Man, whether civilized or savage, is a child of nature — he is not the master of nature. He must conform his actions to certain natural laws if he is to maintain his dominance over his environment. When he tries to circumvent the laws of nature, he usually destroys the natural environment that sustains him. And when his environment deteriorates rapidly, his civilization declines…
— Tom Dale and Vernon Gill Carter, Topsoil and Civilization, quoted by Schumacher in Ch. 7
With access to a farm, many are dazzled by the bounty and wonders of nature. I love to see grown people awed by the delicate beauty of a carrot seedling. People start eating vegetables they never liked before because they had never tasted them vine-ripened and chemical-free…
— Robyn van En, community supported agriculture (CSA) pioneer, Indian Line Farm, MA, from ‘Eating for Your Community’ in Good Harvest, Fall 1995.
It takes almost 50 years to grow a forest for an Indian, and the logging companies can cut it down in a few years. That is what we are fighting. But the struggle is not solely about forest preservation. Although clear-cut once at the turn of the century, White Earth has recovered. Its biodiversity is cherished – cherished for what it provides the people and because each plant is alive, has spirit and value on its own. Simply stated, we cannot be a forest culture without a forest.
—Winona Laduke, environmentalist and part Native American from the Obijwe White Lands, author of Honor the Earth, and twice Green Party nominee as vice-president of the USA, writing in the 25th anniversary edition of Small is Beautiful.
This is another chapter which Schumacher appears to have written especially for this book. It follows the pattern of the rest of this section, emphasizing that we have blinded ourselves to our predicament – and primarily because we have impoverished our metaphysical thinking.
What the chapter says.
Before centuries of irrigation and over-farming – mainly after supplying Rome and its empire with its huge appetite for wheat – much of the Middle East was once lush pastureland. Now it is desert.
The argument that Schumacher uses to introduce the problem of land, as he sees it, goes back a long way before the dawn of the green movement, which is normally dated to the publication of Rachel Carson’s ground-breaking book Silent Spring on 1962.
There are people who would pinpoint the American polymath George Perkins Marsh, who published Man and Nature in 1864 – but that, in turn, built on ideas he first revealed on 30 September 1847, when as a Whig congressman, he gave a lecture to the Agricultural Society of Rutland county, Vermont, predicting global warming and much else.
Inspired by Marsh, Walter Lowdermilk, of the Soil Conservation Service, went to the remains of old civilizations in 1938 and 1939. His report, Conquest of the Land Through Seven Thousand Years, was distributed by the US government in huge numbers.
Lowdermilk helped inspire Tom Dale of the Soil Conservation Service, and Vernon Gill Carter of the National Wildlife Federation, to write Topsoil and Civilization, published in 1955, which Schumacher quotes at the start of this chapter.
It was partly a response to the Dust Bowl horrors, which began in 1935 – the culmination of wasteful and thoughtless farming practices dating back to when Europeans first settled in America, and began to move westwards as each successive piece of land was exhausted.
But, as Schumacher points out, there are two main differences between then and now:
- The earth is now much more densely populated than it was then There are also no new lands to move to.
- The rate of change has also enormously accelerated, especially – says Schumacher – “during the last quarter of a century”. Back, in short, to the end of the Second World War.
Next, he quotes the eminent American physicist and botanist, Eugene Rabinowitch – who had been born in Russia and was then the founding editor of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
Rabinowitch was one of the first to call and work for setting up international discussions on nuclear weapons. He was therefore one of the good guys – but Schumacher makes an example of him nonetheless for what he wrote in The Times of London in 1972 (29 April):
“The only animals whose disappearance may threaten the biological viability of man on earth are the bacteria normally inhabiting our bodies. For the rest there is no convincing proof that mankind could not survive even as the only animal species on earth! If economical ways could be developed for synthesizing food from inorganic raw materials – which is likely to happen sooner or later – man may even be able to become independent of plants, on which he now depends as sources of his food…”
Schumacher condemns this approach – and for what will now be for familiar reasons:
“If we become independent of plants, the connection between topsoil and civilization will be broken. Or will it? These questions suggest that ‘The Proper Use of Land’ poses, not a technical nor an economic, but primarily a metaphysical problem. The problem obviously belongs to a higher level of rational thinking than that represented by the last two quotations… Is the land merely a means of production or is it something more, something that is an end in itself? And when I say ‘land’, I include the creatures upon it.”
There comes a point, he says, when we have to put aside the utilitarian calculator:
“The hygienic aspect is secondary; we recognize cleanliness as a value in itself. We do not calculate its value; the economic calculus simply does not come in. It could be argued that to wash is uneconomic: it costs time and money and produces nothing – except cleanliness. There are many activities which are totally uneconomic, but they are carried on for their own sakes.”
The division, traditional in economics, between production and consumption, is actually very confused and confusing, he says. The first of them (production) is beset by accountants, telling producers that most luxuries are ‘uneconomic’. The second (consumption) is dominated by people being pleased about the high standard of living everyone is displaying.
“The higher animals have an economic value because of their utility; but they have a meta-economic value in themselves. If I have a car, a man-made thing, I might quite legitimately argue that the best way to use it is never to bother about maintenance and simply run it to ruin. I may indeed have calculated that this is the most economical method of use. If the calculation is correct, nobody can criticize me for acting accordingly, for there is nothing sacred about a man-made thing like a car. But if I have an animal – be it only a calf or a hen – a living, sensitive creature, am I allowed to treat it as nothing but a utility? Am I allowed to run it to ruin?”
These are metaphysical questions, not scientific ones, Schumacher says:
“It is a metaphysical error, likely to produce the gravest practical consequences, to equate ‘car’ and ‘animal’ on account of their utility, while failing to recognize the most fundamental difference between them, that of ‘level of being’. An irreligious age looks with amused contempt upon the hallowed statements by which religion helped our forebears to appreciate metaphysical truth…”
The molecular biologist Professor Joshua Lederberg – the man who had warned that astronauts returning to earth might carry with them terrible diseases – defined people like this, says Schumacher:
“Genotypically at least, he is six feet of a particular molecular sequence of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and phosphorous atoms.”
Schumacher responds, again predictably:
“As modern man thinks so ‘humbly’ of himself, he thinks even more ‘humbly’ of the animals which serve his needs: and treats them as if they were machines...”
Schumacher then turns his attention back to the land, and in particular towards the report to the European Commission, A Future for European Agriculture (by D. Bergmann, M. Rossi-Doria, N. Kaldor, J. A. Schnittker, H. B. Krohn, C. Thomsen, J. S. March, H. Wilbrandt, Pierre Uri, published by the Atlantic Institute in Paris, 1970) – and towards the 1970 Mansholt Report by the then European commissioner for agriculture, Sicco Mansholt.
The European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has come in for a great deal of criticism since it began in 1962, but – at the start – it was an attempt to raise agricultural productivity, making sure that all farmers across the six nations that were members of what was then the European Community had a fair standard of living for farmers.
To achieve that, the Commission put a system of price and market support in place, which gave farmers a guaranteed price for their products, introduced tariffs on products grown abroad and allowed for state intervention if market prices fell.
But because the farmers were supported according to their total levels of production, things went rapidly awry.
Mansholt predicted that market imbalances could arise from over-production and price support. He proposed a ’modernization of the agricultural sector in an attempt to improve the standard of living of farmers and avoid market distortions.
His plan was the first reform of the CAP. It aimed to optimize the area of land under cultivation and to merge farms to create bigger units.
“The crude materialist view sees agriculture as essentially directed towards food-production,” wrote Schumacher:
“A wider view sees agriculture as having to fulfil at least three tasks:
- to keep man in touch with living nature, of which he is and remains a highly vulnerable part.
- to humanize and ennoble man’s wider habitat, and
- to bring forth the foodstuffs and other materials which are needed for a becoming life.
I do not believe that a civilization which recognizes only the third of these tasks, and which pursues it with such ruthlessness and violence that the other two tasks are not merely neglected but systematically counteracted, has any chance of long-term survival. Today, we take pride in the fact that the proportion of people engaged in agriculture has fallen to very low levels and continues to fall.”
The UK produces 60 per cent of the food it requires with just 3 per cent working on the land, says Schumacher. In the USA, 37 percent of their workforce worked on the land after World War I. Now (1970) it is just 4.4 per cent, he said.
Since the 1870s, and the long agricultural recession in the UK – and since then across the world – the decline in the proportion of workers on the land has been “associated with a massive flight from the land and a burgeoning of cities… Because rural culture has broken down, the rural people are fleeing from the land and, because metropolitan life is breaking down, urban people are fleeing from the cities. ‘Nobody,’ according to Dr Mansholt, ‘can afford the luxury of not acting economically’, with the result that everywhere life tends to become intolerable for anyone except the very rich.”
This is the conclusion of the chapter:
“The social structure of agriculture, which has been produced by – and is generally held to obtain its justification from – large-scale mechanization and heavy chemicalization, makes it impossible to keep man in real touch with living nature; in fact, it supports all the most dangerous modern tendencies of violence, alienation, and environmental destruction. Health, beauty and permanence are hardly even respectable subjects for discussion, and this is yet another example of the disregard of human values – and this means a disregard of man – which inevitably results from the idolatry of economism…”
Agriculture cannot fulfil its second task, “which is to humanize and ennoble man’s wider habitat, unless it clings faithfully and assiduously to the truths revealed by nature’s living processes,” writes Schumacher:
“One of them is the law of return; another is diversification – as against any kind of monoculture; another is decentralization, so that some use can be found for even quite inferior resources which it would never be rational to transport over long distances. Here again, both the trend of things and the advice of the experts is in the exactly opposite direction – towards the industrialization and depersonalization of agriculture, towards concentration, specialization, and any kind of material waste that promises to save labour. As a result, the wider human habitat, far from being humanized and ennobled by man’s agricultural activities, becomes standardized to dreariness or even degraded to ugliness.”
And finally:
“Nothing could be clearer. If agriculture does not pay, it is just a ‘declining enterprise’. Why prop it up? There are no ‘necessary improvements’ as regards the land, but only as regards farmers’ incomes, and these can be made if there are fewer farmers. This is the philosophy of the townsman. alienated from living nature, who promotes his own scale of priorities by arguing in economic terms that we cannot ‘afford’ any other.”
George McRobie, Schumacher’s sidekick at the National Coal Board, wrote in the 25th anniversary book, that he elaborated this rather shorthand statement in his later writings:
‘The task is to work with nature to find ways of improving soil fertility and maximizing genetic variety of plants and animals in contrast to the industrial agriculture approach of attempting to subdue and control nature by chemicals, factory farming, and biotechnology – all forms of violence. This nonviolent approach of collaborating with nature and respecting all forms of life is perfectly consistent with the approach of deep ecology.”
What happened next?
The European Union’s CAP lurched from bad to controversially worse after the Mansholt reforms, with talk of ‘wine lakes’ and ‘butter mountains’, sold off cheaply around the world at below cost, discouraging farmers in other parts of the planet.
The next set of major reforms, in 2013, tried to address the issue of over-production by making agriculture more sustainable and a more equal distribution of support, limiting the budget for big farms and giving more support to smaller farms by targeting income support better.
Three years later, the UK voted narrowly to leave the European Union and is now struggling to replace CAP subsidies by paying farmers to look after the land, which – depending on how it happens – may be a good thing.
Even so, the decline in the numbers working the land has carried on:
| 2018 | USA | UK | The world |
| % working on land | 1.4 | 1.1 | 28 (down from 44 in 1991) |
| % of those that are poor | 5 | 25 | 33+ |
Yet despite the continuing shrinkage – the proportion of people working in agriculture has leveled out and is beginning ever so slowly to recover, the consolidation of farms still carries on apace – the world is still so dependent on small family farms. They now produce about 56 per cent of agricultural production worldwide.
These questions seem to be at the heart of so much of the current debate on both sides of the Atlantic – about the possibility of unadulterated, healthy food, and how much they have been misled by the modern food and pharmaceutical industries about how to lead healthy lives.
As for the cities, these are still growing in the developed world as well as the developing world – though that was not the case in the 1970s, when Schumacher was writing. In 1986, researchers at Newcastle University in the UK shocked the world of planning by showing that the urban population in the cities was growing for the first time since the end of World War II – partly because of the new influx of students and asylum-seekers from around the world. Also perhaps because city living became trendy again around that time, thanks to the New Civics and livability movements in the USA and the great improvements of cities like Pittsburgh and Birmingham.
It was soon true of most western cities. Even Liverpool, which had lost about a third of its population since 1945, was showing signs of leveling off. There was no more ‘flight to the green’ – as the Germans used to put it: cities were becoming modish again.
Even so, Schumacher may still have been correct. Because so many people felt trapped in cities during lockdown, there has been a huge exodus from London, for example, once people could leave again. If you could afford to leave, you often did; if not, you simply had to stay put.
That was why the advocates of garden cities always insisted on policies that would help everyone to leave the cities if they wanted to – otherwise the only people who would be left there would be the poor, who would be left behind clinging to the wreckage of the cities in high-density towers like those around the outskirts of Paris or the huge, dead estates around the outskirts of Glasgow.
In the great American cities like Detroit or East St Louis or Camden, New Jersey, where the suburbs have been spread out along strip miles of ribbon development, it is in the hollowed out centers of the cities where the poor are left behind.
The main hope for them – and for Schumacher’s solution of providing scope for people to go back to the land – came from a study by the economist Amartya Sen, which showed that, when you took farm land and split it up into plots and built houses on it, the remaining back gardens could be more productive than the same land was before, when it was being farmed conventionally.
That was because of the all-important personal touch, when a householder is growing crops compared with when a farmer was doing the same on the same land before the building, with modern ‘productive’ machinery.
That is the same idea which the great radical William Cobbett first wrote about two centuries ago, and which was confirmed by the allotment movement in World War I in the UK, that – when you give plots of marginal land to the poor – they can out-produce the best land, farmed conventionally.
In the USA, it has been new economics theorists like the Schumacher Center that first began to think about how to revive community growing as part of how to regenerate places – their first community-supported agriculture (CSA) project dates back to 1985 (in the USA, the idea dates back to 1965 in Tokyo).
In the same way, their farm notes currency, redeemable for for vegetables, helped to support local farmers in the awkward gap between investing in a crop and getting the money back. Now this is subsumed under their successful local currency, BerkShares (see Chapter 14).
On both sides of the Atlantic, you can hear the same arguments repeated during and after pandemic lockdowns, that farmers’ markets – where people could buy direct from nearby farmers – were a lifesaver. A record number of people in the USA signed up to be members of CSAs during 2021.
Then, there has been Severine von Tscharner Fleming and her Greenhorns, encouraging people to go back to the land and helping them find their feet there.
The real question is: why don’t policy-makers see the urgency of this?
Questions for discussion…
- Why don’t policy-makers see the urgent importance of these ideas? Is it because so many of them are overwhelmingly urban?
- Can we solve the basic imbalance by growing much more food in cities?
- How might we persuade people to take up farming again?
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