The Proper Use of Land

Among material resources, the greatest, unquestionably, is the land, Study how a society uses its land, and you can come to pretty reliable conclusions as to what its future will be.

The land carries the topsoil, and the topsoil carries an immense variety of living beings including man. In 1955, Tom Dale and Vernon Gill Carter, both highly experienced ecologists, published a book call ed Topsoil and Civilisation. I cannot do better, for the purposes of this chapter, than quote some of their opening paragraphs:

‘Civilised man was nearly always able to become master of his environment temporarily. His chief troubles came from his delusions that his temporary master ship was permanent. He thought of himself as “master of the world”, while failing to understand fully the laws of nature. ‘Man, whether civilised or savage, is a child of nature – he is not the master of nature. He must conform his actions to certain natural laws if he is to maintain his dominance over his environment. When he tries to circumvent the laws of nature, he usually destroys the natural environment that sustains him. And when his environment deteriorates rapidly, his civilisation declines.

‘One man has given a brief outline of history by saying that “civilised man has marched across the face of the earth and left a desert in his footprints”. This statement may be somewhat of an exaggeration, but it is not without foundation. Civilised man has despoiled most of the lands on which he has lived for long. This is the main reason why his progressive civilisations have moved from place to place. It has been the chief cause for the decline of his civilisations in older settled regions. It has been the dominant factor in determining all trends of history.

‘The writers of history have seldom noted the importance of land use. They seem not to have recognised that the destinies of most of man’s empires and civilisations were determined largely by the way the land was used. While recognising the influence of environment on history, they fail to note that man usually changed or despoiled his environment.

‘How did civilised man despoil this favourable environment? He did it mainly by depleting or destroying the natural resources. He cut down or burned most of the usable timber from forested hillsides and valleys. He overgrazed and denuded the grasslands that fed his livestock. He killed most of the wildlife and much of the fish and other water life. He permitted erosion to rob his farm land of its productive topsoil. He allowed eroded soil to clog the streams and fill his reservoirs, irrigation canals, and harbours with silt. In many cases, he used and wasted most of the easily mined metals or other needed minerals. Then his civilisation declined amidst the despoliation of his own creation or he moved to new land. There have been from ten to thirty different civilisations that have followed, this road to ruin (the number depending on who classifies the civilisations).’’

The ’ecological problem’, it seems, is not as new as it is frequently made out to be. Yet there are two decisive differences: the earth is now much more densely populated than it was in earlier times and there are, generally speaking, no new lands to move to; and the rate of change has enormously accelerated, particularly during the last quarter of a century.

All the same, it is still the dominant belief today that, whatever may have happened with earlier civilisations, our own modem, western civilisation has emancipated itself from dependence upon nature. A representative voice’ is that of Eugene Rabinowitch. editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

The only animals.’ he says (in The Times of 29 April 1972), ‘whose disappearance may threaten the biological viability of man on earth are the bacteria normally inhabiting our bodies. For the rest there is no convincing proof that mankind could not survive even as the only animal species on earth! If economical ways could be developed for synthesising food from inorganic raw materials – which is likely to happen sooner or later – man may even be able to become independent of plants, on which he now depends as sources of his food…, I personally – and, I suspect, a vast majority of mankind – would shudder at the idea (of a habitat without animals and plants). But millions of inhabitants of “city jungles” of New York, Chicago, London or Tokyo have grown up and spent their whole lives in a practically “azoic” habitat (leaving out rats, mice, cockroaches and other such obnoxious species) and have survived.’

Eugene Rabinowitch obviously considers the above a ‘rationally justifiable’ statement. He deplores that ‘many rationally unjustifiable’ things have been written in recent years – some by very reputable scientists – about the sacredness of natural ecological systems, their inherent stability and the danger of human interference with them’.

What is ‘rational’ and what is ‘sacred’? Is man the master of nature or its child? If it becomes ’economical’ to synthesise food from inorganic materials – ‘which is likely to happen sooner or later’ – if we become independent of plants, the connection between topsoil and civilisation will be broken. Or will it? These questions suggest that ‘The Proper Use of Land’ poses, not a technical nor an economic, but primarily a metaphysical problem. The problem obviously belongs to a higher level of rational thinking than that represented by the last two quotations.

There are always some things which we do for their own sakes, and there are other things which we do for some other purpose. One of the most important tasks for any society is to distinguish between ends and means-to-ends, and to have some sort of cohesive view and agreement about this. Is the land merely a means of production or is it something more, something that is an end in itself? And when I say ’land’, I include the creatures upon it.

Anything we do just for the sake of doing it does not lend itself to utilitarian calculation. For instance, most of us try to keep ourselves reasonably clean. Why? Simply for hygienic reasons? No, the hygienic aspect is secondary; we recognise cleanliness as a value in itself. We do not calculate its value; the economic calculus simply does not come in. It could be argued that to wash is uneconomic: it costs time and money and produces nothing – except cleanliness. There are many activities which are totally uneconomic, but they are carried on for their own sakes. The economists have an easy way of dealing with them: they divide all human activities between ‘production’ and ‘consumption’. Anything we do under the head of ‘production’ is subject to the economic calculus, and anything we do under the heading of ‘consumption’ is not. But real life is very refractory to such classifications, because man-as-producer and man-as-consumer is in fact the same man, who is always producing and consuming all the same time. Even a worker in his factory consumes certain ‘amenities’, commonly referred to as ‘working conditions’, and when insufficient ‘amenities’ are provided he cannot – or refuses to – carry on. And even the man who consumes water and soap may be said to be producing cleanliness.

We produce in order to be able to afford certain amenities and comforts as ‘consumers’. If, however, somebody demanded these same amenities and comforts while he was engaged in ‘production’, he would be told that this would be uneconomic, that it would be inefficient, and that society could not afford such inefficiency. In other words, everything depends on whether it is done by man-as-producer or by man-as-consumer. If man-as- producer travels first-class or uses a luxurious car, this is called a waste of money: but if the same man in his other incarnation of man-as-consumer does the same, this is called a sign of a high standard of life.

Nowhere is this dichotomy more noticeable than in connection with the use of the land. The farmer is considered simply as a producer who must cut his costs and raise his efficiency by every possible device, even if he thereby destroys – for man-as-consumer – the health of the soil and beauty of the landscape, and even if the end effect is the depopulation of the land and the overcrowding of cities. There are large-scale farmers, horticulturists, food manufacturers and fruit growers today who would never think of consuming any of their own products. ’luckily, they say, ‘we have enough money to be able to afford to buy products which have been organically grown, without the use of poisons.’ When-they are asked why they themselves do not adhere to organic methods and avoid the use of poisonous substances, they reply that they could not afford to do so. What man-as-producer can afford is one thing; what man-as-consumer can afford is quite another thing. But since the two are the same man, the question of what man – or society – can really afford gives rise to endless confusion.

There is no escape from this confusion as long as the land and the creatures upon it are looked upon as nothing but ‘factors of production’. They are, of course, factors of production, that is to say, means-to-ends, but this is their secondary, not their primary, nature. Before everything else, they are ends-in-themselves; they are meta-economic, and it is therefore rationally justifiable to say, as a statement of fact, that they are in a certain sense sacred. Man has not made them, and it is irrational for him to treat things that he has not made and cannot make and cannot recreate once he has spoilt them, in the same manner and spirit as he is entitled to treat things of his own making.

The higher animals have an economic value because of their utility; but they have a meta-economic value in themselves. If I have a car, a man-made thing, I might quite legitimately argue that the best way to use it is never to bother about maintenance and simply run it to ruin. I may indeed have calculated that this is the most economical method of use. If the calculation is correct, nobody can criticise me for acting accordingly, for there is nothing sacred about a man-made thing like a car. But if I have an animal -be it only a calf or a hen – a living, sensitive creature, am I allowed to treat it as nothing but a utility? Am I allowed to run it to ruin?

It is no use trying to answer such questions scientifically. They are metaphysical, not scientific, questions. It is a metaphysical error, likely to produce the gravest practical consequences, to equate ‘car’ and ‘animal’ on account of their utility, while failing to recognize the most fundamental difference between them, that of ’level of being’. An irreligious age looks with amused contempt upon the hallowed statements by which religion helped our for- bears to appreciate metaphysical truths. ‘And the Lord God took man and put him in the Garden of Eden’ – not to be idle, but ’to dress it and keep it’. ‘And he also gave man dominion over the fish in the sea and the fowl in the air, and over every living being that moves upon the earth.’ When he had made ’the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and everything that creepeth upon the earth after his kind’, he saw that it was ‘good’. But when he saw everything he had made, the entire biosphere, as we say today, ‘behold, it was very good’. Man, the highest of his creatures, was given ‘dominion’, not the right to tyrannise, to ruin and exterminate. It is no use talking about the dignity of man without accepting that noblesse oblige. For man to put himself into a wrongful relationship with animals, and particularly those long domesticated by him, has always, in all traditions, been considered a horrible and infinitely dangerous thing to do. There have been no sages or holy men in our or in anybody else’s history who were cruel to animals or who looked upon them as nothing but utilities, and innumerable are the legends and stories which link sanctity as well as happiness with a loving kindness towards lower creation.

It is interesting to note that modem man is being told, in the name of science, that he is really nothing but a naked ape or even an accidental collocation of atoms. ‘Now we can define man’, says Professor Joshua Lederberg. ‘Genotypically at least, he is six feet of a particular molecular sequence of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and phosphorous atoms.‘2 As modern man thinks so ‘humbly’ of himself, he thinks even more ‘humbly’ of the animals which serve his needs: and treats them as if they were machines. Other, less sophisticated – or is it less depraved? – people take a different attitude. As H. Fielding Hall reported from Burma:

‘To him (the Burmese) men are men, and animals are animals, and men are far the higher. But he does not deduce from this that man’s superiority gives him permission to ill-treat or kill animals. It is just the reverse. It is because man is so much higher than the animal that he can and must observe towards animals the very greatest care, feel for them the very greatest compassion, be good to them in every way he can. The Burmese’s motto should be noblesse oblige. He knows the meaning, he knows not the words.’ In Proverbs we read that the just man takes care of his beast, but the heart of the wicked is merciless, and St Thomas Aquinas wrote: ‘It is evident that if a man practises a compassionate affection for animals, he is all the more disposed to feel compassion for his fellowmen.’ No-one ever raised the question of whether they could asked to live in accordance with, these convictions. At the level of values, of ends-in-themselves, there is no question of ‘affording’.

What applies to the animals upon the land applies equally, and without any suspicion of sentimentality, to the land itself. Although ignorance and greed have again and again destroyed the fertility of the soil to such an extent that whole civilisations foundered, there have been no traditional teachings which failed to recognise the meta-economic value and significance of ’the generous earth’. And where these teachings were heeded. not only agriculture but also of all other factors of civilisation achieved health and wholeness. Conversely, where people imagined that they could not ‘afford’ to care for the soil and work with nature, instead of against it, the resultant sickness of the soil has invariably imparted sickness to all the other factors of civilisation.

In our time, the main danger to the soil, and therewith not only to agriculture but to civilisation as a whole, stems from the towns- man’s determination to apply to agriculture the principles of industry. No more typical representative of this tendency could be found than Dr Sicco I.. Mansholt, who, as Vice-President of the European Economic Community, launched the Mansholt Plan for European Agriculture. He believes that the farmers are ‘a group that has still not grasped the rapid changes in society’. Most of them ought to get out of farming and become industrial labourers in the cities, because ‘factory workers, men on building sites and those in administrative jobs – have a five-day week and two weeks’ annual holiday already. Soon they may have a four-day week and four weeks’ holiday per year. And the farmer: he is condemned to working a seven day week because the five day cow has not yet been invented, and he gets no holiday at ail." The Mansholt Plan, accordingly, is designed to achieve, as quickly as humanely possible, the amalgamation of many small family farms into large agricultural units operated as if they were factories, and the maximum rate of reduction in the community’s agriculture population. Aid is to be given ‘which would enable the older as well as the younger farmers to leave agriculture’."

In the discussion of the Mansholt Plan, agriculture is generally referred to as one of Europe’s ‘industries’. The question arises of whether agriculture is, in fact, an industry, or whether it might be something essentially different. Not surprisingly, as this is a metaphysical – or meta-economic – question, it is never raised by economists.

Now, the fundamental ‘principle’ of agriculture is that it deals with life, that is to say, with living substances. Its products are the results of processes of life and its means of production is the living soil. A cubic centimetre of fertile soil contains milliards of living organisms, the full exploration of which is far beyond the capacities of man. The fundamental ‘principle’ of modern industry, on the other hand, is that it deals with man-devised processes which work reliably only when applied to man-devised, non-living materials. The ideal of industry is the elimination of living substances. Man-made materials are preferable to natural materials, because we can make them to measure and apply perfect quality control. Man-made machines work more reliably and more predictably than do such living substances as men. The ideal of industry is to eliminate the living factor, even including the human factor, and to turn the productive process over to machines. At Alfred North Withehead defined life as ‘an offensive directed against the repetitious mechanism of the universe’, so we may define modern industry as ‘an offensive against the unpredictability, un- punctuality, general waywardness and cussedness of living nature, including man’.

In other words, there can be no doubt that the fundamental ‘principles’ of agriculture and of industry, far from being compatible with each other, are in opposition. Real life consists of the tensions produced by the incompatibility of opposites, each of which is needed, and just as life would be meaningless without death, so agriculture would be meaningless without industry. It remains true, however, that agriculture is primary, whereas industry is secondary, which means that human life can continue with- out industry, whereas it cannot continue without agriculture. Human life at the level of civilisation, however, demands the balance of the two principles, and this balance is ineluctably destroyed when people fail to appreciate the essential difference between agriculture and industry – a difference as great as that between life and death – and attempt to treat agriculture as just another industry.

The argument is, of course, a familiar one. It was put succinctly by a group of internationally recognised experts in A Future for European Agriculture:

Different parts of the world possess widely differing advantages for the production of particular products, depending on differences in climate, the quality of the soil and cost of labour. All countries would gain from a division of labour which enabled them to concentrate production on their most highly productive agricultural operations. This would result both in higher income for agriculture and lower costs for the entire economy, particularly for industry. No fundamental justification can be found for agricultural protectionism.6 It this were so it would be totally incomprehensible that agricultural protectionism, throughout history, has been the rule rather than the exception. Why are most countries, most of the time, unwilling to gain these splendid rewards from so simple a prescription? Precisely because there is more involved in ‘agricultural operations’ than the production of incomes and the lowering of costs: what is involved is the whole relationship between man and nature, the whole life-style of a society, the health, happiness and harmony of man, as well as the beauty of his habitat. If all these things are left out of the experts’ considerations, man himself is left out – even if our experts try to bring him in, as it were, after the event, by pleading that the community should pay for the ‘social consequences’ of their policies. The Mansholt Plan. say the experts, ‘represents a bold initiative. It is based on the acceptance of a fundamental principle: agricultural income can only be maintained if the reduction in the agricultural population is accelerated, and if farms rapidly reach an economically viable size.‘‘7 Or again: ‘Agriculture, in Europe at least is essentially directed towards food-production…. It is well known that the demand for food increases relatively slowly with increases in real income. This causes the total incomes earned in agriculture to rise more slowly in comparison with the incomes earned in industry; to maintain the same rate of growth of incomes per head is only possible if there is an adequate rate of decline in the numbers engaged in agriculture.“8 …‘The conclusions seem inescapable: under circumstances which are normal in other advanced countries, the community would be able to satisfy its own needs with only one third as many farmers as now.‘9

No serious exception can be taken to these statements if we adopt – as the experts have adopted – the metaphysical position of the crudest materialism, for which money costs and money incomes are the ultimate criteria and determinants of human action, and tile living world has no significance beyond that of a quarry for exploitation.

On a wider view, however, the land is seen as a priceless asset which it is man’s task and happiness ’to dress and to keep’. We can say that man’s management of the land must be primarily orientated towards three goals -health, beauty, and permanence. The fourth goal – the only one accepted by the experts – productivity, wilt then be attained almost as a by-product. The crude materialist view sees agriculture as ’essentially directed towards food-production’, A wider view sees agriculture as having to fulfil at least three tasks:

• to keep man in touch with living nature, of which he is and remains a highly vulnerable part;

• to humanise and ennoble man’s wider habitat; and

• to bring forth the foodstuffs and other materials which are needed for a becoming life.

I do not believe that a civilisation which recognises only the third of these tasks, and which pursues it with such ruthlessness and violence that the other two tasks are not merely neglected but systematically counteracted, has any chance of long-term survival. Today, we take pride in the fact that the proportion of people engaged in agriculture has fallen to very low levels and continues to fall. Great Britain produces some sixty per cent of its food requirements while only three per cent of its working population are working on farms. In the United States, there were still twenty- seven per cent of the nation’s workers in agriculture at the end of World War I, and fourteen per cent at the end of World War II: the estimate for 1971 shows only 4-4 per cent. These declines in the proportion of workers engaged in agriculture are generally associated with a massive flight from the land and a burgeoning of cities. At the same time, however, to quote Lewis Herber:

Metropolitan life is breaking down. psychologically, economically and biologically. Millions of people have acknowledged this breakdown by voting with their feet, they have picked up their belongings and left, If they have not been able to sever their connections with the metropolis, at least they have tried. As a social symptom the effort is significant.10

In the vast modern towns, says Mr Herber, the urban dweller is more isolated than his ancestors were in the countryside: ‘The city man in a modern metropolis has reached a degree of anonymity, social atomisation and spiritual isolation that is virtually unprecedented in human history.‘11

So what does he do? He tries to get into the suburbs and becomes a commuter. Because rural culture has broken down, the rural people are fleeing from the land~ and because metropolitan life is breaking down, urban people are fleeing from the cities. ‘Nobody, according to Dr Mansholt, ‘can afford the luxury of not acting economically”,12 with the result that everywhere life tends to become intolerable for anyone except the very rich.

I agree with Mr Herber’s assertion that ‘reconciliation of man with the natural world is no longer merely desirable, it has become a necessity’. And this cannot be achieved by tourism, sightseeing, or other leisure-time activities, but only by changing the structure of agriculture in a direction exactly opposite to that proposed by Dr Mansholt and supported by the experts quoted above: instead of searching for means to accelerate the drift out of agriculture, we should be searching for policies to reconstruct rural culture, to open the land for the gainful occupation to larger numbers of people, whether it be on a full-time or a part-time basis, and to orientate all our actions on the land towards the threefold ideal of health, beauty, and permanence.

The social structure of agriculture, which has been produced by – and is generally held to obtain its justification from – large-scale mechanisation and heavy chemicalisation. makes it impossible to keep man in real touch with living nature; in fact, it sup- ports all the most dangerous modern tendencies of violence, alienation, and environmental destruction Health, beauty and permanence are hardly even respectable subjects for discussion, and this is yet another example of the disregard of human values – and this means a disregard of man – which inevitably results from the idolatry of economism.

If ‘beauty is the splendour of truth’, agriculture cannot fulfil its second task, which is to humanise and ennoble man’s wider habitat, unless it clings faithfully and assiduously to the truths revealed by nature’s living processes. One of them is the law of return; another is diversification – as against any kind of monoculture; another is decentralisation, so that some use can be found for even quite inferior resources which it would never be rational to transport over long distances. Here again, both the trend of things and the advice of the experts is in the exactly opposite direction – towards the industrialisation and depersonalisation of agriculture, towards concentration, specialisation, and any kind of material waste that promises to save labour. As a result, the wider human habitat, far from being humanised and ennobled by man’s agricultural activities, becomes standardised to dreariness or even degraded to ugliness.

All this is being done because man-as-producer cannot afford ’the luxury of not acting economically’, and therefore cannot produce the very necessary ’luxuries’ – like health, beauty, and permanence – which man-as-consumer desires more than anything else. It would cost too much; and the richer we become, the less we can ‘afford’. The aforementioned experts calculate that the ‘burden’ of agricultural support within the Community of the Six amounts to ’nearly three per cent of Gross National Product’, an amount they consider ‘far from negligible’. With an annual growth rate of over three per cent of Gross National Product, one might have thought that such a ‘burden’ could be carried without difficulty: but the experts point out that ’national resources are largely committed to personal consumption, investment and public services…. By using so large a proportion of resources to prop up declining enterprises, whether in agriculture or in industry, the Community foregoes the opportunity to undertake,-, necessary improvements’’ in these other fields.

Nothing could be clearer. If agriculture does not pay, it is just a ‘declining enterprise’. Why prop it up? There are no ’necessary improvements’ as regards the land, but only as regards farmers’ incomes, and these can be made if there are fewer farmers. This is the philosophy of the townsman. alienated from living nature, who promotes his own scale of priorities by arguing in economic terms that we cannot ‘afford’ any other. In fact, any society can afford to look after its land and keep it healthy and beautiful in perpetuity. There are no technical difficulties and there is no lack of relevant knowledge. There is no need to consult economic experts when the question is one of priorities. We know too much about ecology today to have any excuse for the many abuses that are currently going on in the management of the land, in the management of animals, in food storage, food processing, and in heedless urbanisation. If we permit them, this is not due to poverty, as if we could not afford to stop them; it is due to the fact that, as a society, we have no firm basis of belief in any meta-economic values, and when there is no such belief the economic calculus takes over. This is quite inevitable. How could it be otherwise? Nature, it has been said, abhors a vacuum, and when the avail- able ‘spiritual space’ is not filled by some higher motivation, then it will necessarily be filled by something lower – by the small, mean, calculating attitude to life which is rationalised in the economic calculus.

I have no doubt that a callous attitude to the land and to the animals thereon is connected with, and symptomatic of, a great many other attitudes, such as those producing a fanaticism of rapid change and a fascination with novelties- technical, organisational, chemical, biological, and so forth -which insists on their application long before their long-term consequences are even remotely understood. In the simple question of how we treat the land, next to people our most precious resource, our entire way of life is involved, and before our policies with regard to the land will really be changed, there will have to be a great deal of philosophical, not to say religious, change. It is not a question of what we can afford but of what we choose to spend our money on. If we could return to a generous recognition of meta-economic values, our landscapes would become healthy and beautiful again and our people would regain the dignity of man, who knows himself as higher than the animal but never forgets that noblesse oblige.

1. Topsoil and Civilisation by Tom Dale and Vernon Gill Carter (University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Okla., 1955)

2. Man and His Future, edited by Gordon Wolsten-holme (A Ciba Foundation Volume, J. & A. Churchill Ltd., London, 1963)

3. The Soul of a People by H. Fielding Hall (Macmillan & Co., Ltd., London, 1920)

4. Our Accelerating Century by Dr. S. L. Mansholt (The Royal Dutch/Shell Lectures on Industry and Society, London, 1967)

5. A Future for European Agriculture by D. Bergmann, M. Rossi-Doria, N. Kaldor, J. A. Schnittker, H. B. Krohn, C. Thomsen, J. S. March, H. Wilbrandt, Pierre Uri (The Atlantic Institute, Paris, 1970)

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. Our Synthetic Environment by Lewis Herber (Jonathan Cape Ltd., London, 1963)

11. Ibid.

12. Op. cit.

13. Op. cit.