Coalition for Christian Colleges and Universities

Global Stewardship Initiative

Janel M. Curry-Roper

jcroper@calvin.edu

Geography and Environmental Studies

Calvin College

October 1996

Recent scholars, spanning the many fields that impact on the study of rural places, from economics to ethics, have rediscovered place and the importance of embedded relationships. All these scholars are similar in they call for a shift in the way we approach our understanding of society, of community, and of our relationship to the natural world. This shift in thinking reflects a recognition of the covenantal nature of society and of our relationship with the nonhuman world, and has implication for the debates over the management of natural resources. I first want to present some of these ideas, then I will tie it to a biblical tradition, and finally draw some implications for resource management.

This growing literature counters the assumption that freedom is equivalent to the right to pursue one's self-interests. The alternative is that freedom comes from a shared rootedness that in turn leads to fulfillment and full personhood. The argument is that not only do individuals gain true understanding of physical systems, e.g. agriculture, in real places, but additionally only through the development of a rooted existence in family, neighborhood, church, and beyond, as well as through the development of personal attachments to and care for a place, do we even become mature individuals. The result is the growing recognition that we must treat geographical place as a contributing factor to personhood and that human freedom is only meaningful and fulfilling in community (Campbell 1990). It is there that our values are formed and grounded.

In spite of the reality that our personhood finds fulfillment in relationships that are often expressed in a place, legal systems often deny this aspect of personhood. Geographer Nicholas Blomley illustrated the tension within the Canadian legal systems over the Enlightenment worldview of individual freedom versus individual commitment to a place (Blomley 1992,238-239). He compared two court cases in Canada. In the first, the town of Kimberley, British Columbia, whose life has been tied to a silver, lead, and zinc mine, is faced with its closure. The residents are left with no choice but to move in order to survive yet are reluctant to do so. They have a strong attachment to place, linked with a sense of shared history (Blomley 1992, 243). The second case involves a threat to a doctor's right to practice in British Columbia by a government regulation of licenses to physicians based on provincial need (Blomley 1992, 244). One case concerns the right to move to a place, and the other with the right to remain (Blomley 1992, 244).

The courts supported the doctors, but not the small town residents. From the legal perspective, geography appears as a plane of opportunity -- a frictionless surface on which self-interested individuals make rational moves. A geography that recognizes ties to real places of uniqueness and relationship is missing (Blomley 1992, 246). But Blomley, like others who question this view of reality, asks: is it possible to speak of individuals without attention to community and place? Furthermore, this abstract concept of geography as space does not mesh with the actual practices of the doctors who sought the freedom of mobility. They didn't want to move in space, but wanted to be able to choose particular places (Blomely 1992, 247-248).

Criticisms of assumptions underlying orthodox economics have also been forthcoming. Like the space-based account of human existence, neo-classical economists perceive individual choice and pursuit of self-interest as basic to society, and the individual as the basic building block of society.

Granovetter argues that this atomized view of human action fails to include the concept of trust amongst individuals. Trust implies relational embeddedness that is chosen and developed over time, leading back to the alternative concept of freedom arising from longstanding relationships (Granovetter 1985, 489). The kind of trust and embeddedness Granovetter describes can only be based on proximity -- place and community. It is only within the context of treating space as place, recognizing uniqueness to some extent, that we also recognize the freedom such embeddedness can provide.

Bennett Harrison attempts to illustrate the importance of community proximity and relationships in his work on prosperous new industrial districts (Harrison 1992). He claims their existence is not explicable by conventional neoclassical economics (Harrison 1992,471). Harrison explains their growth by the emergence of informal ties based on trust. And the trust is based on experience. It is built up over time, through continual contracting and recontracting, informal deal-making, and assistance to one another in times of stress. Trust can exist only through intimate knowledge of one another, and this requires repeated interaction and personal contact -- something enhanced by geographical proximity (Harrison 1992, 477).

The dominant paradigm which the previous authors have countered -- freedom from lack of social restraint on the individual, economic behavior defined by the free market, individual freedom to move, geographic reality treated as space rather than place -- have also had their impact on our conception of agriculture, one aspect of resource management. The assumptions of neoclassical economics have underlain many of the changes in U.S. agriculture of the past one hundred years. Those who support conventional agriculture production emphasize individual farm profitability. Connections of individual farm enterprise to community and environment are left out of the formula (Lyson and Welsh 1993, 424).

On the other hand, proponents of sustainable agriculture articulate the same critiques of the neoclassical approach to farming as Harrison and Granovetter do industrial economics. Sustainable agriculture supporters argue for the reality of embeddedness within the natural environment and particular social contexts and emphasize living with nature and within a rural community (Beus and Dunlap 1990).

The conventional agriculture paradigm emphasizes farming as a business with specialization, capital inputs, efficiency, reduced labor, large-scale processing and global markets (Beus and Dunlap 1990). The sustainable agriculture paradigm emphasizes farming as a way of life embedded in nature and community with diversification, environmental sustainability, decentralized markets and processing (Beus and Dunlap 1990) -- reflecting the concept of environmental and societal embeddedness (Lyson and Welsh 1993, 426).

Lyson and Welsh found that increases in expenditures for equipment and machinery, the prevalence of corporate farms, higher rates of tenancy, and the prevalence of larger farms are all associated with less diversity of crops grown. Conversely, there is a greater diversity of crops grown in counties where farm labor expenditures are higher, where there are more medium-size farms, and where there is a prevalence of farmers who derive most of their income from farming (Lyson and Welsh 1993, 433). They conclude that range of crops grown in a county is an indicator that can distinguish conventional agricultural systems from sustainable agricultural systems that are more oriented toward the inherent link between production, society, and the environment (Lyson and Welsh 1993, 433).

Granovetter would connect such trends to social embeddedness. He says we should expect more pressure for vertical integration in a market where such social embeddedness is missing. On the other hand, where a stable network of social relations exists, the pressures for vertical integration should be less (Granovetter 1985, 503). Does this explain the easy entrance of the integrated poultry and hog businesses into the southern U.S but resistance to it in the Midwest?

One of the assumptions by which our approach to rural places and natural resource management has been limited is by the emphasis on the search for universal knowledge. Traditionally, scientists have sought their explanations in universals and translocality. They have been interested not in complete understanding of a specifically situated phenomenon, but in partial understandings of widely dispersed but similar phenomena. This reductionism, according to its critics, has involved loss of context and applicability (Kloppenburg 1991; Flora 1992; Reisner 1992).

Within the sustainable agriculture community, the critics of agricultural science argue that agricultural research of the sort performed by experiment stations can have only limited applicability to actual farming operations. The alternative perspective, that of "local or indigenous knowledge" sees understanding arising only out of real places -- turning the agricultural establishment on its head. This perspective argues that knowledge, just like social and economic life, is embedded in specific localities.

Reisner argues that agricultural research in the past fifty years has been characterized by a commitment to an ends-means reductionistic scientific rationality commonly associated with the physical sciences. That is, scientists assign one end, such as increasing yields, as a deterministic end. They then manipulate various experimental treatments to determine the most effective method to reach that end in order to produce general universal knowledge. It represents a way of relating to nature through its goal of control (Reisner 1992, 7).

This scientific rationality is a belief system in the sense that it establishes a way of looking at the world, including rules on how we judge what is true (Reisner 1992, 7). Indigenous or local knowledge, generated by the farmer, differs from scientific knowledge because it has a variety of ends rather than one, is not concerned with universal explanation, is valid only for a particular situation, and includes multiple factors rather than controlling for one. It allows for practical experience as a valid measure of success and includes detailed knowledge of local ecological and environmental factors (Reisner 1992, 8).

In contrast to "scientific" knowledge, "local knowledge" implies that understanding may be inseparable from a particular place in the sense of being embedded in the natural features of that place as well in particular labor process -- environmental and social embeddedness (Kloppenburg 1991, 537). Its emphasis is toward understanding nature rather than dominating nature (Flora 1992).

The acceptance of the idea of the embeddedness of knowledge allows for the rejection of such space-based assumptions as belief in the location-neutrality of agricultural technology and policy, a belief that has led to the standardization and subsequent de-skilling of agricultural laborers who were once necessarily sensitive to place and local conditions (Flora 1992, 93).

While economist like Granovetter, and geographers like Blomley are interested in issues of embeddedness in human relationships, rooted in places, supporters of sustainable agriculture and local knowledge expand their vision to include embeddedness in ecological places. The ethical relationship of humans with nature, Jim Cheney argues, is also best grounded in such real places where "an understanding of self and community is an understanding of the place in which life is lived out and in which an understanding of place is an understanding of self and community" (1989, 131). Cheney might have extrapolated that our present abstract, individualistic structure of rights, our emphasis on space rather than place, and our pursuit of universalistic knowledge may never be able to produce a locally meaningful land ethic.

Raymond Murphy similarly argues that any re-orientation of human relationship with nature will be a response to the ecological experience of environmental degradation in the daily lives of people (Murphy 1994, 244), not a kind of abstract knowledge of environmental problems. He claims there is an experiential basis underlying our knowledge of the environment precisely because humans are themselves embedded in nature and its process (Murphy 1994, 246-247). Through experiences which lead to knowledge, humans begin to identify with nature, not by seeing all of nature as one's self (universalizing), but by experiencing, in a place, one's self as dependent on and part of nature (Murphy 1994, 248). Christopher Lasch expressed similar views in the context of human relationships alone, suggesting from his study of the family that the capacity for loyalty is stretched too thin when it tries to attach itself to something as universal as the whole human race. He concluded that loyalties must be attached to specific people and places, not abstract ideals. These abstract ideas, he claims, rest on the fiction that men and women are all alike and, as a result, concern and loyalty cannot be maintained when differences are discovered. Flesh-and-blood love, on the other hand -- the love of particular women and men, not of humanity in general -- is based on complementary differences, not on sameness (Lasch 1991, 36), and can only flourish by embeddedness in a place.

One of the outcomes of this emphasis on sustainable agriculture, local knowledge, the embeddedness of humans in social relations, place-based existence as the most meaningful existence, and a new relationship with nature is illustrated in the concept of community-based agriculture and "foodsheds."

Harriet Friedmann characterized the principal elements of the world food economy as being distance and durability, over against the particularities of time and place. The objective of those involved in the world food system, according to Friedmann, is to recreate the world into a featureless plain, free of physical or social obstacles to the free flow of money and agricultural commodities (Kloppenburg, Hendrickson, and Stevenson 1995, 5). If the attempt to overcome distance is the central challenge of our modern, global food system, then, say those interested in alternatives, greater attention to proximity -- to that which is relatively near -- should be an appropriate response (Kloppenburg, Hendrickson, and Stevenson 1995, 15; Crouch 1993). What does this attention to place entail?

Granovetter saw economic concentration as resulting from the absence of embeddedness based on proximity. Likewise, the vision of community-based agriculture is thought to lie in small and mid-sized enterprises capable of responding affirmatively to the opportunities and responsibilities of an emergent commensal community (Kloppenburg, Hendrickson, and Stevenson 1995, 16). In this vision, agriculture is tied to community -- eating together. A second element of the vision of foodsheds and community-based agriculture is an emphasis on local knowledge that is sensitive to the "expectations of the land" and replaces the universalizing perspectives of agricultural science that treat all places the same (Kloppenburg, Hendrickson, and Stevenson 1995, 8).

Finally, the vision is for an alternative founded on respect for the integrity of particular socio-geographic places (Kloppenburg, Hendrickson, and Stevenson 1995, 2). The landscape is treated as a place intricately woven with an individual community, and with human activity conforming to the natural characteristics of that place (Kloppenburg, Hendrickson, and Stevenson 1995, 2). The vision is based on the concept of once again becoming native to a place (Kloppenburg, Hendrickson, and Stevenson 1995, 4). The moral economy of the foodshed will not be based on individuals with unrestrained freedom to pursue their own self-interest, but shaped and expressed in communities which attempt to build sustainable relationships amongst themselves and with the land (Kloppenburg, Hendrickson, and Stevenson 1995, 11).

So how do these arguments relate to the Christian faith and its understanding of the nature of society, our relationship to the creation and our management of it? Scholars in the past have stressed the rational nature of knowledge over belief or perception. Rational knowledge was associated with certainty, truth, and justification. The biblical tradition is that knowing is usually a function of relationship (Hart 1984, 356). For after asserting the truth of the Divine Being, Scripture is mainly concerned with clarifying the ways God relates to us (Clouser 1983, 394). The quantity of God being three in one is something created and assumed by God and should be understood, then, as true of the ways God relates to creation (Clouser 1983, 401). In doing so, God has made this the model of what it is to be rightly human (Clouser 1983, 405). Being truly human means being related to others (Brinsmead 1978, 8). This emphasis on relationship is more akin to the direction of thought previously described.

The Bible does not take an analytical approach by looking at humans in themselves or describing the composition of their parts. Rather the Bible takes a relational approach (Brinsmead 1978, 7; Zylstra 1972, 158,173). Humans are related to God, to the community and to the created order. In Hebrew psychology, the greatest curse which can befall a human is that they be alone (Brinsmead 1978, 9).

In support of this emphasis on relationship, Douglas Hall argues that one of the basic or foundational biblical understandings relates to the concept of humanity as image of God. While the dominant reflection has centered on traits possessed by humans that image God (Hall 1988, 12), he suggests that a minority tradition has identified the image of God not as a quality of being but as a quality of relationship (Hall 1988, 13).

Central to this recognition of commitment, community, the whole, and the relational aspects of reality is the biblical concept of the covenant. Robert Bellah has pointed out the conflict between the Lockean, reductionistic notion of society and biblical religion. It conflicts fundamentally with the Hebrew notion of covenant. The covenant is a relation between God and a people, but the parties to the covenant, unlike the parties in the Lockean contract, have a prior relation: the relation between creator and created. And the covenant is not a limited relation based on self-interest, but an unlimited commitment based on loyalty and trust -- relationship. It involves obligations to God and the neighbor that transcend self-interest though it promises a deeper sense of self-fulfillment through participation in a divinely instituted order that leads to life instead of death (Bellah 1990, 11).

In contrast to this biblical worldview, economist Milton Friedman and his disciplines see human beings as exclusively self-interest maximizers, and the primary measure of self-interest is money. Economics becomes a total science that explains everything. As so-called "rational choice theory," it has invaded all the social sciences -- especially sociology (Bellah 1991, 10). The assumption of our society is that there is no such thing as the common good except as the sum of individual goods (Bellah 1991, 13).

John F.A. Taylor has also seen how the concept of covenantal relationships is counter to our society's positivist perspective. Though he sees such relationships as indispensable to any understanding of the historical structures which we occupy, the inability to understand them by the scientific rigors of proof reduce them to being viewed as arbitrary conventions -- fictions made up by self-interest (Taylor 1966, 7). Yet they are fundamental to our understanding of ourselves, our worldviews, and our society. Taylor draws on biblical images from Job 29:14, "I put on justice, and it clothed me." In that phrase Taylor sees the whole burden of the Hebrew's sense of history: in community, he is clothed; cut off, he is naked; and there is no other nakedness (Taylor 1966, 23). And as Granovetter and Harrison recognize, such a sense of community can only be realized in a place, where day to day relationships can develop.

The concept of covenant offers an alternative to the focus on the individual and the view of collective life as fictions of rationalized interests (O'Neill 1994, 39).

Hall argues that this relational characteristic of our being describes our unique calling to be in responsible relationship with God, each other, and with the rest of creation (Wilkinson 1991, 285). I believe the biblical images of covenants that focus on the covenantors with their households, give us some clues (Kline 1972, 78).

In the Bible, a covenantal document has as its function the structuring of the covenanted kingdom. In this connection the imagery of God's "house" comes to the fore and represents victory over chaos (Kline 1972, 79). In Exodus, this house-building is of two kinds. First, the covenantal words of God spoken at Sinai structure the people Israel themselves into the formally organized house of Israel. Secondly, a more literal building of a living house of God's habitation -- the tabernacle -- is constructed (Exodus 40:34-38)(Kline 1972, 80). In these and other instances, wisdom is associated with house-building (Proverbs 8:22ff) (Kline 1972, 86). Furthermore, house-building implies the presence of a covenant community (Kline 1972, 90). House-building, wisdom, and community come together.

Oikonomia is a well-known word found in the New Testament. It implies responsibility, acting on another's behalf, and care in its biblical context. A related term, oikonomos, means steward, or the steward of a household (Goudzwaard 1992, 5). Again we find the associated concepts: house(hold), managing wisely for the good of the community (household). This is clearer in Luke 12:35-48. The wise steward is the one taking care of the household while he waits for the master. He doesn't settle into complacency, eating and drinking, thinking only of himself. Rather the wise steward gives each of the household their portion of food at the proper time. He is busy taking care of the household. Our Christian faith, while it has a strong element of personal commitment, demands we soon move to the level of community, taking care of each other. This community, especially expressed in the image of the Body of Christ, is not a "building" contracted by individuals acting out of self-interest, but takes on a life of its own.

While the New Testament implies a certain stewardly attitude toward resources and the rest of creation, the Old Testament in particular ties "Body" and "household" images, or covenantal relationships, concretely to land resources. The Israelites were given land by God to be kept as long as they were in a covenant relationship with God. When they habitually treated the land or their fellow member of the community unjustly, they were finally banished from the land. Thus although individual ownership was affirmed, the right to the land was directly tied to one's relationship to God, the fruits of which were seen in one's concern for one's brother or sister, and in one's concern for the land itself. The Law of Jubilee (Lev 25:10) guarded against speculation, or the removal of land from these relationships and concerns. The connects are there: covenant, household and house-building, association with wisdom and stewardship (taking care of the whole, and connection with the land. Humans and land are part of an inter-twined whole.

Natural resource policy questions in the United States have become increasingly polarized between those that demand a return of control and ownership of resources to local areas and individuals, and those that argue for maintaining centralized control, neither of which recognizes covenantal relationships or the concept of trust. Either privatization has been called for, or the federal government has been invoked to intervene. In an important way, one is in response to the other; one necessitates the other. Where the state is perceived as only the protector o individual interests, it becomes inevitable that centralized state functions are required to balance the forces of individual interests. This debate has failed to bring about a clear exploration of the assumptions about humankind and its relationship to resources that underlie both approaches to this issue, and in doing so has failed to discover more biblical alternatives. In the meantime, physical and psychological dependence on the state has steadily increased, while the same cannot be said for mediating institutions that stand between the state and the individual (Berger and Neuhaus 1977). Informal communal social controls have increasingly evolved into the formal social controls of the state. Likewise, communal patterns of conflict resolution have increasingly required third parties in the person of the state.

The rise of individualism has also led us to view resources as commodities, separate from responsibilities to community. Emphasis is put on private ownership, speculation, and market values as the only values of resources. The creation has lost its connection to the human community.

The alternative theoretical approach to the individual as the basic building block of society, and its inevitable corollary, the growth of the state, is that of the nonreducibility of communities. Sociologists have identified community-wide social patterns affecting farming (Flora and Stitz, 1985), especially evident among the ethnically and religiously homogeneous communities that dot the rural agricultural regions of the Midwest. They influence capitalization of the farm enterprise, the extent to which a farm is commercialized, and farmers' risk-reduction strategies (Curry-Roper and Bowles 1991; Flora and Stitz, 1985; Salamon and Davis-Brown, 1986). These patterns suggest that society is not reducible to the individual, but that social wholes, or communities -- the level at which individuals make commitments -- may be the basic building block of society.

This proposed perspective has implications that are directly related to the formulation of natural resource policy. At present, the individual is seen as the target of policy and the respondent to change. This alternative -- that communities of some sort are the basic building blocks of society -- suggests that they may be the correct level to target policy. Individualistic policy may in turn undermine the human cooperative resources of these communities of commitment. Present individualistic assumptions may be limiting our understanding of policy options (Curry-Roper and McGuire 1993).

This "rediscovery" of place, trust, embedded relationship, and community reflects a more biblical view of the created order to our relationship to nature and its assumptions offer the potential for a different, and more biblical, approach to natural resource management. Its discovery comes at a time when government is in the process of devolution, when conflict is growing between citizens of western states and environmentalists, and when society in general is raising questions about the lack of a strong civic society based on trust. A recognition of the concept of covenant and its application to issues of resource management has the potential for mediating these growing conflicts and contributing to the renewal of community-based resource management and civic society.

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