[Homestead] anybody read Wendell Berry ? (essay)

Gene GeRue genegerue at ruralize.com
Mon Oct 18 11:41:50 EDT 2004


>http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/04-6om/Berry.html<http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/04-6om/Berry.html>
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>WENDELL BERRY
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>COMPROMISE, HELL !

I finally managed to find the article. Need to trim that double url, Toni.

I've been reading Wendell Berry for decades and have enjoyed most of his 
work. He is an articulate advocate who loves the land. Occasionally he is 
problematic to me, as in his argument against the computer and his apologia 
for tobacco.

Berry often ends his arguments with telling us what we need to do and here 
he does so several times. Well, to effect the changes Berry advocates, what 
we need to do is to stop increasing our population and to change our 
American lifestyle. Although the tide of population movement into the 
cities has been reversed, our country will be predominately urban for the 
foreseeable future. Most urban dwellers today are the children of urban 
dwellers, whose memory of the land is obscure, so they have little 
knowledge of or sympathy for the land. And they have most of the votes. And 
they dominate the economy.

Land conservation increasingly requires compromises to modern lifestyle. We 
can't use the Earth without changing its face. We can't have our coal and 
have undisturbed land, too. We can't have low-price beef and have bucolic 
pastures sparsely populated with cattle, too. And we can't build 
subdivisions and shopping malls and retain prime farmland, too. These are 
choices our society has made. These are choices each of us makes with each 
trip through the checkout line. They are the natural result of a free 
enterprise system, rising population, and an evolving lifestyle.

There is a clear momentum to our society. The direction in which it is 
going is not helpful to the land. And each one of us is contributing to 
that direction.




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