The environmental crisis and the local economy
May 5th, 2006 by Jim JustWendell Berry explains that it’s no accident that globalization has become dogma at the same time our environmental crisis is becoming manifest. Unprecedented “prosperity” and “economic growth” have led to degraded farms, forests, ecosystems, and watersheds, polluted air, failing families, and perishing communities. We have an “environmental crisis” because we have consented to an economy in which by eating, drinking, working, resting, traveling, and enjoying ourselves we are destroying the natural, the god-given world—all in the name of the “free market,” which promises to bring unprecedented security and happiness to “the many”—not now, of course, but someday in the future. The “environmental crisis” can be solved only if people, individually and in their communities, recover responsibility for their local economies.