People are joined to the land by work

People are joined to the land by work. Land, work, people, and community are all comprehended in the idea of culture. These connections cannot be understood or described by information–so many resources to be transformed by so many workers into so many products for so many consumers–because they are not quantitative. We can understand them only after we acknowledge that they should be harmonious–that a culture must either be shapely and saving or shapeless and destructive. To presume to describe land, work, people, and community by information, by quantities, seems invariably to throw them into competition with one another. Work is then understood to exploit its people. And then instead of land, work, people, and community, we have the industrial categories of resources, labor, management, consumers, and government. We have exchanged harmony for an interminable fuss, and the work of culture for the timed and harried labor of an industrial economy. “People, Land, and Community” in The Art of the Commonplace