Wendell Berry, Great Rural American Thinker, Dies at 92

Poet, essayist, novelist, farmer, and philosopher Wendell Berry died yesterday at 92. With his death, America loses one of its deepest, most deliberate thinkers, a rural American who spoke for rural America more clearly, honestly, thoughtfully, devotedly, Christianly, and consistently than any other figure in contemporary American life.

Somehow I didn’t get around to reading Wendell Berry’s foundational 1977 book, The Unsettling of America, until just last month. Berry’s ideas came to me by osmosis from a great philosophy professor at South Dakota State University and a group of smart students with whom I was strangely connected but with whom I didn’t have the good gosh-darn sense to take the class in which they and that professor spent an entire semester reading and discussing The Unsettling of America and Berry’s philosophy. One of those students told me that course and that book changed the course of her philosophical life. That student also happened to marry me. She invited that professor to read from the Bible at our wedding, and he read deliciously. She has since often read chapters and essays and poems from Berry to me, and I have often referred to Berry’s deep agrarian thinking in my own inferior polemics against superficial ruralists.

Bill Moyers recorded a remarkable conversation with Wendell Berry in 2013. Here is one of the rare occasions on which “The Mad Farmer” sat with any journalist for a video interview. In responses to Moyers’s questions and in readings of his work, Berry explains the core ideas that motivated his work from the beginning of his career in the 1960s. Wendell Berry does not distill to any single catchphrase; he wrote and spoke too thoughtfully, deeply, and integrally for that. I quote him briefly below; I encourage you to read this great American philosopher in full.

Moyers: Resettling of America means…?

Berry: It means putting people on the land, enough people on the land to take proper care of it and pay them decently for doing it. The fact that we in our families know the history of people having to leave the country because they couldn’t make a living there is the history of rural America. But that they left because they couldn’t make a living is an indictment of our land policies. The idea that you have to go somewhere else, that you have to leave a fertile country in order to make a living is preposterous. And it’s a result of the wrong idea of what we mean by making a living in the first place.

To make a living is not to make a killing; it’s to have enough.

…Well, you got to be contrary, but there’s a world of pleasure in contrariness.

—Wendell Berry, in conversation with Bill Moyers, 2013.10.04.

Related thoughts:

• Another person whose life was changed in the 1990s by reading Wendell Berry: entertainer and woodworker Nick Offerman:

• This spring, Offerman reads Berry’s poem of fierce and loving contrariness “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front“:

• In 1969, Wendell Berry, who thought a lot, published an essay called “Think Little“. As he did throughout his writing, Berry saw connection between lots of big things, such as, in this essay, the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, and the environmental movement:

For I believe that the separation of these three problems is artificial. They have the same cause, and that is the mentality of greed and exploitation. The mentality that exploits and destroys the natural environment is the same that abuses racial and economic minorities, that imposes on young men the tyranny of the military draft, that makes war against peasants and women and children with the indifference of technology. The mentality that destroys a watershed and then panics at the threat of flood is the same mentality that gives institutionalized insult to black people and then panics at the prospect of race riots. It is the same mentality that can mount deliberate warfare against a civilian population and then express moral shock at the logical consequence of such warfare at My Lai. We would be fools to believe that we could solve any one of these problems without solving the others [Wendell Berry, “Think Little,” WHole Earth Catalog, 1969, later published in Berry’s A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural, 1972].

• In that same 1969 essay, Berry said activists seeking civil rights, peace, and environmental restoration must combine their public efforts with change in their private lives. To fight for the environment, Berry said, and to achieve numerous inescapably interconnected humanitarian objectives, grow a garden:

Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating. The food he grows will be fresher, more nutritious, less contaminated by poisons and preservatives and dyes than what he can buy at a store. He is reducing the trash problem; a garden is not a disposable container, and it will digest and re-use its own wastes. If he enjoys working in his garden, then he is less dependent on an automobile or a merchant for his pleasure. He is involving himself directly in the work of feeding people.

If you think I’m wandering off the subject, let me remind you that most of the vegetables necessary for a family of four can be grown on a plot of forty by sixty feet. I think we might see in this an economic potential of considerable importance, since we now appear to be facing the possibility of widespread famine. How much food could be grown in the dooryards of cities and suburbs? How much could be grown along the extravagant right-of-ways of the interstate system? Or how much could be grown, by the intensive practices and economics of the small farm, on so-called marginal lands? Louis Bromfield liked to point out that the people of France survived crisis after crisis because they were a nation of gardeners, who in times of want turned with great skill to their own small plots of ground. And F. H. King, an agriculture professor who traveled extensively in the Orient in 1907, talked to a Chinese farmer who supported a family of twelve, “one donkey, one cow… and two pigs on 2.5 acres of cultivated land” – and who did this, moreover, by agricultural methods that were sound enough organically to have maintained his land in prime fertility through several thousand years of such use. These are possibilities that are readily apparent and attractive to minds that are prepared to Think Little. To Big Thinkers – the bureaucrats and businessmen of agriculture they are quite simply invisible. But intensive, organic agriculture kept the farms of the Orient thriving for thousands of years, whereas extensive-which is to say, exploitive or extractive-agriculture has critically reduced the fertility of American farmlands in a few centuries or even a few decades.

A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has set his mind decisively against what is wrong with us. He is helping himself in a way that dignifies him and that is rich in meaning and pleasure. But he is doing something else that is more important: he is making vital contact with the soil and the weather on which his life depends. He will no longer look upon rain as an impediment of traffic, or upon the sun as a holiday decoration. And his sense of man’s dependence on the world will have grown precise enough, one would hope, to be politically clarifying and useful.

What I am saying is that if we apply our minds directly and competently to the needs of the earth, then we will have begun to make fundamental and necessary changes in our minds. We will begin to understand and to mistrust and to change our wasteful economy, which markets not just the produce of the earth, but also the earth’s ability to produce. We will see that beauty and utility are alike dependent upon the health of the world. But we will also see through the fads and the fashions of protest. We will see that war and oppression and pollution are not separate issues, but are aspects of the same issue. Amid the outcries for the liberation of this group or that, we will know that no person is free except in the freedom of other persons, and that man’s only real freedom is to know and faithfully occupy his place – a much humbler place than we have been taught to think – in the order of creation [Wendell Berry, 1969].

You never solve just one thing. It’s all connected, right down to the things we do in our own souls and our back yards.