Land and Life in Boone County, Kentucky: Beyond Economics

Notes by Jas. Duvall, M. A.

2008

"Economia is that land where everything has a price, and everything can be sold or destroyed, for a price."

Dr. Socrates Ruggles

Is agriculture an industry or a way of life?  Land & Life

Factors:

Sanity – man must remain in touch with nature and the land.
Beauty – man must improve the land and its fertility.
Wealth – the land must bear a constant and steady supply of food and other natural commodities, by means that result in happy and healthy lives.

Enriching and reconstructing agriculture and the rural farm population. Policies should result in greater employment and soil fertility. We must inculcate the values and ideals that make rural life possible. These cannot be “reconstructed” like soil fertility, they can only be taught by example, preaching, and philosophical teaching.

Change must take place if there is to be a new attitude to the land. There must be some major resolution of the major tensions in the beliefs of our time. This includes religious beliefs about God, man, and nature. It includes also uncovering our metaphysical presuppositions.

Land as a “sacred” aspect of life.

or,

What is Wrong with the "Green" Movement?

The roots of the current Green movement, both on the right and the left, are to be found in Fascism. The Fascist attempt to solve the industrial problem also included a theory of returning to the land and the ecological problem. Both are characterized by an attempt of the elite to control or destroy the existence of the “unenlightened”, or society as it actually exists.

The inventor Charles F. Kettering once said that the reason so many people present theories of how to improve the world is that they never had to present a working model. Any improvement made in society must be done while the whole thing is a going concern, like those roads that are improved while traffic continues to move on them.

Modern ecological movements are generally not attempts to improve the natural environment we have; they insist on destroying the whole fabric and beginning anew. They are opposed to human freedom, and especially to democracy. They, like the Gnostics, hate humanity, as it actually exists, and are willing to destroy society for the hoped for benefit. As it stands the movement, by and large, is an assault on humanity, with an entirely destructive agenda. “Nature” is treated as a victim, and the Green movement claims to speak for it, though it is a constituency which cannot reject it, whatever harm it does.

This does not mean that ecology is not important. On the contrary. Human relation to the land is the single most important problem facing society today; especially in places like Boone County, Kentucky. Land is not merely a means of production. Some land should not be farmed, built on, or used for any commercial purpose whatever. Thoreau wrote of such land:

I think of no natural feature which is a greater ornament and treasure to this town than the river. It is one of the things which determine whether a man will live here or in another place, and it is one of the first objects which we show to a stranger. In this respect we enjoy a great advantage over those neighboring towns which have no river. Yet the town, as a corporation, has never turned any but the most utilitarian eyes upon it and has done nothing to preserve its natural beauty. They who laid out the town should have made the river available as a common possession forever. The town collectively should at least have done as much as an individual of taste who owns an equal area commonly does in England. Indeed, I think that not only the channel, but one or both banks of every river should be a public highway, for a river is not useful merely to float on. In this case, one bank might have been reserved as a public walk and the trees that adorned it have been protected, and frequent avenues have been provided leading to it from the main street. This would have cost but few acres of land and but little wood, and we should all have been gainers by it. Now it is accessible only at the bridges, at points comparatively distant from the town, and there is not a foot of shore to stand on unless you trespass on somebody’s lot; and if you attempt a quiet stroll down the bank, you soon meet with fences built at right angles with the stream and projecting far over the water, where individuals — naturally enough, under the present management — seek to monopolize the shore. At least we shall get our only view of the stream from the meeting house belfry. As for the trees which fringed the shore within my remembrance — where are they? and where will the remnant of them be after ten years more?
So, if there is any central and commanding hilltop, it should be reserved for the public use. Think of a mountaintop in the township, even to the Indians a sacred place, only accessible through private grounds. A temple, as it were, which you cannot enter without trespassing — nay, the temple itself private property and standing in a man’s cow-yard.

[Henry David Thoreau, Wild Fruits: Thoreau’s Rediscovered Last Manuscript, (New York: Norton, 2000), p. 236-237.]

Other land should be used to produce food for man, but not at the expense of destroying the fertility of the land, which is merely pushing starvation back a generation or two. Certainly this should not be done for mere monetary profit. Land has value in itself as the habitation of man. Decisions made about land are never merely economic, but have philosophical and metaphysical consequences.

What is at stake it the nature of civilization and human life. Agriculture involves our relation to the land, and the question of how man will live in nature. Our health, sanity, and the beauty of the countryside, depend upon this relation. This relation cannot be the result of a simple economic formula. Agriculture and industry are in fundamental opposition. Agriculture, unlike industry, produces living products to sustain life, and this is done through human means. Land is priceless. We may set a commercial price upon it, but that does not mean this is its true value. Its beauty and fertility must not be permitted to decay. The wild creatures upon it, like man himself, must be permitted to live and thrive. Man and animal must be allowed to enjoy the land.

It is only in this sense that land is "sacred".  As Wendell Berry, or foremost Kentucky writer on ecological and agricultural themes has written, there is no place that is not sacred, places are either sacred, or desecrated.  We do not worship land as such, but we hold it in reverence, because our life depends upon it, and the life of the race.  Just as we hold human life sacred from its conception, so we must also rightly respect that which is required for its existence.  In the terms of the Old Testament, the land must become "married"  (the meaning of the Hebrew word Beulah), and this is man's proper relation to the land.

31 March 2008.  Slightly revised, 22 Oct 2010.

Draft of article on Conservation in Boone County, Kentucky
Written while I was the Local History Research Specialist for the Boone County Public Library

James Duvall, M. A.
Big Bone University:  A Think Tank, Research Institute, & Public Policy Center
Nec ossa solum, sed etiam sanguinem.
Big Bone, Kentucky