“Georgic…is what we need now.” (Sayre 2005, p. 189)
Abstract
This paper re-introduces the georgic ethic and the role it has historically played in debates about new agricultural practices. Public engagement, participatory research, and greater local involvement in crafting new means to work the land flood the literature of agrarian studies. Putting the experience- and place-based georgic into that discourse can help deepen its character and future possibilities. The paper draws from recent sociological research into the acceptance and resistance to new practices to show the georgic’s explanatory, descriptive utility in studies of those controversies. It also highlights how agricultural and environmental ethicists can draw from the georgic tradition for its prescriptive and normative possibilities to put practitioners back into the agricultural policy process and to draw more firmly from the notion that knowledge of the environment is constituted in practices of living in it. Placing the language and terms of the georgic ethic more centrally into public conversations about agricultural ethics and policy can enrich those conversations by structuring them with attention to experience, place-based values, and the moral space of interaction between humans and the land.
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Notes
The Thoreauvian scholar James Tillman, writing about Walden and Thoreau’s mixture of pastoral and georgic ideals, casts the pastoral as “essentially characterized by otium, pleasure, and the enjoyment of poetry and contemplation” while the georgic “is characterized by labor, painstaking forethought, and respect for science and common sense” (Tillman 1975, p. 137).
Such claims about trust as warranted through networks of familiarity not only resonate with the georgic vocabulary, but find common cause with feminist ethics of care and community. See Paul Thompson (1998, 2007), who has made the case that the agrarian tradition indeed has strong affinities with feminist ethics of care.
The “local” descriptor helps bring the visibility of cultural context into the foreground, since even in self-description the sustainable practices (as technologies) are tied to a particular, familiar, local place. Credibility, legitimacy, and trust come together in those local settings, where “social perceptions and everyday evaluations of knowledge are rooted in concrete social relations” (Carolan 2006b, p. 326).
It is possible to interpret this cynically through a marketing lens and, in that case, with motives more insidious than I would hope for—perhaps an agro-business need read up on the georgic literature to find out how to convince farmers to go along with their program. This danger certainly exists if one were to interpret the lessons of the georgic as lessons in deceptive marketing. However, while acknowledging this possibility I encourage a reading of the georgic’s value from a different angle to suggest that its primary value is one that respects and seeks to draw from the virtue of agrarian communities, not to denigrate them as no more than marketing subjects.
Abbreviations
- GMOs:
-
Genetically-modified organisms
- PFI:
-
Practical Farmers of Iowa
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Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Jason Delborne, Wyatt Galusky, Gwen Ottinger, Laura Sayre, Paul Thompson, Harvey James, Nancy Grudens-Schuck, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and assistance on the preparation of this article.
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Cohen, B.R. The once and future georgic: agricultural practice, environmental knowledge, and the place for an ethic of experience. Agric Hum Values 26, 153–165 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-008-9172-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-008-9172-7