In Life is a Miracle, Wendell Berry writes:
“The standards of our behavior must be derived, not from the capability of technology, but from the nature of places and communities. We must shift the priority from production to local adaptation, from innovation to familiarity, from power to elegance, from costliness to thrift. We must learn to think about propriety in scale and design, as determined by human and ecological health. By such changes we might again make our work an answer to despair.”
Read that a few times. Imagine: where would we (and corporations) be without our fanatical drive to produce, innovate, to increase power, to profit?
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1 Cheap Energy, Growing Gardens, Green Virtue // Apr 21, 2008 at 3:22 pm
[…] Wendell Berry called this “cheap-energy mind”: The “cheap-energy mind”…is the mind that asks, “Why bother?” because it is helpless to imagine — much less attempt — a different sort of life, one less divided, less reliant. Since the cheap-energy mind translates everything into money, its proxy, it prefers to put its faith in market-based solutions — carbon taxes and pollution-trading schemes. If we could just get the incentives right, it believes, the economy will properly value everything that matters and nudge our self-interest down the proper channels. The best we can hope for is a greener version of the old invisible hand. Visible hands it has no use for. […]
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