[P2P-F] Fwd: Communal Order of Memory and Aspiration

Tue Oct 30 21:43:39 CET 2018

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From: Schumacher Center for a New Economics <
schumacher at centerforneweconomics.org>
Date: Tue, Oct 30, 2018 at 9:16 PM
Subject: Communal Order of Memory and Aspiration
To: Michel <michel at p2pfoundation.net>

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Dear Michel,

*A cu**lture is not a collection of relics or ornaments, but a practical
necessity, and its corruption invokes calamity.  A healthy culture is a
communal order of memory, insight, value, work, conviviality, reverence,
aspiration.  It reveals the human necessities and the human limits. It
clarifies our inescapable bonds to the earth and to each other. It assures
that the necessary restraints are observed, that the necessary work is
done, and that it is done well.  *

*A healthy farm culture can be based only upon familiarity and can grow
only among a people soundly established upon the land; it nourishes and
safe-guards a human intelligence of the earth that no amount of technology
can satisfactorily replace.  The growth of such a culture was once a strong
possibility in the farm communities of this country. We now have only the
sad remnants of those communities.  If we allow another generation to pass
without doing what is necessary to enhance and embolden the possibility now
perishing with them, we will lose it all together.  And then we will not
only invoke calamity–we will deserve it. *

>From *The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture*
<https://centerforneweconomics.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=69d509d113032e3126c4543ce&id=f82e01805f&e=58c6ab1e1c>
by Wendell Berry

Matthew Derr, President of *Sterling College*
<https://centerforneweconomics.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=69d509d113032e3126c4543ce&id=9e02944af7&e=58c6ab1e1c>
in Craftsbury Commons, Vermont, quips that Sterling trains ecologists to be
great farmers and trains farmers to be great ecologists. Sterling is one of
a diminishing number of rural colleges.

Derr and his colleagues are asking the question, “What is the right role of
rural colleges?” Rural working communities are dying. The average age of
farmers is sixty-three. Young people are needed to stay and bring new
enterprise if rural areas are again going to thrive.

In his talk for the *Berkshire Community Land Trust*
<https://centerforneweconomics.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=69d509d113032e3126c4543ce&id=4b737242b4&e=58c6ab1e1c>’s
Annual Meeting
<https://centerforneweconomics.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=69d509d113032e3126c4543ce&id=955f1198b0&e=58c6ab1e1c>
Derr describes this challenge as an opportunity—an opportunity for rural
colleges to create a curriculum that brings higher education and working
landscapes together. To achieve this purpose, Sterling meshes its strong
liberal arts curriculum with the practical skills offered by the member
farmers of the *Center for an Agricultural Economy*
<https://centerforneweconomics.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=69d509d113032e3126c4543ce&id=62e67fcbc4&e=58c6ab1e1c>
(CAE) in nearby Hardwick, VT. Local farmers are paid to give classes in
draft horse husbandry, cheese making, bee keeping, maple syrup production,
et al., on site at their farms. In the process they are passing on
place-based knowledge and assuring a continuity of good husbandry.
<https://centerforneweconomics.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=69d509d113032e3126c4543ce&id=433cd31231&e=58c6ab1e1c>
Growing an Agricultural Economy talk with speakers Matthew Derr and Sarah
Waring.

In the same talk CAE’s Executive Director, Sarah Waring, describes the
Center’s mission as transforming the region’s food system for social,
economic, and ecological vitality. She emphasizes that the level of
cooperation among the players in the system—farmers/producers, restaurants,
stores, schools, hospitals, non-profits, local governments, and
citizen/consumers—is essential to its success. Diversified small farms are
not, by themselves, sustainable. There is a difference between a
place-based economy and a place-based community. An economy is
transactional in nature, a community reciprocal.

She gives the example of the *Vermont Food Venture Center *
<https://centerforneweconomics.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=69d509d113032e3126c4543ce&id=284a297cde&e=58c6ab1e1c>(VFVC),
a shared-use food hub and business incubator designed for food
entrepreneurs and farmers seeking to grow their business that was built by
CAE with donated funds. VFVC has enabled farmers to craft ways to add value
to their raw field-grown products without having to pay for the cost of the
infrastructure. As the lead tenant of the facility, *Jasper Hill Farm*
<https://centerforneweconomics.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=69d509d113032e3126c4543ce&id=8b563e06a8&e=58c6ab1e1c>,
a highly respected local cheese-maker, recognizes that it is subsidizing
the operational cost of the building so that it can serve as a resource for
further development of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom food system. Jasper Hill
understands that it will take a community of successful farms to embolden a
healthy rural culture.

*Center for an Agricultural Economy. Leiah with carrot shredder.*

Does this partnership between Sterling and CAE, between a rural college
steeped in the liberal arts and the working farmers of its place, represent
the education for the “home-coming” that Wes Jackson at *The Land Institute*
<https://centerforneweconomics.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=69d509d113032e3126c4543ce&id=978c3d8aa3&e=58c6ab1e1c>
is seeking? Surely in part.

At the 36th Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures
<https://centerforneweconomics.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=69d509d113032e3126c4543ce&id=d554d02cf6&e=58c6ab1e1c>,
Wes said, “We’ve been working on this for some time now to figure out what
a curriculum would look like that would educate people to go home rather
than use their education for upward mobility if not lateral mobility, to go
home, dig in, and be there long enough for affection to grow and for
intelligent action on what is needed in that particular community to come
about.”

At the Schumacher Center we would recommend enhancing the curriculum by
adding the skills to imagine and crowd-source development of needed
industries based on the land—wool processing and spinning, furniture
manufacturing, hydro-electric generation, brick making, and other *community
supported industries*.
<https://centerforneweconomics.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=69d509d113032e3126c4543ce&id=4fb9de70ea&e=58c6ab1e1c>
And with these, a knowledge of how to implement the community economic
institutions to support such appropriately scaled industry – *local
currencies
<https://centerforneweconomics.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=69d509d113032e3126c4543ce&id=6a6057acfe&e=58c6ab1e1c>*
,
<https://centerforneweconomics.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=69d509d113032e3126c4543ce&id=5ed8c089e0&e=58c6ab1e1c>
*community
land trusts*,
<https://centerforneweconomics.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=69d509d113032e3126c4543ce&id=dac1eef453&e=58c6ab1e1c>
and the principles of worker-owned cooperatives.

*The Berry Farming Program. Sathya moving Turkeys. *

The Berry Center has recognized that Sterling College is addressing in
Vermont the same questions that The Berry Center is addressing in Henry
County, Kentucky: How can farmers afford to farm well?  How do we become a
culture that supports good farming?

In her talk
<https://centerforneweconomics.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=69d509d113032e3126c4543ce&id=e6a10caa29&e=58c6ab1e1c>
for the Schumacher Center in June of 2018, Mary Berry described the
collaboration between The Berry Center and Sterling College to launch The
Berry Farming Program
<https://centerforneweconomics.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=69d509d113032e3126c4543ce&id=ab425e2e93&e=58c6ab1e1c>
in order to draw tangible connections between education, communities, and
the land.
<https://centerforneweconomics.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=69d509d113032e3126c4543ce&id=9561cd3845&e=58c6ab1e1c>
Good Work is Membership talk by Mary Berry.

“If food is a cultural product, and we believe that it is, then we believe
that there is strength in beginning where our culture is and strengthening
it.  We believe that if mechanisms are put into place to move local
products, if farm production is kept in line with demand, and farm prices
are fair, the rural economy can heal itself.”

She adds, “My father’s subject has been the history of the
industrialization of agriculture and the possibility of changing the
standards by which that history is judged. . . .  One of the most ruinous
myths that has been visited on our countryside is the official doctrine
that there are too many farmers. This has never been revoked. It was, in
fact, this realization that set my father off, as he says, to write *The
Unsettling of America*.”

*The Berry Farming Program.*

“If we agree that food is a cultural product then we have to think about
what has happened to the rural culture. The demand for well-raised local
products going up has met the rural culture coming down. There are fewer
and fewer of us who can recognize what is happening.  It seems to me that
our work is to get hold of what is left of the old culture of thrift,
husbandry, and neighborliness and to strengthen it. To put an economy
around good farming that values it.”

There is no single way for achieving a healthy farm culture. Each rural
area is different.  Its landscape is different. Its people are
different. But Sterling College and the The Berry Center offer an
approach—a rich training in the arts, philosophy, literature, and sciences
that gives value and direction for a life well led, wedded to the practical
skills that connect us to a particular landscape and that grow from a
particular place. Together they help foster “a communal order of memory,
insight, value, work, conviviality, reverence, aspiration.”

Best wishes,

Schumacher Center Staff
Thank you to our speakers Leah Penniman and Ed Whitfield for an exceptional
38th Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures program. For those who missed it,
stay tuned in the coming weeks for an announcement with video footage from
the event. The talks will be transcribed, edited, and posted on our website
<https://centerforneweconomics.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=69d509d113032e3126c4543ce&id=d245280a61&e=58c6ab1e1c>
to read for free. They will also be published as eBooks on Kobo and Kindle
as well as physical pamphlets
<https://centerforneweconomics.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=69d509d113032e3126c4543ce&id=8203bc65fc&e=58c6ab1e1c>.
Each
pamphlet is 5 Berkshares or 5 dollars.

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