Very sad to hear that we have lost one of the 20th century's most important voices for ecological sanity, Wendell Berry, revered poet, essayist , farmer , enviromental activist , visionaty, prophet and devoted guardian of the living world . Another fine human taking leave of this place. RIP.
Berry's death, on Aug. 31, was confirmed by his publisher, Counterpoint Press. "In a world that feels under siege, Wendell's writing asks us to slow down, to focus on community, and to think seriously about what we owe each other as fellow humans," publisher Alyson Forbes said in a statement. "Few writers have held so steadily to a single, clear-eyed vision across decades."
Born in 1934, Wendell Berry was the first of four children of Virginia Erdman Berry and John Marshall Berry, a lawyer and tobacco farmer. Both the Erdmans and the Berrys farmed in Kentucky’s Henry County for at least five generations.
Wendell earned a B.A. and M.A. in English at the University of Kentucky, and in 1958, pursuing his love of writing, he attended Stanford University’s creative writing program as a Wallace Stegner Fellow, studying under Stegner in a seminar that included Edward Abbey, Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone, Ernest Gaines, Tillie Olsen, and Ken Kesey.
In 1965, Berry purchased a farm in Lanes Landing, Kentucky, near his parents’ birthplaces and began growing corn and small grains on what eventually became a 125-acre homestead.
He has wrote at least twenty-five books of poems, sixteen volumes of essays, and eleven novels and short story collections. His writing was grounded in the notion that one’s work ought to be rooted in and responsive to one’s place.
For decades, Berry, as poet, essayist, fiction writer, and farmer, advocated personal activism on behalf of the environment. He wrote 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 believed was reflected in how he conducted his life. He was an activist in numerous areas of society.
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. His 2003 essay titled “A Citizen’s Response to the National Security Strategy of the United States,” was a critique of the George W. Bush administration’s post 9/11 international strategy that justified preemptive war, 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.” 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 fourteen 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 wrote. Berry’s message was 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 believed 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.
He believed that besides relying on chemical pesticides and fertilizers, promoting soil erosion, and causing depletion of ancient aquifers, the growth of agribusiness has been a major cause of the disintegration of communities, driving many small farms out of existence, destroying rural communities in the process along with their moral fibre and vision.
In 2009, he wrote, "Beware the machinery of longevity. When a man's life is over the decent thing is for him to die. The forest does not withhold itself from death. What it gives up it takes back."
His "cheerful dissent" reminded us that we are stewards of the land, bound by deep connection.Who spoke clearly to those who want to destroy our world.
A man who spent almost a century proving you could make a whole world out of staying put.
Wendell Berry stayed with one piece of Kentucky ground long enough to find nearly everything there: work, marriage, neighbors, grief, faith, greed, beauty, the living and the dead.
While America kept treating movement as improvement, Berry kept asking what gets torn loose when everybody leaves, everything gets bigger, and nobody knows where the food came from or who is buried over the hill.
His answers were plain. Know the ground. Know the people. Remember the dead. Try not to leave things worse than you found them. He understood that once land, work, food and consequence get far enough apart, ruining them gets easy.
To many, Berry was an icon and a hero. In 2011, President Barack Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal. In 2015, he was the first living writer inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame. In May of that year, a boxed set of his work was published by the Library of America – making him one of only two living writers at that time to have received the honor. Producers Terrence Malick and Robert Redford made a documentary feature film, "The Unforeseen," based on one of his poems.
Calling him a nature writer never made much sense to me. Berry wrote about belonging to a place deeply enough that it could make demands of you. Now he belongs to that Kentucky ground too.
God speed sweet soul. The world is a lesser place without you. Your words continue to ask us to live more gently, to honor the earth beneath our feet, and to find grace in the particular ground we are given.Your words have carried me through many times of darkness and uncertainty, always reminding me to look again—to the still water, the stars, the wild things and find grace. I will carry them with me always.
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front - Wendell Erdman 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 millennium. 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.
The Peace of Wild Things - Wendell Erdman 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.
