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Visionaries

The 20th Century's 100 Most Important Inspirational Leaders

by Freddie Whitefield, Satish Kumar

Excerpt #2

WENDELL BERRY

“The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing, responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.”

WENDELL BERRY IS A WRITER of many parts and, in a manner of speaking, a farmer of one: a novelist, poet, and essayist, he has given his life to tending a small hillside in his native Kentucky county, writing there by hand, and farming by hand- and horse-labor.

In seven novels and even more short stories, Berry tells with humor and affection the story of a small farming community, Port William, as it struggles to preserve its traditional ways against forces both outside and in. In more than ten volumes of poetry, he likewise celebrates (among other things) “the world of nature despite its mortal / dangers” in “a language that can pay just thanks / and honor for those gifts.” In over twenty collections of essays, and in an idiom clear and uncompromising, he diagnoses our besetting ills, chief among them a blind faith in science, addiction to labor-saving devices, and dependence upon an extractive economy that “takes, makes, uses, and discards” and that moves therefore “from exhaustion to pollution”. Against this he indefatigably defends a replenishing, agrarian economy—one that “takes, makes, uses, and returns” and that therefore pays its debts to the earth.

After earning A.B. and M.A. degrees from the University of Kentucky (1956, 1957), Berry went to Stanford University as a writing fellow in the famous Wallace Stegner seminar. He spent a year in Europe on a Guggenheim fellowship (1961-2) and then, from 1962-64, taught English at New York University before deciding to return to Kentucky. “At a time when originality is more emphasized in the arts, maybe, than ever before,” he wrote, “I undertook something truly original— I returned to my origins.” Berry then taught at the University of Kentucky (1964-77, 1987-93), all the while improving the farm on which he and his wife Tanya still live and work. But it is a mistake, Berry says, to characterize this story as a return to the simple life. It is a story of return, to be sure, and it is one of the oldest and most instructive in the western tradition, but there is nothing simple about it. Berry returned, he says, to a far more complex life, a life that he sustains and that in turn sustains him—not by purchase and haste but by work and patience; not by easy acquiescence to a centralized economy, but by careful attention to local ways and wisdom.

This commitment to local ways illustrates a salient theme in Berry’s work: that our lives must be built, and our problems reduced, to the scale of human competence. Cities must not be so large that local agriculture cannot sustain them. The current ‘economy’ (Berry notes the etymological impertinence) must consist of smaller, local economies that attend to local needs and capacities. Citizens must act according to what they can know not in the abstract but in concrete particulars. If they cannot act in a manner commensurate with their capacity to know and to do, if they give themselves over to abstractions—which, Berry says, are always conducive to abuse—they will necessarily abuse the sources they live from: water, soil and air.

For Berry, there is no better example of this than the American farm crisis, which is characterized by the imposition on small farmers of the ‘advice’ and whims of distant, disinterested agribusiness corporations that since World War II have enlarged their profits by destroying small family farms and farmland. Berry criticized this government-sanctioned practice in what may be his most important book, The Unsettling of America (1977), now a kind of fixed star from which American agrarians take their bearings.

Among the many correctives Berry has proffered, two recur frequently: the acquisition of skills, not money, and the practice of restraint, not extravagance. In a characteristic phrase he has said that “we must achieve the character and acquire the skills to live poorer than we do.” But Berry believes neither is possible apart from “culture-borne” instructions. Nor does he believe our ecological crisis is a crisis of knowledge only: “Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand,” he says; “it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.”

Berry’s politics, closely tied to his economic critique and his distrust of organizations, are complicated by the fact that America’s two major political parties increasingly resemble one another. He calls himself a Jeffersonian and a democrat. He is a Jeffersonian inasmuch as he supports decentralization and the proliferation of as many small landholders as possible, and he is a democrat inasmuch as he was born into, and comes out of, the New Deal. He holds that a responsible government will protect small businesses and craftsmen against the ravages of the ‘free’ market which, far from being free, gives the wealthy and powerful easy permission to become wealthier and stronger. He believes that democracy cannot survive apart from a well-informed citizenry that heeds the available moral instruction. But he has been clear on many occasions that he speaks for neither the liberals nor the conservatives as they currently understand—if they understand— themselves. Both are beholden to an economy intent on destroying whatever it can in its effort to support a standard of living that destroys whatever is.

As for his religious sympathies, Berry admits that Christianity, “for better or worse”, is the religious tradition he is heir to, but he also confesses a debt to other religions—Buddhism, for example—that provide useful correctives to our most grievous faults. He seems less and less likely to countenance claims of religious singularity, given the pattern of warfare that follows from such claims. Nevertheless, Berry has consistently declared fealty to the literary and religious tradition to which Dante, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Donne—among others—belong.

Looking back over his work, Berry says, “The work that I feel best about I have done as an amateur: for love. But in my essays especially I have been motivated also by fear of our violence to one another and to the world, and by hope that we might do better.”

Jason Peters