"To me, this means simply that we are not safe in assuming that we can preserve wildness by making wilderness preserves. Those of us who see that wildness and wilderness need to be preserved are going to have to understand the dependence of these things upon our domestic economy and our domestic behavior. If we do not have an economy capable of valuing in particular terms the durable good of localities and communities, then we are not going to be able to preserve anything. We are going to have to see that, if we want our forests to last, then we must make wood products that last, for our forests are more threatened by shoddy workmanship than by clear-cutting or by fire. Good workmanship--that is, careful, considerate, and loving work--requires us to think considerately of the whole process, natural and cultural, involved in the making of wooden artifacts, because the good worker does not share the industrial contempt for 'raw material.' The good worker loves the board before it becomes a table, loves the tree before it yields the board, loves the forest before it gives up the tree. The good worker understands that a badly made artifact is both an insult to its user and a danger to its source. We could say, then, that good forestry begins with the respectful husbanding of the forest that we call stewardship and ends with well-made tables and chairs and houses, just as good agriculture begins with stewardship of the fields and ends with good meals."
"...Our present economy, by contrast, does not account for affection at all, which is to say that it does not account for value. It is simply a description of the career of money as it preys upon both nature and human society. Apparently because our age is so manifestly unconcerned for the life of the spirit, many people conclude that it places an undue value on material things. But that cannot be so, for people who valued material things would take care of them and would care for the sources of them. We could argue that an age that properly valued and cared for material things would be an age properly spiritual. In my part of the country, the Shakers, "unworldly" as they were, were the true materialists, for they truly valued materials. And they valued them in the only way that such things can be valued in practice: by good workmanship, both elegant and sound. The so-called materialism of our own time is, by contrast, at once indifferent to spiritual concerns and insatiably destructive of the material world. And I would call our economy, not materialistic, but abstract, intent upon the subversion of both spirit and matter by abstractions of value and of power. In such an economy, it is impossible to value anything that one has. What one has (house or job, spouse or car) is only valuable insofar as it can be exchanged for what one believes that one wants - a limitless economic process based upon boundless dissatisfaction."
Wendell Berry - "Preserving Wildness" from Home Economics.
This thinking I can vouch for wholeheartedly. The connection implicit with good work, locally done is undeniable. Not only for the reason that good craftsmanship lasts but for the reason that there is a spiritual value in the work as accomplished by neighbor, brother, or self that is absent in the partical board, screw job at Walmart. I throw it in and I throw it out. Perhaps to the chagrin of some, I will never throw out my dining room table, my bed frame, nor my bookshelf. These are things crafted from my own hand, invested in and carefully made. The thought of replacing them is painful. It would be as if I replaced a part of myself.
"...For human beings the spiritual and the practical are, and should be, inseparable. Alone, practicality becomes dangerous; spirituality, alone, becomes feeble and pointless. Alone, either becomes dull. Each is the other's discipline, in a sense, and in good work the two are joined."
Wendell Berry - Preserving Wildness from Home Economics
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