No Turning Back

In our readings in the past few weeks we have read about how land should be more about place rather than price and that putting price on land somehow devalues it's inherent use. Does monetary value and sentimental value need to be two mutually exclusive things? No. Land is priced based on its value to the general man but certain sentimental aspects can, and do, affect the price. Take an old house of example if something of import happened in that house and plot of land the price goes up. If someone is reluctant to sell their farm because it has been in the family for a long time the price goes up (farmland doesn't come up for sale very often so you can charge a lot for it.) Land value reflects a great many things and not just the value it has for use. The reason we monetize land (and anything really) isn't because we are greedy or no longer see it as important it's because its an easy way to trade. What if we didn't see land as something to be bought and sold with money but rather traded for? That's well and good until my acre of farmland is worth one and a half cows to you.

However many of the authors we have read seem to want land to be passed down from father to son and mother to daughter. Let's look back to history where that system was prevalent the feudal ages. Back then very few people owned the majority of the land (sound familiar?) and anyone who didn't own land couldn't hope to acquire any unless they somehow married into a family with land. The gap between the haves and the have-nots was astronomical and could not hope to be closed. But when we decided that people shouldn't only be able to acquire land through inheritance and maybe purchase some from someone who has too much to work by themselves we see the gap shrink. Now almost anyone who wants to (e.g. the organic farmer who came to our class) can buy some land if they are willing to risk it. People have choice and can begin to farm however they please not how the landed gentry tell them to. Why would we want to go to a system with less choice and really more divisiveness? One people fought against so long ago? We can say that maybe we would do it better and maybe our version wouldn't be so bad and that we have learned from past mistakes. We can say maybe sometimes taking a step back is the best way forward.

Not this time. We cannot take an old economic system and make it work for mainstream society because our values have changed. We want to be connected to EVERYONE in the entire world not just our small community. What about the Amish, we ask, they make it work. The Amish are the exception, not the rule. They are a small, dedicated group who started from that view point and that perspective and there's nothing wrong with that. We are not. We started from the perspective of Mac computers and Starbucks. We can't simply give those things up because we don't want to. Most of us would say that it'd be cool to live more simply but five minutes later we're back to posting on our blogs and tweeting. We have gone too far down the rabbit hole of technology and can't get back out now.

There's nothing wrong with that either. Sure our want for tech has caused most of our problems but they are fixable. Not by going backwards or thinking about how people did things a thousand years ago but looking for new, better, greener technology that will help us fix the damage done and prevent future damage. We need new, greener ways of producing electricity not to do away with it. We need new better, greener ways of farming, not going back to the Amish way of life that could not hope to support our huge population.

Face it. We NEED factory farms. We NEED GMOs and huge farms that can produces millions of bushels of corn. We NEED nuclear and solar power plants to produce the electricity we use everyday. Most of us could not survive without these things. How many people in America today can start a fire from nothing? Hunt, kill, and gut a deer? Tell at a glance which plants are safe and which are poisonous? We can learn. From what? A book printed on a industrial sized printing press? Or maybe from a website on our Macs? We can't go back now. We would like to sure because it would be much easier than trying to find new ways of doing things. They're already there and they worked back then with different people and in a different time but we could probably make it work. We would only need to change it a little bit to make it work for us right? Perhaps, but how will we fix the problems that this system brings with it? By going back even further? Or maybe we will go back to the current system because those problems are fixed and we forgot the ones we have now. The reason we have our current system is because we saw problems with the old ways and fixed them. In doing so we created new problems however and now we will need yet another new system to fix these problems. Then another one and another one. Each time improving upon what came before. This way we are always moving forward increasing yields and decreasing our impact on the Earth.

There is no going back. We can't simply trade our current problems with the old problems and tell ourselves that everything is better. It's not better and it's not worse, only different.