Faustian Economics - Wendell Berry

I think it sad (but true... and actually pretty hilarious) what Berry says at the end of his second paragraph, "Perhaps by devoting more and more of our already abused cropland to fuel production we will at last cure ourselves of obesity and become fashionably skeletal, hungry but - thank God! - still driving." This is surprisingly possible because of the way we (humans) use our already depleting natural resources. Berry's quote paints a frightening image that could one day be the present time and way of life on earth.

"The life of this world is small to those who think it is, and the desire to enlarge it makes it smaller, and can reduce it finally to nothing."

- This opinion of Berry's is also scarily accurate. Most humans do not think that they are jailed by any type of limit because freedom is a right that everybody has. Limitlessness, Wendell says, is a godlike quality, which no living human possesses. At this point in time, thinking in such a way is inevitably dangerous because limits define our lives. Berry is right, we only get one chance at life, one world to live in. We have to make the best of it while we can.

The story of the elderly farmer who decided to "crop share" with a younger farmer is the perfect depiction of our world today. The idea that, "you have a bad year, I have a bad year... you have a good year, I have a good year" relates to the condition of our planet. This relationship between the farmers is an example of community economics, which is based on the sharing of fate. In our world, we can't control the actions of others along with the consequences of those actions. We can't change what others do to destroy our earth but we can try to prevent the consequences from becoming too great by acting now.