We need to confront honestly the issue of scale... You may need a large corporation to run an airline or to manufacture cars, but you don't need a large corporation to raise a chicken or a hog. You don't need a large corporation to process local food or local timber and market it locally.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the importance of scale in different industries and suggests that not all endeavors require large corporations.
Wendell Berry emphasizes the need to recognize that while certain industries, like airlines and automobile manufacturing, necessitate large-scale corporate structures due to their inherent complexities, smaller-scale agricultural and local production can thrive without the involvement of big corporations. This perspective encourages localism and the value of community-driven initiatives, showcasing that smaller operations can be more sustainable and beneficial to local economies.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about sustainable agriculture in a community meeting.
We weren't allowing our hopes to become expectations. Expectations are tempting, pleasant, maybe necessary. They are scary too, once you have had some experience. They are not necessarily and not always a bucket of smoke, but they can be and are even likely to be.
The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.
A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
WE ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY - I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.
Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.
We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.
I have tried in my way to be free.
Where a man's heart is, there is his treasure also.
Nothing teaches us about the preciousness of the Creator as much as when we learn the emptiness of everything else.
The first attempt at a response: there must have been a fall, a decline, and the road to salvation can only be the return of the sensible finite into the intelligible infinite.
Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.
Within my body are all the sacred places of the world, and the most profound pilgrimage I can ever make is within my own body.
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