Fearnside: In your recent talk to the Sierra Club, you mentioned “foodsheds.” Can you explain this concept in more detail?

Berry: Cities attract food products from the countryside the same way that a major stream attracts water from the smaller streams in a watershed. A foodshed would be the tributary landscape around a city from which the city’s food would come. It goes back to the ancient concept of the city as a gathering point for the products of its landscape. And since we haven’t had cheap petroleum for a while — and we’re probably not going to have it ever again — we need to think this way once more. Sooner or later, we’re not going to be able to afford to haul food in from everywhere in the world.

Another reason to think in terms of local food economies is that an extended food system concentrates food at collecting points and transportation arteries, so it’s extremely vulnerable to blockades or acts of terrorism. A third reason — and this may be the most important reason of all — is that if you’re going to have sustainable agriculture, it has to be adapted locally. Local adaptation means that you observe in the economic landscape the same processes that you find in healthy natural landscapes: You must have diversity. You must have both plants and animals. You must waste nothing. You must obey the law of return — that is, you must return to the ground all the nutrients that you take from it. You must protect the soil from erosion at all times. You must make maximum use of sunlight. In those circumstances, you may leave the crops and animals pretty much to fend for themselves against diseases. The farm will have some disease, but it won’t have epidemics. If you look at a healthy forest, for instance, you see some prematurely dead trees, but not massive numbers of them.

Fearnside: This sounds like the opposite of the monocrop agribusiness model that we have today.

Berry: That’s right. It’s the diametric opposite of reductive science, and industrial agriculture is based on reductive science.

Fearnside: If what you’re talking about is natural, how did we stray from it in the first place?

Berry: It’s not natural; it’s a conscious, deliberate imitation of natural processes. The farm imitates the diversity of the forest.

Fearnside: So you’re talking about farming more as an art than a science.

Berry: It’s both. Art is a way of making, and science is a way of knowing. You’re never going to escape the need for either one; you’ve got to have a certain amount of knowledge, and you’ve got to have a certain amount of art. You’ve got to know how to make a thing — whether it’s a crop or a novel — and you’ve got to have a way of making it.

Fearnside: You mentioned threats to our food security. How can communities ensure their food security?

Berry: They have to maintain the health of their local landscapes, and they have to provide a livable income to the people who work those landscapes. That’s it.

Fearnside: In your Sierra Club talk, you said that you would like conservationists to become more interested in “economic landscapes” — in working farms, ranches, and forests. Do you feel that most people’s definition of the natural world is too small?

Berry: The human definition of the natural world is always going to be too small, because the world’s more diverse and complex than we can ever know. We’re not going to comprehend it; it comprehends us. The question is whether we can use it with respect. Some people in the past who knew very little biology were able to use the land without destroying it. We, who know a great deal of biology, are destroying our land in order to use it.

Fearnside: Your emphasis is on local economies, not on organic farming. Why?

Berry: “Organic” has become a label, as it was destined to be. It’s a completely worthless word now. It has been perverted to suit the needs of industrial agriculture.

Fearnside: Many people buy organic because it’s healthy.

Berry: That’s true, but in a local food economy, consumers could exert a certain pressure on producers, and rather than push for convenience or even cheapness, informed consumers would apply pressure on behalf of health, sustainability, and security. So the natural tendency in a local food economy would be toward healthfulness.

Fearnside: Do you think that our unhealthy food practices have to do with our lack of connection to the sacred?

Berry: I would say so, because when you are in the presence of something you consider sacred, the natural response is to be humble and respectful and careful. This is dependent on the scale of the endeavor not being too large, and on a proper ratio between the amount of land needing care and the number of caretakers. Ecologist Wes Jackson calls that the “eyes-to-acres ratio,” and it varies according to the type of farm. A ranch in New Mexico with a good grazing program can get by with fewer people than a highly diversified Kentucky farm.

Fearnside: Should the responsibility for changing the food system lie more with the consumer, more with the producer, or equally with both?

Berry: When the producers — the farmers — are going broke, it’s wrong to expect them to reform the system. In fact, there are too few actual farmers left to reform anything. So, as a practical matter, reform is going to have to come from consumers. Industrial agriculture is an urban invention, and if agriculture is going to be reinvented, it’s going to have to be reinvented by urban people.

Fearnside: Those concerned about the land often try to quantify its worth — for example, calculating the monetary worth of a forest to demonstrate why it should remain uncut. Wouldn’t it be better to help people understand the unquantifiable value of a healthy environment?

Berry: Quantification is useful up to a point. You can’t quantify the true value of a forest that is going to be destroyed by mountaintop-removal mining, but to the extent that it can be quantified, I think it ought to be. Any good forester should be able to tell you what the value of that timber would be over, say, two hundred years of sustainable production, and we can compare that to the current dollar value of the coal under the mountain and make a financial argument for keeping the forest. That sort of comparison ought to be done, but it isn’t.

It’s possible to figure out what a city’s annual consumption of products from the land economy is: How much food do the people in the city eat? How much do they require in the way of forest products? How much do they require in the way of mined minerals or fuels? Those numbers can be produced, but we don’t have them, as far as I can tell. Economists and businessmen who are supposed to be hardheaded realists and materialists, concerned about scientific fact, never have these numbers. There’s such a thing as professional bullshit, and this is it.

Fearnside: Mountaintop removal has been called “strip mining on steroids.” Yet it hasn’t generated a lot of press, despite how widespread and damaging it is. Why do you think this is?

Berry: I can’t tell you. That Kentucky coal-slurry pond that broke loose in October 2000 spilled thirty times the pollution that the Exxon Valdez let go in Alaska. The Valdez completely took over public attention, but the Martin County spill didn’t even make the New York Times. Maybe one of the eastern-Kentucky people I’ve seen quoted had it right when he said, “We ain’t as cute as them otters” — which is a heartbreaking statement. This ruination is happening in what’s called a “national sacrifice area,” a term that has some truth to it: the Appalachian coal fields were given up to exploitation a hundred years ago.

Fearnside: The Valdez spill happened in 1989. Since then we’ve had so many new environmental disasters that the press and the public may be becoming numb to them.

Berry: If you’ve lost the capacity to be outraged by what’s outrageous, you’re dead. Somebody ought to come and haul you off.

Fearnside: It’s ironic that we treat time, of which we have an abundance, as a scarce commodity, whereas we treat finite commodities, such as topsoil and fossil fuels, as limitless.

Berry: Actually, though at present we are using topsoil as a finite quantity, as long as you keep it in place, take proper care of it, observe the law of return, and balance the forces of growth and decay, topsoil is an infinite resource. It has the capacity to go on and on. A man named F.H. King traveled in Asia in 1907 or so and wrote a book called Farmers of Forty Centuries. His question on that trip was: How is it that these people have kept their land in production for four thousand years? (Some now think it was longer.) It’s a practical, obvious question. Anybody of normal intelligence should think to ask it. But for the last fifty years or more, no certified agricultural expert has asked it.

Fearnside: I came to Kentucky after four years of living in Central Asia, and I was struck by how environmental disasters both here and there have the same causes: shortsightedness, greed, and the concentration of wealth among a powerful elite. Do you think these are simply part of human nature?

Berry: Greed is a part of human nature, and greed is the root cause of these disasters. Once you have greed and the means of exploitation, the high-toned rationalizations — in other words, the excuses — follow as a matter of course. A real culture functions to limit greed. Our culture functions to increase it, because, we are repeatedly told, it’s profitable to do so, though the majority of the profits go to only a few people.

Fearnside: We’ve talked about what consumers and producers can do to change things. What should the role of government be?

Berry: The appropriate role of government should be to see that power and money don’t accumulate in too few hands.

Fearnside: But too often governments act in their own self-interest and harm the people they’re supposed to be working for and protecting.

Berry: Unless a community consists entirely of like-minded individuals, the community must, to some extent, have laws, which means government. It’s the nature of an organization like a government — or a corporation — to be self-aggrandizing and self-perpetuating. Once it starts running, it aims to keep running. The real limit on government would be reasonably independent, self-sustaining localities and communities. But if there is no local independence, then governments and other organizations have a kind of freedom that they wouldn’t have otherwise.

If you’ve got 300 million people, most of whom produce nothing for themselves or for the community and to whom everything has to be brought from somewhere else, then there’s no way you’re going to have limited government, or limited anything. All organizations feed upon the helplessness and ignorance and passivity of the people.

Fearnside: At the same time, governments and corporations are made up of people.

Berry: People who go to work for corporations essentially abandon their integrity as individuals in order to serve the corporation. And the corporation has a set of rationalizations and excuses for its behavior that the people within it subscribe to, which means they have no moral force of their own. It’s impossible for them to think for themselves or have a contrary opinion.

Fearnside: For most of us, work no longer satisfies our real needs, and so we must convince ourselves that what we do is needed. On the grossest level, that’s all advertising or public relations is: creating a need for things that aren’t needed.

Berry: You’re right. The whole system depends on the ability of the people in power to convince the rest that they’ll be better off if they buy certain products or elect certain candidates. If a company has a better product, they don’t explain why it’s a better product. They make false promises, telling you you’ll be truly happy at last if you’ll buy whatever it is they’re selling. We used to call this “lying.”

Fearnside: In your own writing, you seem to confront head-on the speed and thoughtlessness of contemporary society by your deliberate, thoughtful style. Do you consciously write this way?

Berry: I did make up my mind at some time that instead of trying to serve my purposes by rhetorical artifice or personal attacks, I would try to make as much sense as I could. If your cause doesn’t make sense, why defend it? Writing is a test of sense. It’s an exposure of your ideas to your own scrutiny, and then to the scrutiny of other people.

Fearnside: The decline in reading in the U.S. has often been blamed on writers having become too disconnected from the people and their writing having become too abstruse.

Berry: Real reading, of course, is a kind of work. But it’s lovely work. To read well, you have to respond actively to what the writer’s saying. You can’t just lie there on the couch and let it pour over you. You may have to read with a pencil in hand and underline passages and write notes in the margins. The poet John Milton understood that the best readers are rare. He prayed to his muse that he might a “fit audience find, though few.”

Fearnside: In your preface to Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community [Pantheon], you wrote a beautiful refutation of the idea of intellectual property: “As I understand it, I am being paid only for my work in arranging the words; my property is that arrangement. The thoughts in this book, on the contrary, are not mine. They came freely to me, and I give them freely away.” Where do your ideas come from?

Berry: It’s awfully hard to have an idea that somebody else hasn’t already had, you know. The French writer André Gide worried that he wasn’t original enough, and then he finally consoled himself by realizing that the same things need to be said over and over again, because the times change, and the context shifts, and the language changes, and ideas need to be expressed again in new ways, to be submitted anew to the test of sentences.

But I don’t have much gift for abstract ideas. I’m usually moved to write by practical problems that I’m interested in. And when I lose sight of the problems, I lose interest.

Fearnside: You have certainly stuck to writing as stubbornly and passionately as you have to farming an old, worn-out Kentucky hillside. Is such stick-to-itiveness essential to success as a writer, or in any endeavor?

Berry: Practice is essential. If you’re going to learn to write, it has to be your practice. I’ve been fascinated with the job of learning to write, which is unending. And I enjoy writing. Dealing with the problems it presents gives me pleasure. Sometimes there’s frustration, but if I get frustrated or hit an impasse, I just stop and go back to it later. I don’t like to hear writers talk about how they suffer for their craft. If it’s that bad, they ought to quit.

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