wendell berry
a study in the cyclical binary of life and destruction
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HUMANITIES magazine, she was standing in Miller Hall by a wooden post. Years later, after the university decided to renovate the hall, the wooden newel post ended up in the Berry family home, on the first floor, this symbol of their long union the first thing a visitor sees when entering their home. In addition to a literary career resulting in more than fifty books, in which Tanya has always played an important editorial role, their partnership has yielded two children, five grandchildren, and one great grandchild.
Born in 1934 amid the Great Depression, Wendell was the first of four children born to Virginia Erdman and John Marshall Berry. His parents came from farming families. His mother had been to college and was a great reader. While working on the congressional staff of Virgil Chapman, later a U.S. senator, his father attended law school. But instead of becoming a big-city lawyer, president. he returned to Kentucky to farm while also continuAfter studying at Kentucky, Berry Wendell ing to work for the New Deal. In the 1930s, John became a creative writing fellow grew up in Marshall Berry helped set up a thirteen-state in the Wallace Stegner writNewcastle, Kentucky, marketing cooperative for tobacco farmers—a ing program at Stanford working on his father’s cooperative that lasted for many years, and for farm and neighboring farms. He University where he which both Wendell’s father and, later on, his attended the Millersburg Military worked brother John Marshall Berry Jr., served as Institute and then the University of Kentucky, where he earned his Master’s and met Tanya Amyx. The first time he saw Tanya, Berry recently told Jim Leach in an interview in
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alongside Ernest J. Gaines, Ken Kesey, and several other writers who went on to achieve renown. Stegner supported erry’s career in numerous ways, not least by his example a writer of significant literary and moral ambition who oted much of his life’s work to a place: its natural envient, its people, and its history. After Stanford, Berry on what promised to be an itinerant existence as sor of writing and literature, visiting Tuscany for a Guggenheim fellow and then teaching at New ersity for two years. An invitation to teach at ty of Kentucky, however, carried him back e. He bought a farm near Port Royal, on land adjacent to a farm that had been in his mother’s family, and pursued his vocation as a writer.
is modest enough for its actions and rationales to be discernible. Government, he believes, should take its sense of reality from the ground beneath our feet and from our connections with our fellow human beings. And it should have a better sense of proportion: Its solutions should be equal to its problems and should not beget other problems.
than a naturalist. fies an American school of hat was notable, but also contested, ounding generation. In the debate that set Thomfferson against Alexander Hamilton—and rural farms against ies, and agriculture against banking interests—Berry stands with Jefferson. He stands for local culture and the small family farmer, for yeoman virtues and an economic and political order that
H E L L !
Since the beginning
of the conservation effort in our country, conservationists have too often believed that we could protect the land without protecting the people. This has begun to change, but for a while yet we will have to reckon with the old assumption that we can preserve the natural world by protecting wilderness areas while we neglect or destroy the economic landscapes—the farms and ranches and working forests—and the people who use them. That assumption is understandable in view of the worsening threats to wilderness areas, but it is wrong. If conservationists hope to save even the wild lands and wild creatures, they are going to have to address issues of economy, which is to say issues of the health of the landscapes and the towns and cities where we do our work, and the quality of that work, and the well-being of the people who do the work.
Governments seem to be making the opposite error, believing that the people can be adequately protected without protecting the land. And here I am not talking about parties
It is merely a fact that the land, here and everywhere, is s of our agriculture.We know that we are carelessly and w proliferation of highways and garbage are making our liv or party doctrines, but about the dominant political assumption. Sooner or later, governments will have to recognize that if the land does not prosper, nothing else can prosper for very long.
We can have no industry or trade or wealth or security if we don’t uphold the health of the land and the people and the people’s work.
suffering. We have the “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico and undrinkable water to attest to the toxicity wastefully logging our forests. We know that soil erosion, air and water pollution, urban sprawl, the ves always less pleasant, less healthful, less sustainable, and our dwelling places more ugly. Nearly forty years ago my state of Kentucky, like other coal-producing states, began an effort to regulate strip mining. While that effort has continued, and has imposed certain requirements of “reclamation,” strip mining has become steadily more destructive ofthe land and the land’s future. We are now permitting the destruction of entire mountains and entire watersheds. No war, so far, has done such extensive or such permanent damage. If we know that coal is an exhaustible resource, whereas the forests over it are with proper use inexhaustible, and that strip mining destroys the forest virtually forever, how can we permit this destruction?
If we believe, as so many of us profess to do, that the Earth is God’s property and is full of His glory, how can we do harm to any part of it?
In Kentucky, as in other unfortunate states, and again at great public cost, we have allowed—in fact we have officially encouraged— the establishment of the confined animal-feeding industry, which exploits and abuses everything involved: the land, its people, the animals, and the consumers.
If we love our country, as so many of us profess to do, how can we so desecrate it?
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Elton said again. He was whis The owls went through their cackles and gobbles.
“Listen to them!” Elton said. the woods at night excited him b b
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spering. whole repertory of hoots and clucks and
“They’ve got a lot on their minds.” Being in m. He was a hunter. And we were excited by the flood’s interruption of the road. The rising of the wild water had moved us back in time.
Elton quietly opened his door and got out and then, instead of slamming the door, ust pushed it to. I did the same and came around and followed him as he walked slowly down the road, looking for a place to climb out of the cut. Once we had climbed the bank and stepped over the fence and were walking among the big trees, we seemed already miles from the truck. The water gleamed over the bottomlands below us on our right; you could not see that there had ever been a road in that place. I followed Elton along the slope through the trees. Neither of us thought to use a flashlight, though we each had one, nor did we talk. The moon gave plenty of light. We could see everything—underfoot the blooms of twinleaf, bloodroot, rue anemone, the little stars of spring beauties, and overhead the littlest branches, even the blooms on the sugar maples. The ground was soft from the rain, and we hardly made a sound. The flowers around us seemed to float in the shadows so that we walked like waders among stars, uncertain how far down to put our feet. And over the broad shine of the backwater, the calling of the peepers rose like another flood, higher than the water flood, and thrilled and trembled in the air.
I wanted t stars, but They wer that hard, peaceful w little share then, whe of them, E his hand a to the ow
It was a long walk because we had to go around the inlets of the backwater that lay in every swag and hollow. Way off, now and again, we could hear the owls. Once we startled a deer and stood still while it plunged away into the shadows.
And always we were walking among flowers.
to keep thinking that they were like after a while I could not think so. re not like stars. They did not have , distant glitter. And yet in their pale, way, they shone. They collected their e of light and gave it back. Now and en we came to an especially thick patch Elton would point. Or he would raise and we would stop a minute and listen wls.
I was wider awake than I had been since morning would have been glad to go on walking all night long.
selected works poems Satisfactions of the Mad farmer Prayers and Sayings of the Mad Farmer A Praise In This World Sleep
essay Compromise, Hell!
short story Are You Alright?
bibliography Berry, Wendell. Fidelity Five Stories. New York and San Francisco: Pantheon Books, 1992.
Berry, Wendell. Collected Poems 1957-1982. New York: North Point Press; Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1987
Berry, Wendell. The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays. Berkeley: Counter Point, 2005.