on Jul 16th, 2008Hell Hath No Limits: Wendell Berry and our Faustian Economics
Oh Wendell Berry, will you marry me?
From Harper’s Magazine, Wendell Berry’s Faustian Economics
The general reaction to the apparent end of the era of cheap fossil fuel, as to other readily foreseeable curtailments, has been to delay any sort of reckoning. The strategies of delay, so far, have been a sort of willed oblivion, or visions of large profits to the manufacturers of such “biofuels” as ethanol from corn or switchgrass, or the familiar unscientific faith that “science will find an answer.” The dominant response, in short, is a dogged belief that what we call the American Way of Life will prove somehow indestructible. We will keep on consuming, spending, wasting, and driving, as before, at any cost to anything and everybody but ourselves.This belief was always indefensible - the real names of global warming are Waste and Greed - and by now it is manifestly foolish. But foolishness on this scale looks disturbingly like a sort of national insanity. We seem to have come to a collective delusion of grandeur, insisting that all of us are “free” to be as conspicuously greedy and wasteful as the most corrupt of kings and queens.
Berry touches precisely on what is most scary to me in our national discourse, the complete lack of any talk of saving, conserving, just simply using less crap.
Isn’t that the first best step to addressing out of control debt, spending, and energy costs? Just by saving and using less?