Beyond Good Intentions 

The problem with good intentions, of course, is that they're never enough.  They're necessary, but often (usually?) woefully insufficient.  And what's more, they tend to obscure any practical results that are out of joint with their noble character, thereby often (usually?) leading to even further perverse real-world outcomes.

For example, it is unquestionably good and noble to aim to eliminate hunger and food scarcity, to "feed the world" as the so-called Green Revolution of the post-World War II era promised to do in the United States – and delivered, with nothing short of spectacular success.  It was a success, that is, only if you completely ignore the devastating impact of all those "miraculous" wartime chemicals on soil health, and therefore ultimately on human health.*  Similarly, it is undeniably good to try to help farmers stay in the business of farming by providing economic supports, since Mother Nature cares not a whit for the rules of free-market economics.  But when those economic supports come in the form of government-guaranteed crop subsidies and government-backed crop insurance, and those subsidies and insurance, in turn, underwrite production of only a handful of so-called "commodity" crops (corn, wheat, soybeans, cotton, and rice), they in fact drive the trends toward monoculture cropping and farm consolidation that end up making farms and farmers – and therefore the rest of us – even more vulnerable to disease and long-term environmental and economic ruin.  The ironies of our food system are both palpable and legion.

So good intentions, when divorced from careful analysis of their practical effects, are basically indistinguishable from bad intentions.  I know there are others who take the argument to the next level, positing that the perversities of our food system must actually be the result of the bad intentions – or at least the greedy intentions – of the giant agro-chemical companies and the elected officials who do their bidding in the realms of policy, legislation, and regulation.  And sure, some dynamic along those lines is operative.  But I think any narrative that relies exclusively, or even just heavily, on that kind of conspiratorial explanation for our food predicament misses the larger point.  We can manage to get ourselves in this kind of pickle without any consciously bad actors pulling the strings. 

The truth is, we can manage to get – and keep – ourselves in this kind of pickle simply by failing to continually question our assumptions, chief among them the assumption that there is some grand program, some "scalable" model (there's that word again), that can be devised by so-called experts and then applied, more or less uniformly, everywhere.  But here's the reality:  there is no program.  There are sound principles for farming practices that are conducive to long-term human and environmental health (human and environmental health being so intertwined as to be basically indistinguishable).  But how these principles and practices play out on a given farm in a given community in a given region must necessarily vary according the character of the land and other particularities of that place. 

So what we need are not programs but people, people who know their place – not in the sense of acquiescing to some pre-ordained social hierarchy, but rather in the very literal sense of coming into intimate relationship with the land that surrounds and supports them.  It is through such intimate relationship that we guard against the potential perversities of mere good intentions.  It is not a panacea, this intimate relationship – that would be synonymous with "program".  But it is a start of a different way of being in the world, a way of being centered on connection, beauty, health, and wholeness; a way of being that is wary of, if not thoroughly allergic to, shortcuts and cheap substitutes.   

* Here, I'm talking about the dizzying array of fertilizers, fungicides, pesticides, and herbicides that most farmers came to depend on after World War II, almost all of which are petroleum derived and many of which are simply repurposed explosives ingredients and agents of chemical warfare.