Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

homestead - Re: [Homestead] Wendell Berry article in Orion mag

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] Wendell Berry article in Orion mag
  • Date: Thu, 15 Sep 2005 17:06:44 -0500


http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/05-5om/Berry.html

Classic Wendell Berry material but written more simply with short, declarative sentences and therefore more eloquent and more powerful than some of his earlier essays. Happy to see the adjustment. Where I was earlier put off by the English professorshippiness, here I am enchanted by the flow.

Alas, I find Berry still a provincial romantic disconnected from national and international economic reality. With the exception of a tiny percentage of food produced by ecologically sensitive growers able to sell to upscale markets, the preponderance of world food is produced for volume profit and ecology and energy input be damned. I wish it were otherwise and I, like so many members of this list, strive to be the husband and steward of my land. But agribusiness will have no truck with such uneconomic should-dos until it is forced by governmental regulation or energy shortages.

In my lifetime I hope to see Jim Hightower, Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry and similars on an advisory committee to the Secretary of Agriculture that has real clout. I am breathing freely.






Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page