Essays like The Whole Horse are harder to read than most, but I love reading them. I was first surprise to find that this essay was written in 2002. In all honesty, I thought this essay was written during the industrial area with the populist {I think that was the party that were farmers and hated industrialization}. In these types of essays I like to know a little bit about the author, what I found was that he had a degree in English, and went from University teaching. Then he owned a farm with tobacco, corn and other grains (Wiki).
With that in mind, getting in the essay I couldn’t hundred percent agree with him or disagree. For the most part, I would have to disagree. “Industrialism is the separation of people and places and products from their histories.” This statement I find to be false, because industrialism is part of our history and a big factor of it involving the well-being of our nation and the people. Then he mentions the conservation movement and its downfall. To me, agrarianism is the idea of taking both movements and putting it together on a small level. He is anti-globalization and anti-big government. However, he seems to lack a little history himself. If you divided it into a “sound local economy, in which producers and consumers are neighbors, nature will become the standard of work and production” for the sake of nature, you put the nation in trouble of being divided, and as history recalls divided we fall.
I understand the need to have a health relationship between nature and us, because we are in fact part of nature, but people will notice this and the way we have our economy set up we allow the people to control it. The author gives the fine example of this when he goes on talking about the food industry. Due to the bad food that the industry had to recall, or the change of society organic food had started becoming big, making room for change within the industrial system to switch to what the consumer wants. Just because the people do not hold on to useless stuff anymore doesn’t mean that we should blame those who brought on the change of better things. History is also about change.
I could go on about this writing, and nit-pick it, because I like reading these types of papers and debating with them, wither I’m right or wrong. However, I think it’s best I stop now. The piece was most interesting.
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I like how you brought more information into your blog rather than just what was in the article. While reading "The Whole Horse", I often got the feeling that maybe Berry didn't have all the facts, and you pretty much summarized my theory when you said, "However, he seems to lack a little history himself." To me, it seems Berry just needs to be accepting of the fact that change can be good, and industrialism has done many good things for us. Like you said, history is about change.
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