Berry in Babylon

A critique I do not want to make

I was recently introduced to the writing of Wendell Berry, and have been reading Our Only World: Ten Essays. It has moved me deeply, and I’ve been reading passages out loud, posting quotes online, marking up my print copy almost too much. Wendell Berry writes in a manner both simple and profound.

Then I read the essay “Less Energy, More Life”, and realized that as beautiful as his vision of how humans should live is, it is severely limited. There are problems facing humanity that his approach to life cannot solve.

The essay starts with both mountaintop removal for coal mining (a concern for a writer whose life is centered in rural Kentucky), and climate change. “It is not as though we have not been warned”, he writes - but he is not talking about the problems caused by fossil fuel, but rather industrialization and modernity in general. I’m well aware of this - I call it “Babylon”, after the Rastafarian term for the exploitation and alienation of humans, the result of materialism and modernism (and hence the title of this essay). But then he turns to what others would call Degrowth.

We must understand that fossil fuel energy must be replaced, not just by “clean” energy, but by less energy. The unlimited use of any energy would be as destructive as unlimited economic growth or any other unlimited force. If we had a limitless supply of free, nonpolluting energy, we would use the world up even faster than we are using it now.

And this is where we part ways, a fundamental disagreement. We cannot escape Babylon by going backward - only by going forward.

I do not believe that we can just move everyone on Earth into the farms and villages of Wendell Berry’s pastoral vision, even if everyone wanted to - which, to be sure, most do not. That’s because of the sheer scope of the world’s population. It has more than doubled in just my lifetime; it has grown eightfold in the past 200 years, and will have grown tenfold by the time it peaks in 50 years or so. We rely on industrialized, high productivity agriculture to feed that many without massive famines - a level of agricultural productivity that will be difficult to maintain, simply because of the impact of climate change over the next half-century or more. Barring social collapse and gigadeaths from famine and war, this moment is likely the smallest population anyone alive right now will ever experience, even newborn babies. This is not to say we shouldn’t try to preserve the idea of a wholesome rural life - we absolutely should. But we cannot do it for everyone, not at this point in history, and not for a long time to come, until the population declines to a much more manageable level.

The population explosion of the past centuries was made possible in large part by the massive influx of energy from fossil fuels. And not only has the population exploded, but poverty has plummeted. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, 90% of the world lived in what would be considered extreme poverty today - penniless, illiterate, hungry, and with no chance of upward social mobility.

The idyllic small town life of Wendell Berry’s writing was made possible by fossil fuel wealth. My own ancestry is from southwestern Kentucky. My Papaw was an illiterate tobacco farmer, like his father and his grandfather, going as far back as at least 1820. My father left the farm, left the state, and owned a small landscaping business. I went to college and became a software engineer. When I was a small child, I thought Papaw’s farm was the most wonderful place in the world. I look back and see that they didn’t have electricity or running water. Five of my father’s 12 siblings died as babies or small children. That’s poverty. I want people to be able to live on rural farms, in small villages, in real harmony with the land - but I also want them to have the opportunity to go to college and get a Master’s degree, as Berry did, and make a conscious choice whether to return to that life, or live in Babylon.

But for a long time now, fossil fuel has been ruining the climate, threatening the way of life Berry dreams of preserving. We cannot continue to use it, or it will destroy our civilization - not just Babylon. Renewable energy from solar and wind, with batteries and other storage to time-shift when it is available to when it needed, solves the climate destruction of fossil fuel in a minimally invasive way. Moreover, it can be scaled small and widely distributed, helping those farms and small communities become less rather than more dependent on Babylon. A small farm can generate all the power it needs to operate on its own.

This is, precisely, the “limitless supply of free, nonpolluting energy” that Berry fears.

I do not fear it. And the reason I do not fear it is because I do not believe (most) human beings are merely creatures of limitless greed. Once our needs are met, our wants are limited. If we have clean water, sufficient food, a home to live in, health care, educational opportunities, and the ability to travel when we wish… I believe most people would be more than satisfied. If a pastoral small town life was practical for everyone, and not just a path to poverty and exploitation and boredom, that many would choose to live that life. And the city dwellers may choose to live in Babylon, but most would not choose to exploit others or destroy the planet in order to do so.

I do not believe that a “limitless supply of free, nonpolluting energy” will cause humanity to mine and pave the entire planet. Rather, I think it’s what will save the planet. We are already seeing this, with the forces that are leveling off the global population (and will cause it to start declining this century). We have transitioned from a world of high birthrates and high child mortality, where half the children died before the age of five, to a world of low birthrates and nearly nonexistent child mortality - less than 1% in a majority of nations on Earth today. Rather than the endless “population bomb” spiral that was feared in the 1960s, people who have a choice mostly choose to have few or no children. And so I believe we will see with consumption as well. Most people would prefer a cottage to a castle.

I dream that maybe, a few centuries from now, a world with only a billion or so people, with limitless and decentralized clean energy, will put an end to most of Babylon. Tomorrow’s children will choose the sort of sustainable, low-impact lives that Berry argues for so passionately in his writing. The people of that future will seek meaning in their relationships with Nature and community, not in infinitely growing consumption or disastrous boom/bust cycles.

But it’s going to take many lifetimes to get there.