Last year, shortly after July 4, I wrote an essay entitled “Local Independence.” In it, I observed rural communities cannot thrive independently without local economies serving their people. Absent such independence, rural places are an appendage of some larger place and will live or die on the decisions of that other place.
I have thought about that premise a lot over the last 12 months. Our communities thrived when they were more self-sufficient than they are today. Correlation is not always causation, but there is absolutely a relationship between the decline of a place’s prosperity and its dependence on others for the fundamental necessities like food, clothing, and shelter. We need only look at our friends in Europe to see the perilous nature of a society’s dependence on importing necessities. We can quibble with the particulars in American farm policy (I have many such quibbles), but many of our leaders are absolutely correct when they state that a country feeding itself is a security matter.
But I am not here to solve large problems. In 2009, Wendell Berry gave an interview at the Wisconsin Book Festival in which he said something powerful that runs counter to the general mainstream narratives about solutions:
“We’ve had two generations of college-bred people now who have really been indoctrinated with the ideas that every big problem has a big solution…and I just don’t believe it. The big problems we have now are going to be solved, if they are ever solved, by hundreds of people accepting local responsibility for small problems…they’re never going to get famous, they’re never going to get tenure for this…but this is the way it has to work. We’re not really very smart, we humans, and the ideas that somebody could come up with a big solution to a big problems is always dangerous…it always comes to the simple solutions.”
Today, I write this on July 4, 2023 (at sunrise on a kayak, as evidenced by the photo). I cherish the freedom and the power of the American experiment. That experiment was, is, and forever will be a work in progress and an imperfect project so long as imperfect humans have their hands on the tiller. July 4, 1776 was only the beginning and also a charge for each of us to continue forward. Today, I think back to the ideals of Thomas Jefferson set forth in the Declaration of Independence and in his other writings. Jefferson knew that the concepts of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness rested on the prosperity of individual people and places. Jefferson wrote that “the small landholders are the most precious part of a state” and that “whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right.”
Jefferson’s vision was never fully accomplished on a national level. Even apart from Jefferson’s own failings on the question of slavery, his ideas of a system of small landholders was overridden in the Republic’s early days by the intoxicating riches in land speculation for those in power. Yet, Jefferson was still correct. A system in which people have the ability to provide for themselves on small parcels of land is a system in which people can sustain themselves and their communities regardless of what happens in some far-off state or national capital, much less what transpires on the other side of the globe.
I believe in “informed nostalgia,” as I recently wrote, and today I see the American people crying out for a world in which we can again sustain ourselves without depending on factors outside our control. The cost of living and inflation are rising faster than wages. Our economy is ever-more concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Our people have fewer choices and thus less control in purchasing power. We are ever-more beholden to The Machine—technological, economic, and someone else’s idea of progress. It all leaves rural America choking on the dust and starving for jobs and prosperity.
But as Wendell said, these big problems don’t have big solutions. Someone who proposes a big solution probably sees an opportunity to enrich themselves or their friends. Big problems have small solutions. Today, as we celebrate our independence, I encourage us to look small. I encourage us to accept local responsibility for solving problems. It may never lead to fame on the internet or television, but it will lead to prosperity for our friends, families, and neighbors, and that is a heck of a lot more important. What about Mr. Jefferson’s ideas? The land speculators of the 18th century didn’t listen to him, but maybe he wasn’t so wrong after all.
James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and podcast. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to West of 98 wherever podcasts are found.
"But as Wendell said, these big problems don’t have big solutions. Someone who proposes a big solution probably sees an opportunity to enrich themselves or their friends"
- I was dwelling on this fact the other day. Whenever a big problem arises society seems to instinctively jump to technology/big solutions. It is as if we cannot fathom (or accept) that the solution might be locally orientated or involve more manual human work.