Advocacy for the Earth
Rural Context, Urban Connections1
by Shannon Jung

The environmental practices of the rural economy have a disproportionate impact on the health of the planet. Farming, mining, timbering and fishing are primary industries with direct positive or negative global and urban repercussions. In a very real, even empirical sense, rural people through their activities represent the stake we all have in the environment. Their positive ecological practices produce healthy results for us - good food, clean water, uncontaminated soil, wetlands and woodlands for animals, a biologically diverse seed bank, and fresh air.

This essay will focus on some of the ways the low esteem accorded care of the earth has been linked with the low esteem accorded producers of food, especially farmers. It will then point to advocacy efforts which aim at a healthy future for the land and its peoples. Our farming representatives deserve the same high political priority as do health care and environmental well-being. That priority must be embedded in the policies of urban corporations and all governments.

The popular image of the farmer may be that of the hardworking, conscientious steward of the land who lives out her and his commitment the care of the earth despite building up staggering debt loads year after year. That image bears a close resemblance to the "hick," the poor dumb slob who keeps producing food for those who feel superior to him and her. If you hear undertones of "sucker" associated with the image, you will not be far off.

Despite its exaggeration here, that image exemplifies the problem of rural peoples as well as the low political standing that ecological integrity continues to suffer. Let me be more expansive, since I believe that the low political priority accorded farmers, rural communities and the environment decisively shapes the nature of the advocacy the church is called to promote.

The single factor that most influences the agricultural practices farmers adopt is federal farm policy. That policy, spelled out in farm acts at five-year intervals, has as its primary goal maintaining cheap food. This has taken the shape of tilting farm policy toward the providing of subsidies on the basis of yields and acreage. The higher the yield or the greater the acreage the greater the subsidy. This has been spectacularly successful at lowering the percentage of its income that the United States population spends on food to a world low. Politicians in general are rewarded by such cheap food. Farmers with medium-sized operations - that is to say producers who depend on farming for at least a portion of their livelihood - are particularly pressured by such policies.2 Their ecological practices will reflect the pressure to produce increased yields, their financial practices may well reflect the pressure to "get bigger."

Though these medium-sized farmers have frequently been found to be more ecologically responsible than absentee, corporately-owned, often-larger farms, farm policy has not until recently taken care of the earth into account. In recent years the USDA has paid farmers to take Conservation Reserve Program acres out of production, and thus conserve land that had been in production (as well, of course, as wetlands and marginally arable ones). This was done to decrease surpluses, cut federal expenditures, raise market prices, as well as to encourage ecologically responsible agriculture. It is clear that farm policy has begun to take ecology increasingly into account; it is also clear that farm policy places its first priority on fiscal conservation (both in terms of impact on federal budget and the maintenance of cheap food). The care of the earth still rides in the back of the bus; at least it is now on the bus.

Conservation Reserve Program contracts are beginning to run out; farmers had to sign up for five years, and the first contracts are expiring. Whether the Federal Farm Act of 1995 (and interim policy until then) will continue to support, however haltingly, the conservation of land is a matter whose resolution will say much about political advocacy and the extent to which environmental considerations have really entered the mainstream.

What is remarkable is how many farmers have practiced an ethic of genuine care of the land. They have cared for their land, many out of religious motivations. They understand God to be distinctively present on the land. The movement for a sustainable agriculture continues to gain momentum. The public at large has begun to realize that the quality of its nutrition depends on healthy farming practices. All these are signs that the low esteem in which farming and ecology are held (and which has synergetically reinforced such standing by association) can be reversed. It will require political advocacy and changes in personal and institutional lifestyles.

It will do little good to pressure farmers and other rural people directly. In many ways their position is analogous to that of middle management; they have little control over the policies - legislative, fiscal, environmental - that impact their work. Chief executives and top management officers can have far greater influence. What is needed is legislation that: