Subject: Re: Ethics in Agriculture (fwd)...Drucker (fwd)
From: [email-masked] (Larry London)
Date: 3 Jun 1994 13:41:54 -0400
Newsgroups: alt.sustainable.agriculture

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 3 Jun 1994 02:50:11 -0400 (EDT)
From:[email-masked]
To: [email-masked]
Cc: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: Ethics in Agriculture (fwd)...Drucker

>
> Date: Thu, 2 Jun 1994 19:50:31 -0400 (EDT)
> From: Ian S Howard <[email-masked]>
> ...
>
> If I have Sims' piece pegged right I don't think we will have to worry (on
> environmental grounds) about the next depression.  He and others (e.g.,
> Wendell Berry) advocate more people on the land.  That's how folks
> survived the last major depression -- they had no money but they had food.

If you are speaking of the U.S., you are clearly misstating U.S. demographic
facts.

> I realize that this doesn't apply to the Dust Bowl, but there is a good
> argument that we should never have plowed that land to start with (see Wes
> Jackson's perennial polycultures).

Which land specifically are you speaking of?  Or is "Dust Bowl" a
slogan with fearsome appeal to those who weren't alive then
and don't know all that was involved?

> ..... Success at devising the correct moral
> attitude to agriculture may well depend on getting everyone who eats
> involved.  During the last depression many more were.  Granted, sloppy
> practices exacerbated some of the problems of the depression, but many
> practices (e.g., mixed rotational farming) were and are environmentally
> beneficial; that is, they make soil and maintain fertility, and if Berry
> is correct healthy families.

Reading paragraphs like that (and you are fully welcome to your outlook),
remind me of serious analyses based on real socialogical and economic
facts of the era.....

I invite people to dig in at a really good library for these two books:

        _The End of Economic Man: a study of the new totalitarianism_
        Peter F. Drucker
        John Day Co., 1939

        _The Future of Industrial Man: a conservative approach_
        Peter F. Drucker
        John Day Co., 1942

Reading analyses of *the* era, written *during* the era can sometimes
make one realize that people weren't so dumb about the trends of the
times...and how "modern" those thinkers were.

Though not a central topic, Drucker illuminates *why* agriculture in
*Western* countries is an industrial activity...irrespective of fringe
nostalgic farming activities...already a fact-of-life *prior* to the First
World War...and that dislocations in the ag sector may have been as
much due to *failure* to acknowledge that fact, as any other cause...
excepting what Happened under Lennin and Stalin...but that is not the
West, is it?

Do you suppose the Dust Bowl occurred because of sloppy practises, or
from the boom-bust cycle fostered by U.S. Government encouraging
high food prices to ramp up production during WWI and in its immediate
aftermath, followed by a drop-dead Federal ag policy when Europe's
ag sector made a miraculously fast recovery in the '20s?

WWII brought many significant and irreversible changes in our social /
governmental / educational / research / financial / communications
infrastructures.  The common thread, according to Drucker (and he is
an acknowledged expert), was *new* ways of organizing human capital to
large scale goals.

He contends that industry was irreversibly restructured...ditto the
American universities....ditto agriculture...ditto transportation...
ditto communications...ditto the role of the government *itself*.

Drucker would agree and *emphasize* the need for a moral /ethical outlook,
but that it is useless if it contradicts or refuses to deal realistically
with large scale social realities...one of which is that 98% of humanity
would rather *not* live on a small (or large) farm.

_The End of Economic Man_ deals with the consequences of Western man's
*dispair* that neither socialism, nor communism nor capitalism satisfied
our inner needs nor provided stability in social-economic spheres.

As I read those two books, I could see that a great deal of the current
back-to-nature type talk about reforming "farming" is a continuation
of that despair...WWII and the Cold War only delayed and stalled a return
to those pervasive societal feelings of "Who am I; what is my place
in the Universe?"

Due to the magnitude of today's world population, ag production can
*only* be industrial in construction; and solutions to whatever we may
perceive as the negative side effects can either be "scientific" or
hysterical, according to how ready we are to precipitate world scale
societal disintegration.

The true objective of ag today is to provide food, fiber and oil at
affordable prices with sufficient supply stability to allow the
other 98% of us to pursue life, liberty and happiness as we see fit. :^)

Steve Modena   [email-masked]