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35 Who Made a Difference: Wendell Berry
http://www.smithsonianmag.si.edu/smithsonian/issues05/nov05/35_berry.html
Wendell Berry in the Smithsonian magazine Nov. 2005

A Kentucky poet draws inspiration from the land that sustains him

Wendell Berry, farmer and poet, has lived in sight of the Kentucky River
for 40 years, in a landscape where generations of his family have farmed
since the early 1800s. The river is probably the only mainstream close to
his heart. As a farmer, he has shunned the use of tractors and plowed his
land with a team of horses. As a poet, he has stood apart from the
categories and controversies of the literary world, writing in language
neither modern nor postmodern, making poems that have the straightforward
elegance of the Amish furniture in his farmhouse. And in recent decades, he
has produced a body of political thought, in a series of essays and
speeches, that is so Jeffersonian it seems almost un-American in today's
world.

Berry argues that small farms and farm communities are as vital to our
liberties now as they were in Jefferson's day. The agribusiness
corporations and developers that have all but replaced them, he warns, are
eroding our freedom along with our soil. In a recent essay, "Compromise,
Hell!" he writes: "We are destroying our country—I mean our country
itself, our land....Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own
cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward
them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier
than the rest of us."

At 71, Berry and his wife, Tanya, live on their 125-acre farm, producing
almost all the food they eat: table vegetables from the garden, meat from
their flock of sheep. They sell some sheep and take firewood from the
woodland, and their livestock graze on green pastures. During Berry's years
as a writer—he has produced some 40 volumes of poetry, fiction and
essays—and a teacher in the English department at the University of
Kentucky, the couple has practiced and achieved the respectable degree of
self-sufficiency that Berry preaches. They have improved the land, raised a
family and seen both of their children take up farming nearby. Their son,
Den, and his wife, Billie, raise cattle, corn and hay on a farm five miles
away; Den makes furniture to augment the family income. Their daughter,
Mary, and her husband, Chuck Smith, ten miles away, have preserved an old
farm by turning it into the Smith-Berry winery, while also raising cattle
and crops.

Twenty-five years ago, Berry wrote in Smithsonian about the hard work of
reclaiming land that had been neglected and abused, of learning how to
properly cultivate and care for it. When I visited the farm recently, he
was pleased to show me how the land has responded. "Tanya and I just got
back from a sheep sale," he remarked, "and I drove up the creek and
thought, this is so beautiful, completely beautiful. You don't know how
beautiful it is unless you see it every day. You may forget about it in the
frustrations and heartbreak of farming and your life, but then it'll come
to you again, you'll see it again."

Berry has criticized the environmental movement for separating wilderness
from farmland in its conservation campaigns. Showing me around the place,
he said, "This is the front line of the conservation struggle too. I don't
think people realize how much work, actual physical work, would be involved
in restoring this country to some kind of health. My experience over the
last 25 years has been that not many people speak, or can think, from the
point of view of the land. As soon as the conversation shifts from issues
actually affecting the land, to 'the environment,' then you're done for.
People think of it as something different from themselves, and of course it
isn't."

No less critical of the agricultural establishment, Berry gained
considerable public attention 30 years ago with his book The Unsettling of
America, a manifesto against the government's advice to farmers: get big or
get out. "I suppose the main misfortune in my life," he says, "is that the
public situations I've tried to address haven't changed very much. I
thought that book was a way of taking part in a public conversation, and
the public conversation hasn't happened—not, for sure, in the capitols or
in the mainstream media."

Berry has been joined by a growing community of allies, however, in
pressing Jefferson's claim that "The small landholders are the most
precious part of a state." And the public, for its part, has been showing
an increased interest in farmers' markets, locally grown organic produce,
and consumer co-ops that offer healthier foods—all signs that small
farms, after decades of decline, could someday make a comeback. The
greatest obstacle, Berry worries, is a lack of people to work the land.
"How are you going to get these people?" he wonders. "And how are you going
to keep them at it once you've got them, past the inevitable
disillusionment and the weariness in the hot sun?" When I remind him of an
old popular song about farm boys returning from World War I—"How're you
gonna keep 'em down on the farm, after they've seen Paree?"—he responds:
"How are you going to shut up that voice that's now in every American mind,
"I'm too good for this kind of work'? That is the most insidious voice of
all."

As a young man, Berry thought he would have to leave his native place and
way of life. "In high school my teachers were telling me, you can't amount
to anything and stay where you're from. So when I left here I assumed I
would be an academic wanderer perhaps, that I'd be going with my 'talent'
from one university to another, so I could amount to something. When I
decided to come back here, a lot of people I respected thought I was
deliberately achieving my ruin." Now his life, and his poetry, belong to
the place he came back to. "I realize every day how extremely fortunate
I've been as a writer to live where my imagination took root," he says. In
his poetry he often gives thanks for his surroundings. He seeks to write,
he says in a recent poem, in "a tongue set free from fashionable lies."

I ask if he sometimes feels like an Old Testament prophet, a voice in the
wilderness. He can't afford such thoughts, he says. He is determined to
have hope. "Part of the reason for writing all these essays is my struggle
never to quit, to never utter those awful words 'it's inevitable.'" His
writing has sometimes been called radical, but he thinks of himself as a
conservative, conserving what is most human in our landscape and ourselves.
"You know," he says, laughing, "if you subtracted the Gospels and the
Constitution and the Declaration of Independence from my work, there
wouldn't be very much left.”