[L]and and people have suffered together, as invariably they must. Under the rule of industrial economics, the land, our country, has been pillaged for the enrichment, supposedly, of those humans who have claimed the right to own or exploit it without limit. Of the land-community much has been consumed, much has been wasted, almost nothing has flourished.
But this has not been inevitable. We do not have to live as if we are alone.
Wendell Berry’s 2012 Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities.
I look around my new home city, and I see that many areas of Baltimore have “been pillaged for the enrichment of others.”
But, as Wendell Berry says, we do not have to live as if we are alone.
Community efforts like urban gardens and farms reconnect us to the land and people in our neighborhoods. They beautify and make productive land that others made useless, dangerous, and ugly.
Gardening will certainly not provide answers to all of Baltimore’s problems, but it might be a firm step toward the promotion of
economy, the making of the human household upon the earth . . . This is the economy that the most public and influential economists never talk about, the economy that is the primary vocation and responsibility of every one of us.