Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

homestead - Re: [Homestead] anybody read Wendell Berry ? (essay)

homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Homestead mailing list

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] anybody read Wendell Berry ? (essay)
  • Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 08:41:50 -0700


http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/04-6om/Berry.html<http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/04-6om/Berry.html>


WENDELL BERRY


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.






Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page