Wendell E. Berry ( b 5/8/34) - Prophet of responsibility

 

Wendell Erdman Berry the American novelist, essayist, novelist, and poet,  environmentalist, cultural critic, and farmer celebrates his 87th birthday today.Born the first of four children of Virginia Erdman Berry and John Marshall Berry, a lawyer and tobacco farmer.  near Port Royal, in Henry County, Kentucky (1934). His family, on both sides  have farmed tobacco in Henry County for at least five generations.

 A prolific author, he has written many novels, short stories, poems, and essays. I love the meditative quality of his work. A key theme in his  writing is the importance of living in harmony with nature and protecting the earth. Environmental activist Bill McKibben has called Berry " a prophet of responsibility."  

With care and humility, passion and eloquence, he has  lived his life built on convictions and has a love for everything that's wild, everything that's natural, and at the same time for people, particularly simple people who are trying to build a relationship with the natural world. For most of his life, he has lived and worked with his wife, Tanya Berry, on a farm in Port Royal, Kentucky, trying, as he puts it, "to see from there as far as I can."

 Berry considers himself a Christian and criticizes the Christians who fail to take climate change and the environment seriously. He’s an activist for (and against) many other issues, too, including the death penalty, nuclear power plants, the coal industry, the war in Vietnam, sustainable agriculture, and dependence on fossil fuels. In 1973 he began corresponding with poet Gary Snyder.https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2021/05/happy-birthday-gary-snyder-poet.html In many ways they were opposites: Snyder lived in California, Berry in Kentucky; Snyder was a practicing Buddhist, Berry a Christian. They didn’t always agree. Berry worried about fighting evil: “You can struggle, embattle yourself, resist evil until you become evil […] And I see with considerable sorrow that I am not going to get done fighting and live at peace in anything like the simple way I thought I would.” Snyder didn’t believe in the concept of evil the way that Berry envisioned it and told Berry he was fighting “ignorance, stupidity, narrow views [and] simple-minded egotism.” But over more than 40 years they have exchanged almost 250 letters, on subjects ranging from writing to religion, from farming to philosophy. Their letters are collected in Distant Neighbors (2014).

Wendell Berry dares to investigate the systemic malaise of the West. None is more fascinated with the interesting nature of the world than he, but he knows something’s gone wrong and he wants to look deeper. A radical voice who  cannot be pigeonholed politically or religiously, A pacifist and anti-capitalist moralist who has written against all forms of violence and destruction, of land, community and human beings.

 Many of Berry's  basic principles are actually consistent with socialist thought, in particular his strong concern  for the welfare of others and thee way he critcises corporate  power and market-driven behaviour. This combined with his belief in social equality, a thoughtful measured  mind that encompasses  a broad range of issues ranging from the ecological, aesthetic, spiritual, political and cultural. To those of us interested in the evolution of ideas, that is some achievement.

For Wendell Berry, the defense of the Earth is a mission that admits no compromise. This quiet and modest man who lives and works far from the center of power on a farm in Kentucky where his family has lived for 200 years has become an outspoken, even angry advocate for a revolution in our treatment of the land..

For years, Berry,, has advocated personal activism on behalf of the environment. He has written that there should not be a "split between what we think and what we do. Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live." 

What Berry believes is reflected in how he conducts his life. As a political activist he has taken taken part in protests against the Vietnam War, nuclear power and a range of other environmental issues, and has written critiques inter alia of George Bush’s post-9/11 policies,  which he wrote about  about in  his 2003 essay titled "A Citizen's Response to the National Security Strategy of the United States",which was  published as a full-page advertisement in The New York Times. In it he asserted that "The new National Security Strategy published by the White House in September 2002, if carried out, would amount to a radical revision of the political character of our nation."  

 The ideas that permeate his essays, novels and poetry focus on the failings of the global economic system that result in environmental destruction, greed, violence and injustice, and the need for sustainable agriculture and appropriate technologies that allow for greater connection to place, respect the nature, and recognise the interconnectedness of life.

 At the 1968 University of Kentucky conference on the War and the Draft, in "A Statement Against the War in Vietnam" Berry said: "I have come to the realization that I can no longer imagine a war that I would believe to be either useful or necessary. I would be against any war." And in  his essay, the "Failure of War" ( 1999) he wrote, "How many deaths of other people's children are we willing to accept in order that we may be free, affluent and (supposedly) at peace? To that question I answer: None . . . Don't kill any children for my benefit." 

In 1979 he participated in non-violent civil disobedience against the construction of a nuclear power plant in Marble Hill, Indiana. And in  2009, Berry, along with Wes Jackson, president of The Land Institute and Fred Kirschenmann of The Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture gathered in Washington D.C. to promote the idea of a 50-Year Farm Bill claiming that "We need a 50-year farm bill that addresses forthrightly the problems of soil loss and degradation, toxic pollution, fossil-fuel dependency and the destruction of rural communities." 

Also in 2009, along with 38 other Kentucky writers, Berry wrote in opposition to the death penalty asking the Governor and Attorney General to impose a moratorium on the death penalty in that state. In that same year, he spoke out against the National Animal Identification System, which required that independent farmers pay the cost of registration devices for each animal while large, corporate factory farms pay by the herd. Said Berry, "If you impose this program on the small farmers, who are already overburdened, you're going to have to send the police for me. I'm 75 years old. I've about completed my responsibilities to my family. I'll lose very little in going to jail in opposition to your program – and I'll have to do it." 

Opposing the use of coal as an energy source, in 2009 Berry joined over 2,000 others in non-violently blocking the gates to a coal-fired power plant in Washington, D.C., and later that year combined with several non-profit organizations and rural electric co-op members to petition against and protest the construction of a coal-burning power plant in Clark County, Kentucky. As a result, in 2011 the Kentucky Public Service Commission cancelled the construction of this power plant. On September 28, 2010 Berry participated in a rally in Louisville during an EPA hearing on how to manage coal ash. Berry said, "The EPA knows that coal ash is poison. We ask it only to believe in its own findings on this issue, and do its duty."  Berry, with 14 other protesters, spent the weekend of February 12, 2011 locked in the Kentucky governor's office demanding an end to mountaintop removal coal mining.

Through whatever he is writing, Berry's message is constant: humans must learn to live in harmony with the natural rhythms of the earth or perish. In his opinion, we must acknowledge the impact of agriculture to our society. Berry believes that small-scale farming is essential to healthy local economies, and that strong local economies are essential to the survival of the species and the well-being of the planet,

 Wendell Berry lives up to his own standards, both privately and publicly. He uses horses to work his land and employs organic methods of fertilization and pest control. In 2010 he withdrew personal papers he had donated to the University of Kentucky because he objected to a decision to name a basketball-players' dormitory the Wildcat Coal Lodge. "The University's president and board have solemnized an alliance with the coal industry, in return for a large monetary 'gift,'" he wrote. "That...puts an end to my willingness to be associated in any way officially with the University." He intends to transfer his papers to the Kentucky Historical Society.

The author of more than 50 works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including the novel Hannah Coulter (2004), the essay collections Citizenship Papers (2005) and The Way of Ignorance (2006), and Given: Poems (2005) Wendell Berry has also  been the recipient of numerous awards and honors, which include  a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1962), the Vachel Lindsay Prize from Poetry (1962), a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship (1965), a National Institute of Arts and Letters award for writing (1971), the Emily Clark Balch Prize from The Virginia Quarterly Review (1974), the American Academy of Arts and Letters Jean Stein Award (1987), a Lannan Foundation Award for Non-Fiction (1989), Membership in the Fellowship of Southern Writers (1991), the Ingersoll Foundation’s T. S. Eliot Award (1994), the John Hay Award (1997), the Lyndhurst Prize (1997), and the Aitken-Taylor Award for Poetry from The Sewanee Review (1998). In 2010, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by Barack Obama, and in 2016  he was the recipient of the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle. He is also a fellow of the Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Happy birthday Wendell Berry,  we are all living in a time here we could all be well served to imitate this prophet of responsibility's walk, and try  to reflect on our own responsibiliies as custodians of the places we belong to, listen to his words, his clarity and wisdom, find gentleness beyond the unsettleness of day.

The Peace of Wild Things - Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

 

I go among Trees - Wendell Berry

I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.

My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.
Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.

What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.
Then what I am afraid of comes.

I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.

After days of labor,
mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.

 

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front- Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion – put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

What we need is here 

Geese appear high over us,

pass, and the sky closes,

  Abandon

as in love or sleep, holds

them to their way, clear

in the ancient faith: what we need 

is here.

 And we pray,  not

for new earth or heaven, butt to be

quiet in heart, and in eye,

clear,

 what we need is here.