people

It is a small logical step from understanding that self-determination for an individual depends on “your own place on your own land” to understanding that self-determination for a community depends on the same thing: its home ground, and a reasonable measure of local initiative in the use of it. This gives us a standard for evaluating the influence of an “outside interest” upon a region or a community. It gives us a standard for evaluating the policy of “bringing in industry” and any industry that is brought in. Outside interests do not come in to a place to help the local people or to make common cause with the local community or to care responsibly for the local countryside. There is nothing at all to keep a brought-in industry in place when the place has become less inviting, less exploitable or less profitable than another place.

We may not want to oppose any and all bringing in or coming in of industry, but localities and communities should insist upon dealing for themselves with any outside interest that proposes to come in. They should not permit themselves merely to be dealt for by state government or any other official body. This of course would require effective, unofficial local organizing, and I believe we are developing the ability to do that.

But the most effective means of local self-determination would be a well-developed local economy based upon the use and protection of local resources, including local human intelligence and skills. Local resources have little local value when they are industrially produced or extracted and shipped out. They become far more valuable when they are developed, produced, processed and marketed by, and first of all to, the local people—when, that is, they support, and are supported by, a local economy. And here we realize that a local economy, supplying local needs so far as possible from local fields and woodlands, is necessarily diverse.

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1. I wish more people thought like this...

Communities need an 'export product' to bring money into the community to offset the money that leaves the community.

Too many small communities trade their independence for a retail business which does nothing to bring money into a community. They think it will create jobs.

We need to return to locally produced farm products that are sustainable and a lot of small communities will return to economic health.