Simply put, we should try to be a part of virtuous communities involved in producing food, clothing, and shelter, as well as in our own faith, work and play, and the schooling of our children.

Economic choices informed by this sensibility ought to be rooted and committed to the limits, beauties, cultures, etc., of one’s place. A lodge-pole pine home on the Kansas prairie may be aesthetically beautiful, in a sense, but it does not have integrity; it is not “of its place.”

Now I also agree with Bruce that worrying about coffee beans while Rome burns is foolish. But we might let those who cultivate the more rooted beauties of their particular place, from hot drinks to homes and everything in between, trouble our conscience from time to time. Or as Wendell Berry put it:

I still cut my wood with a chainsaw, which has nothing to recommend it but speed, and has all the faults of an airplane, except it does not fly. It is plain to me that the line ought to be drawn without fail wherever it can be drawn easily. And it ought to be easy (though many do not find it so) to refuse to buy what one does not need. If you are already solving your problem with the equipment you have—a pencil, say—why solve it with something more expensive and more damaging? If you don’t have a problem, why pay for a solution? If you love the freedom and elegance of simple tools, why encumber yourself with something complicated?

And yet, if we are ever again to have a world fit and pleasant for little children, we are surely going to have to draw the line where it is not easily drawn. We are going to have to learn to give up things that we have learned (in only a few years, after all) to “need.” I am not an optimist; I am afraid that I won’t live long enough to escape my bondage to the machines. Nevertheless, on every day left to me I will search my mind and circumstances for the means of escape. And I am not without hope. I knew a man who, in the age of chainsaws, went right on cutting his wood with a handsaw and an axe. He was a healthier and a saner man than I am. I shall let his memory trouble my thoughts.