Bringing it home …

In Wendell Berry’s Another Turn of the Crank (Counterpoint, $18, ISBN 1 887178 03 1), the Kentuckian poet-farmer and self-confessed Luddite -like Fritz Schumacher and others before him – is horrified by the impersonal gigantism of American life, its industrial medicine and vast corporate farms. He proposes a return to linked communities of smallholders, and a human ecosystem where uniqueness, diversity and cooperation are essentials, not merely nice ideas. Berry cites the success of the Menominee Indians, wise (and solvent) foresters since the 1850s, but reminds us that sustainable caretaking involves hard choices.