Post 1: Sustainability and Utopian or Georgic Narratives

Unsustainable Sheep Pastures in More's Utopia

Thomas More seems to have a good understanding of unsustainable farming practices. In the start of this passage, he claims that the massive sheep pastures “consume, destroy, and devour whole fields, houses, and cities”. This is a clear condemnation of the way that animal agriculture uses land. The owners take up huge quantities of it, leaving little available for other necessary activities. This is touched on again later when he writes “you lost no small quantity of ground by forests, chases, lands, and parks”. Here he is talking about how the massive expansion of farmland encroaches on natural landscapes. This is an extremely important concern today as well as places like the Amazon rainforest are cut down and destroyed to use the land to keep cattle or grow feed for them.

He also mentions the ecological damage these pastures cause, saying they turn lands into “desolation and wilderness”. The word “desolation” implies that their activities damage the land, stripping it of natural resources and leaving the soils unhealthy. I think “wilderness” is meant to suggest that it makes it impossible to use the land for other purposes. This is an important consideration, but it differs from modern understandings of sustainability in the sense that we see preservation of “wilderness” as central to maintaining a healthy environment.

The last part of his argument focuses on the economic effects of these practices. He talks about how they force the original inhabitants “out of their known and accustomed houses” and make their only option to “go about a-begging”. This suggests that he understands how accumulation of land and resources by a few large farmers takes those resources directly out of the hands of the average person, sending them into poverty.

In terms of where this passage stands in the conversation about sustainable land use, it provides a strong analysis of why using huge amounts of land for animal agriculture is unsustainable from both an ecological and economic point of view. He argues that it leaves little land available for other activities, that it is damaging to the environment, and that it causes poverty. These are all important considerations both in More’s time and today. The only thing that is lacking is a discussion of what could be done to improve this situation. He does not necessarily need this to make the argument he is making, but progress requires both an understanding of the problem and how to solve it. More shows that he has the understanding and communicates it well, but he leaves it up to the reader to come up with solutions or find them somewhere else.

Works Cited

More, Thomas. “Utopia.” In Three Early Modern Utopias, ed. Susan Bruce. NY: Oxford UP, 2008. 22.