October 2001:               suggested link Thoughts in the Presence of Fear by Wendell Berry "The time will soon come when we will not be able to remember the horrors of September 11 without remembering also the unquestioning technological and economic optimism that ended on that day."

From Orion Online:

Thoughts in the Presence of Fear
by Wendell Berry

"I. The time will soon come when we will not be able to remember
the horrors of September 11 without remembering also the unquestioning
technological and economic optimism that ended on that day.

II. This optimism rested on the proposition that we were living in a
"new world order" and a "new economy" that would "grow" on
and on, bringing a prosperity of which every new increment would
be "unprecedented".

III. The dominant politicians, corporate officers, and investors
who believed this proposition did not acknowledge that the
prosperity was limited to a tiny percent of the world's people,
and to an ever smaller number of people even in the United States;
that it was founded upon the oppressive labor of poor people all
over the world; and that its ecological costs increasingly threatened
all life, including the lives of the supposedly prosperous.

IV. The "developed" nations had given to the "free market" the
status of a god, and were sacrificing to it their farmers, farmlands,
and communities, their forests, wetlands, and prairies, their ecosystems
and watersheds. They had accepted universal pollution and global
warming as normal costs of doing business. [...]

XIII. One of the gravest dangers to us now, second only to further
terrorist attacks against our people, is that we will attempt to go on as
before with the corporate program of global "free trade", whatever the
cost in freedom and civil rights, without self-questioning or self-criticism
or public debate. [...]

XX. The aim and result of war necessarily is not peace but victory, and
any victory won by violence necessarily justifies the violence that won it
and leads to further violence. If we are serious about innovation, must we
not conclude that we need something new to replace our perpetual "war
to end war"? [...]


See also at Orion Online:

From the Margin
by Wes Jackson

[...] "Many of us on the rural margin see that there is more to this story
than oil or the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. Rural America
suffers problems connected to the global picture. Economic decline in
the countryside has been devastating. In the past five years farm subsidies
have increased 300 percent. Seventy-five percent of those federal subsidies
go to corporate farms, and 72 percent of agricultural production is now
controlled by the wealthiest 8 percent of those farms. The primary beneficiaries
are suppliers, the agribusiness companies who, in 2000, spent $58 million
on campaign contributions. Of the nation's fifty counties with the lowest per
capita income, only one is metropolitan. It is increasingly unhealthful to live
in rural America. Only half the watersheds in the lower 48 have unpolluted
water. Our rural areas are strewn with pesticides and toxic levels of nitrogen
fertilizers. We too, like the poor countries of the Middle East, are marginalized.
We are more likely to buy flags than burn them only because we are still
members of the American family. [...]