I’ve been reading a short collection of essays by Wendell Berry called Another Turn of the Crank. I’m not ready to sign on to Berry’s agrarian vision, but I do think he makes some important observations. In an essay called “The Conservation of Nature and the Preservation of Humanity,” he points out that much of the environmental movement sets up a dichotomy between pristine “wilderness” and land that has been exploited and abused by human beings. But what we really need, Berry says, are models for good fruitful use of the land by humans, not an idealized human-free landscape:

That there have been and are well-used landscapes we know, and to leave these landscapes out of account is to leave out humanity at its best. It is certainly necessary to keep in mind the image of the human being as parasite and wrecker–what e.e. cummings called “this busy monster manunkind”–for it is dangerous not to know this possibility in ourselves. And ceratinly we must preserve some places unchanged; there should be places, and times too, in which we do nothing. But we must also include ourselves as makers, as economic creatures with livings to make, who have the ability, if we will use it, to work in ways that are stewardly and kind toward all that we must use. That is, we must include ourselves as human beings in the fullest sense of the term, understanding ourselves in the fullness of our cultural inheritance and our legitimate hopes. (p. 72)

Berry’s point is simple: “as we cannot exempt ourselves from living in this world, then if we wish to live, we cannot exempt ourselves from using the world.”

Even the most scrupulous vegetarians must use the world–that is, they must kill creatures, substitute one species for another, and eat food that otherwise would be eaten by other creatures. And so by the standard of absolute harmlessness, the two available parties are not vegetarians and meat eaters but rather eaters and noneaters. Us eaters have got ’em greatly outnumbered. (p. 73)

The trick is to combine use with care. And to treat our fellow-creatures with care requires us to dig into the roots of our ethical and religious traditions. Contrary to a scientism that would reduce living creatures to an assemblage of mechanical parts care “allows creatures to escape our explanations into their actual presence and their essential mystery”

In taking care of fellow creatures, we acknowledge that they are not ours; we acknowledge that they belong to an order and a harmony of which we ourselves are parts. To answer to the perpetual crisis of our presence in this abounding and dangerous world, we have only the perpetual obligation of care. (p. 77)

But, as they say, charity begins at home. “Misanthropy is not the remedy for ‘anthropocentrism.’ Finally we must see that we cannot be kind toward our fellow creatures except by the same qualities that make us kind toward our fellow humans.” Interestingly, Berry takes abortion as a chief exemplar of the ways in which we have cheapened human life. And this is of a piece with the rest of our violence. “If we cannot justify violence to unborn human beings, then how can we justify violence to those who are born, or to the world they are born into?”

Obviously the guiding principle of “care” needs to be fleshed out in ways that take into account conflicts of interests. Berry concedes as much himself when he concedes that, though he believes abortion to be wrong, he can imagine situations where choosing it would be the lesser evil. One problem is that it’s so easy for us to privilege the claims of the relatively strong over the weak and voiceless. This is one of the limits of a rights-based ethic: rights-bearers are often identified by their ability to make claims on their own behalf. Thus those who are unable to claim their rights, at least in our approved language of public philosophy, are held to have none.

But his main point, which strikes me as sound, is that, in general, any policy of sustainability has to be rooted in the possibility of thriving human communities. A sustainable human way of life has to also be a sustainable human way of life.