What Wendell Berry Meant to Me

Wendell Berry, a writer and a farmer, passed away this past August 31st, at the age of 92. It would be difficult to overstate the significance of Mr. Berry’s writing on my life; I have devoted more hours to reading and thinking about his works than that of any other author. He was an essayist, a poet, and a novelist. While reading his various books I have laughed aloud and I have shed tears, and my mind has been much sharpened by both the clarity and forcefulness of his arguments. More importantly, my heart has been enlarged by his witness.

I would not, in fact, be farming if it were not for Wendell Berry.

I was first introduced to his work in the early 2010s. Over time I came to know more of his writing through articles in online publications, essays in various anthologies, a book of his poetry given to me, a book of his essays given to me, and then finally in purchasing from the Library of America a two-volume set of his selected works from 1969 through 2017. The great irony, of course, to which all but his most casual readers will attest, is that he made the same essential argument over and over, over and over, for decades and across thousands of pages—probably reading one essay picked almost at random would get you more or less the core of his argument. What I understand that to be is this:

The earth is of ultimate value, and it is our true responsibility and our deep joy to live from our local land in accordance with that local land’s capacity and generosity. The necessity of good land use—which we may call local adaptation—is real and incontrovertible: healthy land sustains a healthy community, culture, and economy. We neglect this at our peril.

Why did Wendell Berry make this same argument throughout his entire writing career? Because we kept not heeding it, and continue still to not heed it. That is the tragedy of it all. He obviously knew this: “One keeps writing essays and speeches that one would prefer not to write, that one wishes would prove unnecessary, that one hopes nobody will have any need for in twenty-five years.” But that obstinance of his, the stubborn refusal to give in or acquiesce, must be seen as a defining trait of his character. He was, in this regard, a prophet. He was uncompromising (i.e. his essay entitled “Compromise, Hell!”) and would cede no ground to any thought of surrender. This stance makes reading his works simultaneously an invigorating and agonizing practice. I keep one volume of his essays always at hand; I work through it page by page, whether at breakfast in the morning, at night in my corner nook, or outside by the grill while waiting for the charcoal to get going. It does get a rest if I am reading a novel or another nonfiction book—and I will admit it also gets a rest when I begin to feel too disheartened reading essay after essay stating in unequivocal and inarguable fashion our collective failures of imagination and compassion, our disastrous greed and our shortsighted willingness to destroy our one and only home, and with it destroy ourselves.

It is bracing to read the essays of Wendell Berry. He wrote in plain, simple, clear language, and his works do you, the reader, the honor of not coddling you. He assumed your intelligence and your good sense, and he was unsparing in his assessments of both the guilt of the industrial corporations wrecking our planet and communities for profit as well as our individual guilt in consenting for them to be our proxies in this debasement. He fit into no readily available political box, and his religious faith if examined would surely be a stumbling block to both the pious and the profane. He maintained a coherence of thought that is unlike anyone I’ve ever read. It was as if he had so enlarged his context as to take in the causes and effects of the whole world; the magic is that he was able to do this pretty much from his home and farm. He understood what was vital about the formal integrity of an ecosystem, a community, a farm, an education - and the danger inherent in dissecting that integrity.

There are so many things I want to say about Wendell Berry; so many quotations I’d like to pluck from his essays and set in front of you here. There are so many lovely retrospectives that established writers put out in the days after his passing, several of which I wish I had written myself because they say at least in part what my heart feels. But for me, the best thing he gave me, the craziest thing I did with his writing—well, I jumped in and decided to be a farmer. And I wonder how many other people out there have similar stories; what other regular folks (not the writers or philosophers or activists) around the country and the world encountered this man’s writing and were so moved by it that eventually they upended their careers or plans and just… started farming? Inspired by his testament, how many people that we will never hear of or hear from are doing the good work of caring for their local land and by extension their community?

Mr. Berry gave me the gift of a previously-unforeseen hope. I had never considered farming as a fulfilling vocation, and that is because our nation and our economy has seen fit to desecrate the land and take advantage of those who work it for so long now that this neglect has become cultural. In defiance of this insult and impoverishment, Wendell Berry stood his ground, literally—“What I stand for is what I stand on.” Through his printed word he offered me a portrait of a life lived with full integrity, one where necessary sacrifice and effort are borne with humble dignity, where limitations are not a burden to cast off but are a source of gratitude, where joy and satisfaction are discovered not in novelty but in the familiarity of one’s local land and community. Good farming is the wellspring from which this life pours forth.

Among his many sources of wisdom and inspiration, it seems to me that the quote I come upon most frequently in his writing is from Sir Albert Howard: “The health of soil, plant, animal and man is one and indivisible.” This was, to Howard and then to Wendell Berry, the “one great subject.” There is no way to separate the health of the land from our own health. It is superstition and magical thinking to believe we are invulnerable, and utter folly to put our faith in the same tools to now save us that have wrought such terrible consequences upon our topsoils and waters, our fellow creatures in the more-than-human world, and our own bodies and communities. If a farmer cannot plough his way out of debt, then surely we cannot find salvation through the ever-greater consumption of wild nature and the transformation of human nature into machine. Our only recourse is local adaptation—turning to the good work of living according to nature’s measure. This is the agrarian standard, “which requires bringing local nature, local people, local economy, and local culture into a practical and enduring harmony.”

Wendell Berry convinced me that working on a small scale is not only honorable and even advantageous, but is in fact probably the only real option. Humanity has always been in love with power, and power loves bigness; it is no wonder that in the face of today’s outsized problems we want to believe in even bigger solutions. But each and every landscape, ecosystem, and community is different - how can you apply a one-size-fits-all global solution to problems that are intractably local? For example, we are seeing water crises spring up all over the world. Though there are commonalities across the board (climate change and overuse by industrial agriculture being predominant ones), no two localities will see their crisis solved in exactly the same way. We cannot invent or manufacture our way out of it; we cannot fix ourselves at scale.

I continue to turn and return to Mr. Berry’s writing because it is always challenging. His prophetic truthtelling—and even more importantly the example he set in living out his convictions—both encourage and haunt me. I’ve made decisions that he would find incongruous with the lifeways for which he advocated, probably most egregiously the fact that I have moved thousands of miles from my home place. But I intend to settle here, to become a sticker, as he fondly referred to those who “are motivated by affection, by such love for a place and its life that they want to preserve it and remain in it.” Wendell Berry was a prophet, yes, but he was a prophet of love. He understood, with a clarity that few are willing to summon, what we lose when we forget our affection for the world we inhabit. He wrote of that forgetting, and his lifelong accounting had to have been heartbreaking—indeed, it is heartbreaking to read. But he wrote with an eye towards hope (“The point—the only interesting point—is that we have not quit”). He was no masochist or martyr; he took pleasure where he could find it, be it a nap in the woods, a good meal at the family table, or visiting a farm clearly loved and cared for.

For a couple months now, one sentence of his has been striking me deep and clear, repeatedly, like a bell well-rung. This happens (to me at least) with his writing: in the midst of his evisceration of corporate industrialism and his withering critiques of modern American culture, there will come a single simple sentence that flashes hope in my heart like lightning. In his essay “The Whole Horse,” Berry is defending agrarian principles and advocating against the abuses of the industrial economy. At the end of a section, he slips in this dagger: “The possibility of an authentically settled country still lies ahead of us.”

The possibility of an authentically settled country still lies ahead of us. If that is not hope, what is? And if that can be written by Wendell Berry, a man who made it his life’s work to defend agrarianism and the long-suffering rural communities, and who thus had to state again and again how deeply we have failed ourselves and our home places, then there is not one of us who should give up. We have nearly destroyed our world, one place at a time. This is true. And we continue to give our dollars and votes to those who are in charge of this destruction. Also true. Worse still, our consent given to these proxies is almost an unconscious consent—we are dissociated, numbed, ignorant, to our detriment and to the perverse enrichment of the plutocrats and oligarchs and their lackeys.

And yet, and yet… the possibility of an authentically settled country still lies ahead of us. This was—no, this is—the wisdom of Wendell Berry.

There is a chance, however slim, that we as a people may learn the lessons and remember the affections required to authentically settle in a place. Something amazing: this hope, this future possibility, paradoxically enables us to live today for today. Farmers know well how little control we have over the future. That storm system that is barreling towards the island chain? It may swoop south, but it may well just bullrush us. We do what we can today, for today’s sake, trusting that tomorrow will soon enough turn into today, and then we will again do what we can. This doesn’t mean we don’t plan or take necessary steps to secure what we can against future troubles. It means instead that there is, quite simply, enough work to do today. There are enough worries today to keep us busy, enough beds to prep and plant, enough weeds to clear, enough orders for which to harvest. We honor today by making ourselves worthy of our work.

So how do we find our way to that promised land, that authentically settled country? Day by day, small farm by small farm, coherent local economy by coherent local economy. There is no shortcut, no cheap and quick fix. It will take time, and it will take many people in many places—even though we do not have enough time nor enough farmers. But I do believe good farming is irresistible; even if you don’t want to get dirty and sweaty and dont wan’t to deal with bugs or long days or slim margins, I don’t know a person who wouldn’t prefer tasty, nutritious food to bland, empty food. And don’t we all want beautiful landscapes instead of burned out, used up, paved over ruins? And don’t we want our money to circulate in our local economies rather than being siphoned out? And don’t we want our communities filled with neighbors rather than strangers, with love rather than suspicion or indifference?

Land-based local economies are the hinge on which the future swings. This kind of economy relies upon the earth, yes, but also upon neighborliness. As the title of one of Berry’s essays that is dearest to me has it, “It all turns on affection.” I farm to remind myself of this affection. I farm so that I may deepen my endless and entwined connection to the earth and all its creatures: a true re-membering. Wendell Berry offered me hope, and I incarnate that hope by farming.

Come, taste and see.