Square Man in Round Nature

In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences. -Robert Green Ingersoll, lawyer and orator (1833-1899)

The Bolivian government will soon introduce a motion at the United Nations regarding the Rights of Mother Earth. This motion is an extension of a domestic Bolivian law entitled "The Rights of Mother Nature" which guarantees The Earth life, water, clean air and the like. The initiator is President Morales, said to be the first South American President from an indigenous background whose culture history apparently includes the worship of "Packamama", the female embodiment of the earth. Mr. Morales, in 2008, introduced to the U.N. "10 commandments to save the planet;" Number 1 was "End Capitalism".

This is a good example of a problem sweeping the globe: A reasonable insight followed closely by a childish solution. The problem is no better exemplified that the problem facing the American farmer. Without doubt, farms inhabitated and worked by the people who own them out produce all other farms under all other systems. More--and this is crucial--the farms are better cared for and can be passed intact on within the family as working farms over time. Communal farms, farms made corporate, state farms all can mobilize workers and produce larger volumes with less efficiency--but those farms deteriorate and cannot be relied upon in the future. Erosion, water loss, short term chemical treatments all are factors in the decline but the essence seems to be the worker does not own the land, does not feel an attachment and responsibility to it, perhaps has no family inheritance plan for it. The negative--and it is a large negative--is that these farms have limits in efficiency. If one applies the capitalistic notion that bigger production is better, at some point the farm will outgrow the farmer's ability to manage it well and it will decline.

So Henry Ford applied to the farm may not work. More, it may be poison to that land over time.

For some reason this problem is seen by a one-size-fits-all community that either capitalism does not work or, because capitalism works the inefficiencies of gigantic corporate farms must be wrong; that thinking is like saying Newtonian physics doesn't work because it does not explain quantum theory or that quantum is wrong because Newton is right. What it really means is that the world is bigger than our ham-handed rules and more subtle.

Free markets (and freedom) are wonderful concepts based upon our understanding of human nature; these notions predict the success of the family farm but say nothing about the farm's impact on the water table. Our responsibility as thinking adults is to develop theories that will respect both human nature and the nature it lives in.