Joseph Petulla

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

The
AGRIBUSINESS EXAMINER
Monitoring Corporate Agribusiness From a Public Interest Perspective
A.V. Krebs  Editor\Publisher


Issue #120
       June 21, 2001


A MEMORIAL: JOSEPH PETULLA

"He whom you love and lose
is no longer where he was before.
He is now wherever you are."
        --- St. John Chrysostom

On June 9, 2001 Joseph Petulla, your editor's best friend and long-time
professional and personal confidant, died of cancer. As a tireless
community activist, environmentalist, author, teacher, progressive populist
friend and valued colleague to so many his presence will sorely be missed,
but not his legacy as one can read for themselves below.

Joe Petulla taught at six colleges and universities, including the
University of California, Berkeley. A Fullbright scholar, he founded the
graduate program in environmental management at the University of San
Francisco where he taught and counseled until his retirement. Among the
many books he wrote and published were his classic American Environmental
History: The Exploitation and Conservation of Natural Resources, American
Environmentalism: Values, Tactics and Priorities, Environmental Protection
in the United States: Industry, Agencies, Environmentalists, The Tao Te
Ching and the Christian Way, From Crisis to Wellness, Christian Political
Theology: A Marxian Guide and his his most recent pride and joy Edgar
Beaver's Destiny: An Environmental Fable. (See Issue #106)

A native of Oil City, Pennsylvania he has lived in Berkeley, California for
some 34 years with his companion and wife Maggie. In addition to teaching
courses in religion on both the high school and college levels, writing
extensively on environmental issues, he served in recent years as volunteer
reader to small school children in the Berkeley community.

A memorial service will be held for Joe Petulla at 6 PM on Saturday, June
23, 2001 at St. Joseph the Worker Church in Berkeley, California (1640
Addison at Jefferson (one block off University between Sacramento and
M.L.King).

Good friend, R.I. P. !!!!


JOSEPH PETULLA:
ECONOMIC RATIONALITY OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
HAS LEAD TO ECONOMIC CONCENTRATION,
WASTE OF NATURAL RESOURCES,
ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION

 ". . .  It is almost an understatement to assert that Americans have been
all too willing to exploit natural resources to their limits for personal
gain. But to decry America's materialism and greedy profit-seeking, its
collective attitudes of waste, would be an oversimplified moralization.
Attitudes --- materialistic or otherwise --- are born in history. Economic
, political and social institutions create a culture and a mentality which
in turn live long after those institutions have given way to new
structures. With them technologies are developed to meet new needs and
engender habits, even new cultures of their own. Economic and politics,
attitudes and beliefs, technologies and habits --- these variables interact
in a complex web of relationships in the creation of a culture.

Different periods of time will necessarily be characterized by a different
mix of the variables, and as one era builds upon the preceding one, social
change proceeds from the possibilities inherent in the former society. If
environmental change is to occur, an understanding of American history with
a special view of the way natural resources have been exploited or
conserved is important. Awareness of past and present institutional
structures is needed before the first step toward environmental and social
change can be taken . . . . .

First, I suggest that the economic rationality of American democracy has
tended to lead to economic concentration; a waste of natural resources; and
environmental degradation (also an inequitable distribution of wealth, but
this subject is scarcely touched upon).

Second, business imperatives rather than environmental or social concerns,
and technological development have increased the exploitation and
processing of natural resources.

Third, at the same time, the nation has become increasingly tied together
through cheap transportation, and regional specialization of resource
extraction or processing,

Fourth, American political policy and legal institutions have generally
supported the logic of private enterprise development, promoting and
defending individual private property rights over social and environmental
concerns, eschewing control of private lands even for purposes of
conservation; and also providing abundant government assistance for the
profitable purposes of agriculture, lumber, oil, and mining interests. The
government has increasingly underwritten the needs of the large companies
representing the more "rationalized," efficient sector of their respective
industries.

Nonetheless, sharp criticism of both the economic rationality and the
corresponding political policy has surfaced in every age of American social
life . . . Very often voices of conservation have been muffled in the roar
of industrial progress, or have been so rare as to be insignificant forces;
sometimes the entire conservation movement has been coopted and defanged by
corporate interests. But the critical voices and collective environmental
protest have returned, just as the great social movements continually come
back after seemingly irreparable setbacks. Without the confidence that this
kind of realization brings, the reading of history, social and
environmental, could prove very depressing indeed.

---- American Environmental History: The Exploitation and Conservation of
Natural Resources by Joseph M. Petulla (Boyd & Fraser: 1977)


ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORIAN JOSEPH PETULLA:
VERTICAL INTEGRATION AND MONOPOLY
"MANIFEST DESTINY OF CAPITALISM"


>From 1900 to 1920 has been called the "Golden Age of Agriculture." an age
old-timers often have referred to as the "good ol' days," The period,
however, was not without its problems; some of which would persist and
fester to this very day.

The dawn of a new century brought relative prosperity and abundance to
American agriculture after the recurring depressions of the late 19th
century. By 1910 the purchasing power of farmers would at last equal that
of urban, industrial workers, resulting in a four year period that would
soon become in the decades following the basis for calculating "parity"
prices for agriculture.

What happened in these first twenty years of the new century, therefore, is
crucially important to any study of the chronic agricultural depression of
most of the 20th century. While these decades would alter the character of
American agriculture the social transformations that took place proved to
be so rapid and profound for farmers and their communities they never be
able to adjust adequately.

Farm prices moved upward, in some cases more rapidly than the increase in
the general price level. Steam power and broader-based education by the
State Experiment Stations and USDA would also come to play important roles
in increasing farm production.

Following the panic of 1893, a severe drought triggered a marked decline
both in the number and quality of livestock  and a dramatic increase in the
price of two essential winter feed crops --- corn and hay. These
unfavorable weather conditions in turn accelerated the acreage devoted to
grain production in 1895 and early 1896, leading to exceedingly low prices
for both farm products. Prices would remain low for the next year or so
while the nation struggled with the currency question.

Several countries abroad, however, began to have short crops of grain and
feed in 1896, so by the end of 1897 commodity prices began to rise. Soon
thereafter the U.S., still a debtor nation, resolved that the best method
of meeting its foreign obligations was through exporting its agricultural
products.

The influential Iowa farm editor, Henry C. Wallace, described this period,
writing in 1900:

"The farmer is the main element in national prosperity because there are so
many of him. When the farmers prosper, have money to pay their debts,
provide for their families, and make improvements, good times are clearly
in sight, as they were in 1897. The farmer's money started the mills and
factories all over the land. For two or three years they had been running
on short time, the country was bare of manufactured products, the farmers
had great need of them, and this farm prosperity started a wave of
prosperity among all classes, which has continued to the present hour."

Some believed that a "surplus" of farmers created this new "wave of
prosperity."  "In very truth," one observed, "when enough [farmers] have
been driven into manufacturing . . . they would be numerous enough to
manufacture two or three times as much as this country could consume and
the surplus would have to find a foreign market."

Economists like Michael Perelman, author of Farming For Profit in A Hungry
World: Capital and the Crisis in Agriculture, have even suggested that this
surplus and its "wave of prosperity" contributed directly to World War I.

"Once the farm surplus turned into a surplus of goods in general, the
momentum generated in the drive for agricultural exports continued as a
policy to expand manufacturing exports as well. The U.S. was eventually
drawn into conflict with the other great industrial nations in a world
struggle over markets which culminated in World War I."

It was at this time farmers were also accelerating their struggle against
the trusts and tariffs, believing that protectionism, while benefitting the
trusts, raised farmers' costs and reduced their overseas markets on the
other.

During the Progressive era, which reached full flower in the early 1900's
in the first Theodore Roosevelt administration, it was widely acknowledged
that the U.S.'s "new wave of prosperity" was creating enormous social and
economic problems. However, it was believed that that same system that
created them could solve them. Consequently, progressives argued, if
officeholders and businessmen were honest, upright, good and efficient, and
applied the principles of science with the public good in mind, all the
apparent evils of the time would disappear.

They also believed that scientific management and monopoly integration and
power, if used wisely, could assuredly benefit all of society. To
progressives, therefore, trusts were a fact of life; it was simply a matter
of "good" and "bad" trusts.

The key to the monopoly question became one of motive rather than the fact
that monopolies. When Edward Harriman and J.P. Morgan's fight for control
of the railroads in the Midwest went to the Supreme Court and the Court
ordered Morgan's Northern Securities Company dissolved because of its
intent to restrain trade in interstate commerce, the "rule of reason" in
anti-trust judicial opinion was introduced.

"Rule of reason" considered only motives, good or bad, behind monopoly, not
the de facto economic effects of the combination. In dissenting from the
majority opinion Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that precedents should
be sought in common law to distinguish between "reasonable" and
"unreasonable" intent in restraint of trade. In writing for the majority
Justice John Marshall Harlan expressed the idea that every such combination
restrains trade by its very size and is to the public's detriment.

To the scientists, professional people, businessmen and politicians --- the
American elites --- bigness and vertical integration was the assured means
for a more efficient, stable and prosperous society as a whole. Further,
they sincerely believed that vertical integration and/or monopoly was, in
Professor Joseph Petulla's words, "the manifest destiny of capitalism."

Ironically, however, while the Morgans and the Rockefellers were preaching
this gospel from their Wall Street cathedrals many small businesses were
rapidly growing in number and often proving themselves more efficient than
the corporate giants. For that reason the elites began looking to the
Federal government for relief and for the maintenance of their control in
industry. As Petulla, author of American Environmental History observes:

"They became convinced that business and government could cooperate in
`rationalizing' the nation's economy for everyone's benefit. By the end of
the first decade of the century, businessmen were actually initiating
social reforms or at least suggesting national regulations when the demands
of individual states and their laws regarding rates, competition or income
taxes became oppressive."

By way of example, U.S. Attorney General Olney, as early as 1892, wrote to
a close friend of a Burlington Northern rail lines executive that it would
be wise for the railroads to use the Interstate Commerce Commission for
their own purposes since, "the older the Commission gets to be, the more
inclined it will be found to take the business and railroad view of things.
It thus becomes a sort of barrier between the railroad corporations and the
people and sort of protection against hasty and crude legislation hostile
to railroad interests . . . The part of wisdom is not to destroy the
Commission, but to utilize it."

A resolution of sorts to the trust and anti-trust arguments in the
"Progressive Era" came in 1914 with the passage of the Clayton Act which
sought to remove the ambiguities of the older Sherman Anti-Trust Act by
more carefully defining what specific acts constituted an unfair competition.

The Clayton Act also attempted to stress the value of competition even
though it provided little ammunition against the huge monopoly
conglomerates that by their very size kept competition out of the market.
Curiously enough, labor and agricultural organizations were exempt from its
provisions. To establish a means of enforcement the Federal Trade
Commission Act was passed within the year.

The dawn of the new century found prices for farm products becoming
increasingly attractive, although the agricultural community was still
faced with its share of problems.

Tobacco and cotton prices were at a level that caused producers to engage
in several, and on occasion violent, withholding operations. The Farmers
Union and American Society of Equity were founded in 1902 in an attempt to
improve and stabilize the economic position of farmers. While the Equity
society, a strictly business organization, mainly emphasized buying, rather
than selling and soon drifted toward cooperative marketing activities, the
Farmers Union began in Raines County, Texas as the Farmers Educational and
Co-operative Union of America.

Although it would later turn to the political process, the Farmers Union,
known today as the National Farmers Union, originally stressed the
importance of the "family farm system" to the social and economic health of
the country. It also began attacking farmers' unfair price and market
problems systematically.

In its first year, the NFU successfully negotiated cooperative contracts
with cotton ginners to acquire a network of cotton warehouses. By 1904 it
was withholding cotton from the market in an attempt to fix the price.
Later it conducted a series of cotton acreage reduction campaigns. While it
succeeded in building warehouses it failed to become a decisive force in
the marketplace through control of crop production.

Meanwhile, the farm population continued to decline as the siren call of
urban opportunity beckoned the young. In 1909 more than 10 million people
were engaged in agriculture on some six million farms which produced
one-fifth of the world's wheat crop, three-fifths of its cotton crop, and
four-fifths of its corn crop. All these commodities and the rest of the
nation's agricultural harvest was being grown on less than one-half of the
nation's farmland.

Even though the land was bountiful and productive, the Progressives and
Teddy Roosevelt saw a need to "reclaim" arid lands in the west through
irrigation. Although midwestern and eastern farmers were alarmed by the
possible competition from new farmlands, eastern labor groups and many of
the American elite and members of Congress from Western states applauded
the idea.

Prior to Roosevelt's call for "reclamation," the Carey Act of 1894 had made
a similar attempt to encourage irrigation, but no one devised a method to
raise the capital needed to develop new irrigation systems. When the
Reclamation Act of 1902 was passed it contained some important provisions
designed by Roosevelt to stimulate the "family farm system" of agriculture.

Landowners could apply for federally subsidized water on only 160 acres of
their land and absentee landowners were not eligible  for such water. While
local water laws were to govern water distribution, the receipts from the
land sales covered by the Act were supposed to be applied to the
construction of reservoirs and irrigation works.

In 1907 the new Reclamation Service was established as an independent
Bureau under the Secretary of the Interior. It was soon apparent, however,
that speculators, knowing the location of proposed irrigation sites,
successfully bought such land from their existing owners even before the
Service itself had approved of the projects for the region. By the time
they resold this land the price was so inflated that only highly
capitalized farmers (and in many cases individuals who owned well beyond
the allowed 160 acres) could afford to make the payments to the speculators
or the Federal government.

When public officials objected to this trend, Reclamation Director
Frederick H. Newell pointed out that the law intended only the reclamation
of arid or semi-arid lands and made no distinction between private or
public irrigable lands. By 1910  24 projects were under construction, but
only a minute portion of the public was being benefited by the federal water.

The Progressive's attitude and handling of the "reclamation" water issue is
also illustrative of what Petulla describes as the "ambiguities" of the
Progressive program itself.

"Although Progressives attacked monopolists as engrossers of the public
domain, they allied themselves with monopolists who agreed on the necessity
of a `wise use' philosophy of scientific management and of economic growth
and expansion. And although Progressives were committed to the fight for
political and economic justice and to the idea of grassroots democracy,
they did not hesitate to force the preservation of forest and mineral lands
on smaller political units --- the states and local governments --- in the
interests of a rational `wise use' policy (`socialization of management')
and in the name of all the people.

"In the final analysis they, rightly or wrongly, preferred their own
(`scientific') counsel to that of the people, perhaps because they were
convinced that powerful corporations would win out if these matters were
put in the hands of the `people'."

The government's "scientific counsel" not only took the matter of federal
water and reclamation out of "the hands of the people" but placed it part
and parcel in the hands of the same "powerful corporations" which would
soon come to dominate corporate agribusiness.

Probably no single federal law remained so flagrantly abused, violated and
disregarded by both individuals and Federal government as the reclamation
Act of 1902, until both its letter and spirit were drastically altered in
1982.


PETULLA: FAMILY FARMERS
STRANGE MIXTURE OF ENVIRONMENTAL TRADITIONS
BIOCENTRIC, ECOLOGIC AND ECONOMIC

For almost two centuries we have witnessed the evolving industrialization,
urbanization and commercialism of our nation's family farm system of
agriculture (as Thomas Jefferson forecast). During that time we have also
witnessed many attempts to return to the "good ol' days" and the pastoral
life of Jefferson's day.

Jefferson saw four basic qualities inherent within the agrarian life as
vital to any community or society: namely, retaining control of one's life
while nurturing the principle of self-sufficiency, maintaining a
homogeneity of interests, a love of naturalism, and the prizing of
creativity.

No element in modern society has traditionally projected a more pronounced
image of people with fundamental control over their own lives than our
nation's farm families. Such control is reflected in many ways, especially
the degree of self-sufficiency so often exhibited by farmers and rural
people.

Because they have the means to produce their own food and the security
provided by the land, farmers have frequently seen themselves as relatively
independent of the industrial\commercial world. This degree of genuine
and\or imagined independence has not only curious economic, political and
psychological overtones, but has also fueled the notion among many that
farming is uniquely "a way of life."

This independence has also forced the farm community repeatedly to face the
question of freedom and equality. Addressing this very question in a
brilliant Gregory Foundation Memorial Lecture on "The Rural Foundation of
American Culture" at the University of Missouri on January 26, 1976, Dr.
Walter Goldschmidt observed:

"I said earlier that one aspect of the Protestant ethic . . . is a belief
that each individual's value is established by his accomplishment, and that
for that reason each person should be allowed to grow as wealthy and
powerful as he can. But this unfettered growth of wealth and power
threatens the very social framework out of which it has emerged. It is not
an easy dilemma to solve, for it confronts freedom with equality --- an
age-old issue . . .

"How much freedom? How much equality? Very much is at stake, not only for
the farm communities, but for the whole of the American polity. If, as  I
have suggested, the growth of corporate control of agriculture is not a
product of efficiency, intelligence and hard work --- of virtue according
to the Protestant Ethic--- but a consequence of policies and manipulations,
the matter takes on a different character. The task, is to reformulate
policies respecting agriculture so that the competitive advantage of large
scale operations are removed, so that the ordinary working farmer has an
equal chance. If this is done, it may not be necessary to resolve the
dilemma between freedom and equality."

Aside from the hoped-for wealth from the goods produced each year on their
land, the earth itself has always given farmers a sense of oneness. They
see themselves as truly sharing in nature's abundance, yet blessed with the
rewarding task of taming nature for a common purpose. This shared pursuit
of common interests among farmers often involves cooperative efforts (such
as participating in the legendary barn buildings) where each individual in
the community seeks to complement ideally, rather than compete with one
another.

There is a paradox, however, here for while farmers espouse this ideal of
solidarity, believing because farming is their community's major economic
activity, they are the ones who must maintain a large measure of control
over their own lives, it is, in fact, the large and often absentee owners
and corporate agribusiness interests who now wield the real economic and
political power in so many of our rural communities.

Jefferson believed that farmers were more attuned to the rhythms of nature
that their urban neighbors. While they have historically had a more acute
sense of what Jefferson characterized as "naturalness," their attitude
toward nature has, nevertheless, been a strange mixture of environmental
traditions.

In American Environmentalism: Values, Tactics, Priorities, Joseph Petulla
suggests that part of the reason for these "duel and occasionally
paradoxical values of environmentalism," found in people like farmers, lies
in the origin and history of their expression.

"Those traditions," he writes, "that have inspired such expressions are
called biocentric, ecologic and economic.

"The biocentric tradition stems from the primitive feelings that led the
ancients to both fear and to respect nature and the power of mana --- the
unknown creator and destroyer of life --- within nature. Although this
extraphysical force which gave plants, animals and other objects of nature
their unique powers has changed its expression throughout the millennia, it
can be seen today in both its progressive and conservative forms.

"The ecologic tradition, has evolved from ancient Greco-Roman theories of
natural law which have come to us through the Christian interpretations of
teleology (investigation of the purposes and final ends of nature) of the
medieval Scholastics, and from them through the natural philosophies of the
eighteenth-century Enlightenment, ending finally in what we know as modern
science.

"The pursuit of knowledge from the early natural-law philosophers to
contemporary scientists has been characterized mostly by the desire to
uncover predictable `laws of nature' and to use those laws according to the
prevailing religion, ideology or dominant class interests.

"Finally, the economic tradition or our third environmental expression is a
modern one and grew out of an attempt to make efficiency a virtue in early
capitalistic societies. Max Weber in Protestant Ethics and H.R. Tawney in
Religion and Capitalism illustrated the connections between the principles
of Calvinism, Puritanism and other religions on the one hand and the
development of the middle class in early capitalism on the other.

"Individualistic religions --- that is, religions that focused on the
individual rather than the particular church --- appeared to offer both the
mark of holiness and eternal rewards as well as those who, with strict
self-discipline, lived up to their societal duties. The individualistic
virtues replaced social solidarity, fraternity and sympathy when `economic
man' was born in the grand alliance between the bourgeoisie and organized
religion.

"It then took just one short step for moral and political leaders to
support economic theories of `the invisible hand' in which the common good
of all could be reached by individual competition. Finally, goodness became
identified with efficiency (that is, economic efficiency) and elimination
of waste so that even monopoly consolidations and `economic planning' could
be touted as more efficient and therefore morally superior.

"Both," Petulla concludes, "the progressive and conservative interpretation
of these three environmental traditions --- biocentric, ecologic and
economic --- has thus enable various and frequently conflicting special
interests within agriculture to gain added sustenance from a variety of
history's religious and\or ideological convictions."

For Jefferson, creativity as he exemplified in his own personal life, was a
basic quality of agrarian life that was desirable in the pursuit of both
liberty and human progress. Again, in this regard farmers have been unique
in our society in that they have had the opportunity on an almost daily
basis to be part of --- as well as a witness to --- creation, growth,
realization, and the enjoyment of the fruits of one's own labor.

As William B. Wheeler notes in his perceptive 1976 essay on "Jeffersonian
Thought In An Urban Society:"

"How could it be possible . . . that anyone else beside the farmer could
establish such an indelible link in the great chain of being, the
continuous act of creation? If the creations themselves are not grand (as
those of a Carnegie or a Rockefeller or a Morgan), they are not
accomplished by an army of laborers or a well oiled mass human machine, but
rather by one person who can plan, execute and bask in his successes,
however modest."

These four qualities --- retaining control, homogeneity of interests,
naturalness and creativity --- often overlap in Jeffersonian thought. They
are ideals. Whether such qualities were or are actual components possessed
by all or even a majority of farmers in Jeffrerson's day or since, as
Wheeler notes, is almost beside the point.

" . . .the repetition of them by Jeffersonians and farmers alike made them
real in the minds of Americans from that day to this. Indeed, they have
become real and have been seen as the components indispensable to any
realization of the Jeffersonian creed."


Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org