We have lost one of our most important thinkers.
I first came across Wendell Berry in Vermont in 1995. His collection of essays, Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community has been a wellspring of wit and wisdom to draw from ever since. His writing seemed to anticipate (and resist) the horrors of today, and the clarity of his thinking was often mistaken for simplicity.
“It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world
will be between people who wish to live as creatures
& people who wish to live as machines.”
Wendell Berry, "Life is a Miracle"
On education, community, health, technology and economics, his writing poured out home truths and wisdom. He was an iconoclast who was rooted in tradition(s) but not bound by them. Berry wrote at least twenty-five books (or chapbooks) of poems, twenty-four volumes of essays, and fifteen novels and short story collections - including the seminal The Unsettling of America (1977).
In an essay on Conservation and Local Economy he wrote:
“We must see that it is foolish, sinful and suicidal to destroy the health of nature for the sake of an economy that is not really an economy at all but merely a financial system, one that is unnatural, undemocratic, sacrilegious, and ephemeral. We must see the error of our effort to live by fire, by burning the world in order to live in it. There is no plainer symptom of our insanity that our avowed intention to maintain by fire an unlimited economic growth. Fire destroys what nourishes it and so in fact imposes severe limits on any growth associated with it. The true source and anologue of our economic life is the economy of plants, which never exceeds natural limits, never grows beyond the power of its place to support it, produces no waste, and enriches and preserves itself by death and decay.”
“We must learn to grow like a tree, not like a fire. We must repudiate what Edward Abbey called “the ideology of the cancer cell”: the idiotic ideology of “unlimited economic growth” that pushes blindly toward the limitation of massive catastrophe.”
If his talk of ‘the economy of plants’ has echoes of Patrick Geddes, he was the inheritor of the tradition of Edward Abbey, the author of Black Sun and The Monkey Wrench Gang, who was the inspiration for the formation of Earth First! Both are of course part of an eco-anarchist tradition that includes Emerson, Aldo Leopold, Henry David Thoreau, Gary Snyder, Sven Lindqvist and Peter Kropotkin.
His writing style had range, from poetry to polemic, often in short essays and aphorisms; it was deep, insightful, and wise but remained untainted by academia or jargon.
His influence and legacy is wide and deep, inspiring people to re-think the way they thought about land, food and ecology. Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, would say his life was changed by Berry’s declaration that “Eating is an agricultural act.”
In the Preface to Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community ‘The Joy of Sales Resistance,’ he wrote:
The Food System is firmly grounded on the following principles:
Food is important mainly as an article of international trade.
It doesn’t matter what happens to farmers.
It doesn’t matter what happens to the land.
Agriculture has nothing to do with “the environment”.
There will always be plenty of food, for if farmers don’t grow it from the soil, then scientists will invent it.
There is no connection between food and health, People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are healed by the health industry, which pays no attention to food.
It follows that there is no connection between healing and health. Hospitals customarily feed their patients poor-quality, awful-tasting, factory-made expensive food and keep them awake all night with various expensive attentions. There is a connection between money and health.
One of my favourite essays by Berry was called Out of Your Car, Off Your Horse (twenty-seven propositions about global thinking and sustainable cities’). In it he writes:
“Unless one is willing to be destructive on a very large scale, one cannot do something except locally, in a small place. Global thinking can only do to the globe what a space satellite does to it: reduce it, make a bauble out of it.”
“Look at one of those photographs of the earth taken from outer space and see if you can recognise your neighbourhood. If you want to see where you are you will have to get out of your spaceship, out of your car, off your horse, and walk over the ground. On foot you will find that the earth is still satisfyingly large and full of beguiling nooks and crannies.”
One of his consistent themes, that he returned to again and again, was against abstraction and for grounded localism.
He wrote: “The only sustainable city - and this to me, is the indispensable ideal and goal - is a city in balance with its countryside: a city, that is, that would live off the net ecological income of its supporting region, paying as it goes all its ecological and human debts.”
This was a dedication to place and the concept of rootedness. In this sense he can be seen in a tradition of Patrick Geddes, Nan Shepherd, and Lewis Mumford. His ideas are also, obviously, founded in the unfashionable but crucial concept of living within limits.
Berry was an independent thinker whose own critique of the environmental movement needs to be reclaimed. In an essay called Conservation is Good Work he wrote:
“No settled family or community has ever called its home place an “environment”. None has ever called its feeling for for its home place “biocentric” or “anthropocentric.” None has ever thought of its connection to home place as “ecological,” deep or shallow. The concepts and insights of the ecologists are of great usefulness in our predicament, and we can hardly escape the need to speak of “ecology” and “ecosystems.” But the terms themselves are culturally sterile. They come from the juiceless, abstract intellectuality of the universities, which was invented to disconnect, displace, and disembody the mind. The real names of the environment are the names of rivers and river valleys; creeks, ridges, and mountains; towns and cities; lakes, woodlands, lanes, roads, creatures and people.”
Berry leaves such a powerful legacy for us to learn from about technology, food and land. He taught us that place matters, that the relationship between ends and means is still vital and that resistance is fertile. Rest in Place, Wendell Berry.