Good Work Institute has a manifesto. You might have one at home. It is a booklet we designed with care to give away. It is actually not a grand statement of our beliefs that we pounded out as a group, but rather an object that gracefully brings together a collection of words and images, powerful quotes by thinkers and poets, along with original artworks commissioned from local artists, that together convey the essence of what we call “Good Work.” Within its pages we restate the five principles of Just Transition in our own words, riffing on the foundational work of the Climate Justice Alliance and Movement Generation. On its cover, pictured above, you can read these words:
The name of our proper connection to the earth is “good work,” for good work involves much giving of honor. It honors the source of its materials; it honors the place where it is done; it honors the art by which it is done; it honors the thing that it makes and the user of the made thing. Good work is always modestly scaled, for it cannot ignore either the nature of individual places or the differences between places, and it always involves a sort of religious humility, for not everything is known. Good work can be defined only in particularity, for it must be defined a little differently for every one of the places and every one of the workers on the earth.
Good Work Institute’s name originates from this excerpt of Wendell Berry’s essay “Conservation is Good Work” published in 1993, and we have read this paragraph aloud more times that we can count. It is worth taking a moment to read it aloud to yourself.
When Wendell Berry passed away on August 31, at the age of 92, we felt it as a tender loss but also as a reminder of the profound work of this radical poet-farmer and how he has influenced us. He spent his life eloquently critiquing the errant and destructive ways of our globalized economy and reminding us of the true nature of our relationship to the word “economy.” He walked the talk and balanced his sharp observations, teaching, and writing with a commitment to stewarding the farmland and community that his family had lived on for generations in Port Royal, Kentucky.
This week, as a way to honor and remember, I quieted the racket of daily life and read the full text of a talk he gave for the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2012, entitled “It All Turns on Affection”. This was the year after he received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama, at the height of his public life. He starts with a story of his grandfather struggling to remain on their small farm despite the pressures of corporate agribusiness. Then he moves through a sinuous train of thought, and argues that we have, as humans, lost our compass, which has made us callous, destructive, wrong-headed and short-sighted, leading to the extreme states of crisis we are experiencing. But, he says, that compass is still available to us: it is our innate sense of affection for our places and our neighbors. It requires acknowledging our limitations when we operate outside of a human scale and the richness of our capabilities when we operate from a place of intimate knowledge and commitment to each other and the land.
When the news of Berry’s passing came, we called Matt Stinchcomb, GWI’s co-founder and former ED, who is now launching The Understory, another initiative working to support regional ecosystems and local communities. Matt was the driving energy behind Good Work Institute’s creation over ten years ago; our organization’s name came from his own encounter with Berry’s inspiring writing. He said:
It is my personal belief, and one shared by my former colleagues at GWI, that the social, economic, and ecological calamities in which we find ourselves are rooted in disconnection. We are disconnected from ourselves, our neighbors (of all species), and from the Earth. In turn, it is this disconnection that enables us to commit and/or be unaware of the misdeeds, small and large, that we do as humans. It is this disconnection that clouds the fundamental truth of the interdependence of all things, and that drives the cultivation of technologies, ideologies, and systems that champion a worldview where we see ourselves as separate from the whole. If we are to meet this moment, Wendell Berry always reminded us that we are intrinsically bound to it all. He encouraged us to recognize that our failures, our successes, and our fates are shared. In short, his words and his actions invited us to reconnect, and reminded us that reconnection is best done at a scale that supports direct relationships and first-hand experiences.
Reconnection through relationships, experience, connection to place, and sharing power – this is the goal of Good Work. We are grateful to Wendell Berry for his lifetime of dedicated, patient and hand-made wisdom to help guide our way.
Three excerpts from “It All Turns on Affection” by Wendell Berry
I will say, from my own belief and experience, that imagination thrives on contact, on tangible connection. For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.
Obviously there is some risk in making affection the pivot of an argument about economy. The charge will be made that affection is an emotion, merely “subjective,” and therefore that all affections are more or less equal: people may have affection for their children and their automobiles, their neighbors and their weapons. But the risk, I think, is only that affection is personal. If it is not personal, it is nothing; we don’t, at least, have to worry about governmental or corporate affection. And one of the endeavors of human cultures, from the beginning, has been to qualify and direct the influence of emotion. The word “affection” and the terms of value that cluster around it—love, care, sympathy, mercy, forbearance, respect, reverence—have histories and meanings that raise the issue of worth. We should, as our culture has warned us over and over again, give our affection to things that are true, just, and beautiful. When we give affection to things that are destructive, we are wrong. A large machine in a large, toxic, eroded cornfield is not, properly speaking, an object or a sign of affection.
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Economy in its original—and, I think, its proper—sense refers to household management. By extension, it refers to the husbanding of all the goods by which we live. An authentic economy, if we had one, would define and make, on the terms of thrift and affection, our connections to nature and to one another. Our present industrial system also makes those connections, but by pillage and indifference. Most economists think of this arrangement as “the economy.” Their columns and articles rarely if ever mention the land-communities and land-use economies. They never ask, in their professional oblivion, why we are willing to do permanent ecological and cultural damage “to strengthen the economy?”
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We are no longer talking about theoretical alternatives to corporate rule. We are talking with practical urgency about an obvious need. Now the two great aims of industrialism—replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy—seem close to fulfillment. At the same time the failures of industrialism have become too great and too dangerous to deny. Corporate industrialism itself has exposed the falsehood that it ever was inevitable or that it ever has given precedence to the common good. It has failed to sustain the health and stability of human society. Among its characteristic signs are destroyed communities, neighborhoods, families, small businesses, and small farms. It has failed just as conspicuously and more dangerously to conserve the wealth and health of nature. No amount of fiddling with capitalism to regulate and humanize it, no pointless rhetoric on the virtues of capitalism or socialism, no billions or trillions spent on “defense” of the “American dream,” can for long disguise this failure. The evidences of it are everywhere: eroded, wasted, or degraded soils; damaged or destroyed ecosystems; extinction of species; whole landscapes defaced, gouged, flooded, or blown up; pollution of the whole atmosphere and of the water cycle; “dead zones” in the coastal waters; thoughtless squandering of fossil fuels and fossil waters, of mineable minerals and ores; natural health and beauty replaced by a heartless and sickening ugliness. Perhaps its greatest success is an astounding increase in the destructiveness, and therefore the profitability, of war.
In 1936, moreover, only a handful of people were thinking about sustainability. Now, reasonably, many of us are thinking about it. The problem of sustainability is simple enough to state. It requires that the fertility cycle of birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay—what Albert Howard called “the Wheel of Life”—should turn continuously in place, so that the law of return is kept and nothing is wasted. For this to happen in the stewardship of humans, there must be a cultural cycle, in harmony with the fertility cycle, also continuously turning in place. The cultural cycle is an unending conversation between old people and young people, assuring the survival of local memory, which has, as long as it remains local, the greatest practical urgency and value. This is what is meant, and is all that is meant, by “sustainability.” The fertility cycle turns by the law of nature. The cultural cycle turns on affection.
