Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

livingontheland - [Livingontheland] Wendell Berry, American Hero

livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org, sunfarm@toast.net
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Wendell Berry, American Hero
  • Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2012 13:44:35 -0600


In NY TIMES. a few years ago we went to see him in Santa Fe mistaking him for
Thomas Berry, but did get to talk with him while everybody else was in line
for Gary Snyder.

Wendell Berry, American Hero
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/24/wendell-berry-american-hero/?ref=opinion

The sensibility of Wendell Berry, who is sometimes described as a modern day
Thoreau but who I’d call the soul of the real food movement, leads people
like me on a path to the door of the hillside house he shares with his wife,
Tanya, outside of Port Royal, Ky. Everything is as the pilgrim would have it:
Wendell (he’s a one-name icon, like Madonna, but probably in that respect
only) is kind and welcoming, all smiles.

He quotes Pope (“Consult the genius of the place in all”), Spenser, Milton
and Stegner, and answers every question patiently and articulately. He
doesn’t patronize. We sit alone, uninterrupted through the morning, for two
or three hours. Tanya is at church; when it’s time, he turns on the oven, as
she requested before leaving. He seems positively yogic, or maybe it’s just
this: How often do I sit in long, quiet conversation? Wendell has this effect.

Tanya returns around noon, and their daughter, Mary, arrives shortly
thereafter. (Mary lives nearby, runs a winery, and is engaged in enough food
and farm justice issues to impress Wendell Berry.) We eat. It’s all local,
food they or their neighbors or friends or family have grown or raised, food
that Tanya has cooked. There’s little fuss about any of that, only enjoyment
and good eating. I note that I can’t stop devouring the corn bread, and that
the potatoes have the kind of taste of the earth that floors you.

And we chat, and then Wendell takes me for a drive around the countryside he
was born in and where he’s lived for most of his life. As he waves to just
about every driver on the road, he explains that the land was once home to
scores of tobacco farmers, and now has patches of forest, acres of commodity
crops and farms where people do what the land tells them to. That’s one of
Wendell’s recurring themes: Listen to the land.

There really is not that much to see until I try to see it through Wendell’s
eyes, and then every bit of erosion becomes a tiny tragedy — or at least a
human’s mistake — and every bit of forest floor becomes a bit of the genius
of nature. (If you imitate nature, he’s said, you’ll use the land wisely.)

He knows the land the way I know the stops on the Lexington Avenue subway
line and, predictably, I begin feeling like the fairly techie city person I
am and wonder if it could have been otherwise. I have friends who
back-to-the-landed it in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and a couple of them
stuck it out. Although one of them seems to have disappeared somewhere near
Leadville, Colo., another — urban as he was in the beginning — has gained the
same kind of wisdom Wendell has, a sense of patience and understanding, a
kind of calm despite full awareness of the storm.

Genuine and as much of a product of place as Wendell is, he’s not a full-time
farmer and never was, but a farm-raised intellectual and even a man of the
world. I’d never heard of him the first time I read his work — probably in
Harper’s, probably in the ’80s — but his words have changed my life. As the
years have gone by, I’ve watched his stature change. If he’s not a leader
then he’s an inspiration to those who are.

In any case, he’s in Port Royal now, and has been for decades (his family has
been here for 200 years), and there is something about his attachment to
nature — it’s not just the land but everything on the land — that is so
profound that his observations and his judgments (Wendell is a kind but very
judgmental man) can be jaw-dropping. If you read or listen to Wendell and
aren’t filled with admiration and respect, it’s hard to believe that you
might admire and respect the land or nature, or even humanity.

In Washington this past Monday, Wendell delivered the 2012 Jefferson Lecture,
the highest honor the federal government has for “distinguished intellectual
achievement” in the humanities. He titled the talk “It All Turns on
Affection.” When I visited him last month he told me that preparing the talk
“taxed him greatly,” and I can see why. It’s incredibly ambitious, tying
together E.M. Forster’s “Howard’s End,” the history of his family and the
country around it, and — to summarize it rather crudely — the costs of
capitalism’s abuse of humans and land.

I doubt there is a more quotable man in the United States. (You can readily
see this by reading the text of the talk, or by visiting this lovely page of
Wendell Berry quotes.) Monday, he spoke of the “mechanical indifference” of a
financial trust, that it had the “indifference of a grinder to what it
grinds,” saying, “It did not intend to victimize its victims. It simply
followed its single purpose of the highest possible profit, and ignored the
‘side effects.’” This from a poet and an essayist who, by following his love
of the land and its people, describes the current state of affairs as
accurately and succinctly as anyone on earth: “The two great aims of
industrialism — replacement of people by technology and concentration of
wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy — seem close to fulfillment.”

I knew that Wendell and I agreed on these things when I went to visit him.
Oddly, I felt, as I imagine others have in making the same trip, as if I were
seeking wisdom. Indeed, Wendell’s thoughtfulness and perception, combined
with his outside-ness and demeanor (if anyone could persuade me to start
worshiping, it would be Wendell), makes this only natural.

We spoke, as I said, for hours, and my two big questions for him were,
essentially, “How are we going to change this?” and “What can city people do?”

He makes it clear that he doesn’t think anything is going to happen quickly,
except perhaps the possible catastrophe that lurks in the minds of everyone
who believes the earth to be overstressed. “You can describe the predicament
that we’re in as an emergency,” he says, “and your trial is to learn to be
patient in an emergency.”

Change, he says, is going to come from “people at the bottom” doing things
differently. “[N]o great feat is going to happen to change all this; you’re
going to have to humble yourself to be willing to do it one little bit at a
time. You can’t make people do this. What you have to do is notice that
they’re already doing it.”

Then he takes me to the barn, where there are seven newborn lambs. And he
says, “When you are new at sheep-raising and your ewe has a lamb, your
impulse is to stay there and help it nurse and see to it and all. After a
while you know that the best thing you can do is walk out of the barn.”

We walk out of the barn, and say goodbye.

Three hours later, my phone rings. (Wendell, famously, does not own a
computer.) “Mark,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about that question about
what city people can do. The main thing is to realize that country people
can’t invent a better agriculture by ourselves. Industrial agriculture wasn’t
invented by us, and we can’t uninvent it. We’ll need some help with that.”






Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page