old ideals of enough and plenty have been overruled by the ideals of all you want and all you can get. They cannot imagine that for farmers a limitless market share, like a limitless appetite, can lead only to the related diseases of too much and too little.
Science, apart from moral limits in scientists, seems to be limitless, for it has produced nuclear and chemical abominations that humans, with their very limited intelligence, can neither limit nor safely live with. “Anything goes” and “Stop at nothing” are the moral principles that some scientists have borrowed apparently from the greediest of conservatives and the most libertine of liberals. The faith that limitless technological progress will finally solve the problems of limitless contamination seems to depend upon some sort of neo-religion.
The good care of land and people, on the contrary, depends primarily upon arts, ways of making and doing. One cannot be, above all, a good neighbor without such ways. And the arts, all of them, are limited. Apart from limits they cannot exist. The making of any good work of art depends, first, upon limits of purpose and attention, and then upon limits specific to the kind of art and its means.
It is a formidable paradox that in order to achieve the sort of limitlessness we have begun to call “sustainability,” whether in human life or the life of the ecosphere, strict limits must be observed. Enduring structures of household and family life, or the life of a community or the life of a country, cannot be formed except within limits. We must not outdistance local knowledge and affection, or the capacities of local persons to pay attention to details, to the “minute particulars” only by which, William Blake thought, we can do good to one another. Within limits, we can think of rightness of scale. When the scale is right, we can imagine completeness of form.
The first limit to be encountered in making a farm—or a regional or national economy—is carrying capacity: How much can we ask of this land, this field or this pasture or this woodland, without diminishing the land’s response? And then we come to other limits, perhaps many of them, each one addressing directly our imagination, sympathy, affection, forbearance, knowledge, and skill. And now I must call to mind Aldo Leopold, who, unlike most conservationists since John Muir, could think beyond wilderness conservation to conservation of the country’s economic landscapes of farming and forestry. His conception of humanity’s relation to the natural world was eminently practical, and this must have come from his experience as a hunter and fisherman, his study of game management, and his and his family’s restoration of their once-exhausted Sand County farm. He knew that land-destruction is easy, for it requires only ignorance and violence. But the obligation to restore the land and conserve it requires humanity in its highest, completest sense. The Leopold family renewed the fertility and health of their land by their work, their pleasure, and their love for their place and for one another.
Aldo Leopold thought carefully about farming and forestry because he knew that far more land would be put to those uses than ever could be safeguarded in wilderness preserves. In an essay of 1945, “The Outlook for Farm Wildlife,” he laid side by side “two opposing philosophies of farm life” (the italics being his):
1 The farm is a food-factory, and the criterion of its success is salable products.
2 The farm is a place to live. The criterion of success is a harmonious balance between plants, animals, and people; between the domestic and the wild; between utility and beauty.
This is a statement about form, contrasting a form that is too simple and too exclusive with a form that may be complex enough to accommodate the interest of what is actually involved. Under the rule of the first form, “the trend of the landscape is toward a monotype.” This form can be adequately described as the straightest, shortest line between input and income. All else is left out or denied. Such a form concedes nothing to its whereabouts. It is placed upon whatever landscape merely by imposition, as a cookie cutter is imposed upon dough. In its simplicity and rigidity, such a form is bad art, but also, as Leopold knew and as we now know better than he could have, it is bad science.
The second form is described as “a harmonious balance” among a diversity of interests. On such a farm, made whole by the high artistry of farming, every part is both limited and enabled by the others. This harmonious balance, I should not need to say, cannot be prefabricated. It can be realized only uniquely within the boundary of any given farm, according to the natures and demands of its indwelling plants and animals, and according to the abilities, needs, and wishes of its resident human family. Wherever this is fully accomplished, it is a grand masterpiece to behold.
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