For him, the words birthplace and home and even children had a complexity and vibrance of meaning that at present most of us have lost., Berry wants readers to hate Lees sins but love the sinner, or at least understand his motives. Currently, a dozen farming families participate. U.S. as a whole had only just become a nation in which the majority of its inhabitants lived in urban areas, Christians who take stewardship seriously, The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to Netflix, HBO, Amazon Prime, and Hulu in March, People Cant Stop Fighting Over the Politics of the, The Quarterback Conundrum at the Very Top of the NFL Draft. Lucinda, a tall, lean, no-nonsense woman married to JohnJ. Berry, was a young mother during the Civil War. Wendell Berry laments his "lack of simple things" in 'The Want of Peace,' asking about our collective trade-"selling the world to buy fire." . Berry once defined community this way: A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each others lives. Equal parts The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture (1977), a scathing indictment of big agribusiness and factory farms, and The Hidden Wound (1970), his pathbreaking book-length essay on farming, American culture, and racism, The Need to Be Whole once again considers the question that Berry has spent his entire life contemplating: How can we live among our fellow creatures in a way that is honorable, just, and as sustaining of our souls as of our material needs? For centuries, Hudson Valley farmers have used the winter months to store seed, swap stories, and lay the groundwork for a bountiful growing season. Thomas Friedman, of the Times, is scolded for a preening column in which he calls himself a green capitalist and blames Congress for not cracking down on coal, oil, and gas producers. I remembered a line from The Long-Legged House: One bright warm day in November it was so quiet that I could hear the fallen leaves ticking, like a light rain, as they dried and contracted, scraping their points and edges against each other., The place was so inviting, I wondered if anyone had ever broken inseeking, perhaps, a little food and a furtive nights rest. Late in the book, Berry writes that one of the results of Donald Trumps win in 2016 was his discovery of just how much urban, liberal America disdains (as he would have it) those of us who live in the country. In the centers library, Mary said that the project began a decade ago, when she went to talk with her father about how the local-food movement, so popular among urbanites, wasnt doing enough to support small farmers in their region. In 1967, he helped lead the Sierra Clubs successful effort to block the Red River Gorge Dam, in east-central Kentucky. I drove slowly along a rutted, muddy lane, to avoid hitting a party of ducks. The headquarters of the Berry Center occupy a capacious white brick Federal-style house on South Main Street. For instance, he writes early on that slavery would have been a relationship of mutual affection between owner and owned, that an enslaved person would emerge from the abstraction of market value to become a known person, known moreover as a member of the farms community of humans and other creatures. He posits that abuse and cruelty must have been rare, because such treatment would have wasted time and that, after the days work was done, enslaved people were relatively free to venture as they wished. Still, he offers a systems perspective applicable to startups and growing businesses that need to develop both staff and technology to thrive. But between his introduction and concluding two chapters, theres a revisionist history of slavery and its legacy that is largely unburdened by historical fact, laced with resentment about verbal slights flung at both the South and the rural U.S., and utterly incurious as to why, for instance, masses of Americans might find statues of Confederate generals objectionable and so be inspired to pull them down (Berry dismisses statue removal, as well as much of liberal politics, as simple political correctness). I didnt know anything, you see, he told me. The Crowood Press, 2019. When the Berrys children were growing up, the family had two milk cows, two hogs, chickens, a vegetable garden, and a team of draft horses. LEO: The bluegrass world lost another legend recently. Several of Berrys friends urged him to abandon the book, anticipating Twitter eruptions and withering reviews., My friends, I think, were afraid, now that I am old, that I am at risk of some dire breach of political etiquette by feebleness of mind or some fit of ill-advised candor, Berry writes. But it also offers glimpses of his next book and looks at his legacy, which includes The Berry Center, which promotes prosperous, well-tended farms serving and supporting healthy local communities and the Wendell Berry Farming Program of Vermonts Sterling College, which offers a tuition-free college degree in sustainable family farming. On a summer night near the end of the war, Lucinda saw men in uniform making off with her husband on horseback, and set out behind them on foot, in her nightgown. I recognized the story, which he included in a piece of fiction in a recent issue of The Threepenny Review. As Liz ran into the pasture, Wendell and I went into the barn. But that's not love, Wendell Berry argues in the following excerpt from his new book, The Need to Be Whole. We see a lot of young farmers with the dream and the drive, but without the starter money. She went on, Its about expectationsknowing not to expect a super-glamorous life, and being willing to appreciate what you do have. Aghast, Beshear asked, But youre on city water, arent you? Handshoe said recently that the Governor meant well, but was no match for the coal lobby: After he left, nothing much happened., Berry puts his faith in citizens who are committed to restoring their communities. On Sundays, he sometimes accompanies Tanya to the Port Royal Baptist Church (not Southern Baptist), where they worship with neighbors and four generations of Berrys. Lesser known but remarkable, especially given that in 1970 mainstream American environmentalism was almost completely unconcerned with anything related to social justice. I said Id thought they crowed only at dawn. In 1958, Berry was awarded a Wallace Stegner writing fellowship at Stanford. Mary admits that progress has been slow: Thats where the nonprofit work comes in. And Berry grew up working alongside hired Black laborers on his grandparents farm, learning from them many of the pleasures and skills and responsibilities of farm work. He had made a bird feeder and fastened it to the porch railing, so he could watch the comings and goings of chickadees, titmice, juncos, and jays. He urges immediate action as he mourns how America has turned its back on . In his great poem The Peace of Wild Things, he wrote: When despair for the world grows in me I go and lie down where the wood drake / rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. Produce that cant go to marketbolted lettuce, oversized zucchini, frostbitten Brussels sproutsbecomes more food for the livestock, and for the family. Wendell and Tanya share the house with their amiable sheepdog, Liz, who greeted me in a light rain as I climbed a set of steep stairs from the road. Most readers first discovered his fiction and poetry, then his essays, where they found a lyrically rendered view of a peril-stricken world. Friends, we're mighty grateful to be bringing another year to a close, and to have been able to spend it with you either here at the Center or from afar with our various online events. Someone took out a few panes and tried to get into my safe. His latest book, The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice, is the culmination of a lifetime of thinking and writing, and it is by turns infuriating, brilliant, lazy, startlingly radical, deeply disappointing, and filled with love, even as it seethes with resentment. Republican gubernatorial candidate Quarles calls for medical cannabis in Kentucky, Ky. lawmakers advance bill to keep coal on power grid, citing reliability concerns, Hopkinsville women appointed to state boards, Christian County sewing group donates quilts to foster care children, 2022 Hoptown Chronicle | All rights reserved, New farmers come closer to fulfilling their dreams at Wendell Berry program in Kentucky, New compendium of Kentucky writer Wendell Berrys essays published, Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues. Last October, Berry showed me the camp, asking only that I not say where it is. With support from government agencies and foundations, it runs a radio station, a theatre program, an art gallery, a filmmaking institute, and a record label. A few hours west of the decapitated mountains of Appalachia is the part of Kentucky known as the Bluegrass region. For a time / I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. I hope Berry gets his rest and returns to his good work. Perhaps the most brilliant part of The Need to Be Whole is when Berry writes that one of the longest-lasting legacies of slavery has been the degradation of manual labor. Berrys books are frequently found on the shelves of those who not only are critical of the wasteful course of mainstream American culture but also believe that we can change it ourselves with simple tools, a little land, lots of camaraderie, and plenty of sweat. A bakery up the road employs recovering opioid addicts. We walked through a greenhouse and their five-acre vegetable gardenasparagus, squash, carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, garlic, onions, potatoes, celery, and lettuceand on to the Fiechters pigs, a five-way cross between Red Wattle, Duroc, wild boar, Wessex Saddleback, and Meishan. And it named Wendell Berry the recipient of its 2022 Henry Hope Reed Award. Berry has found a kind of salvationand a lifelong subjectin his stewardship of the land he farms in Kentucky. Standing on its long legs, it had a peering, aerial look, as though built under the influence of trees.. For if everything is connected through the violence of American-style capitalism, then it can be reconnected according to lovenot the treacly, John Lennon Top 40 variety, but the radical love that Berry learned from his conversations with fellow Kentuckian bell hooks (published in hooks Belonging: A Culture of Place), with whom he opens his introduction. She was outside, and one of the roosters was crowing raucously. for its efforts to clean up waters polluted by toxic mining runoff. An earlier version of this article misstated HerbE. Smiths role in the creation of Appalshop. These days, Den, a master woodworker, raises cattle and hay with his wife, Billie, at their farm nearby. A society with an absurdly attenuated sense of sin starts talking then of civil war or holy war.. An early-twentieth-century English botanist, Howard had studied traditional farming methods in India and emerged as an evangelist for sustainable agriculture. Wendell Berry was born in 1934 into the tobacco country of Henry County, Kentucky. With it, he told me, you can deliver a blow of tremendous force to a stake or a splitting wedge. Thinking about a modern sledgehammer, I asked how the handle was inserted into the head. And as he has done in many essays over the years, Berry convincingly shows how attempts to modernize agriculture, driven, since the 1970s, by the federal governments policy of get big or get out, has led to the devastation of a once more or less independent rural culture. He writes of exchanging friendly talk with Trump voters at Port Royals farm-supply store, a kind of tolerance that is necessary in a small town: If two neighbors know that they may seriously disagree, but that either of them, given even a small change of circumstances, may desperately need the other, should they not keep between them a sort of pre-paid forgiveness? And so the wound has lived beneath the skin.. It was some instinctive love of wilderness that would always bring me back here, he wrote, but it was by the instincts of a farmer that I established myself., He turned himself around at the University of Kentucky, where he earned undergraduate and masters degrees in English. This was the era of recycling and wilderness preservation, when the famous crying Indian implored Americans merely to stop littering. Instead, he returned empty-handed. ". It had a smooth handle and a bulbous head, squared off at the end. He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and was given The National Humanities Medal. When Berry moved to the country with his wife, Tanya, he gave her a privy that never aspired so high as to have a door.. You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time. Ultimately, were using the curriculum as a way for farmers to make decisions informed by poetry, history, and literature, as well as the hard sciences.. I very much hope that this is not Berrys last missive from Henry Countythat, having taken hundreds of pages to vent his resentment, he can clear his mind, can air out his prose and return to what I understand to be his calling: caring for the land, caring for the community of life, caring for the integrity and clarity of his thought. Several of Berrys friends urged him to abandon the book, anticipating Twitter eruptions and withering reviews. They ought to keep it ready to hand, like a fire extinguisher. Without this, we risk conflagration: A society with an absurdly attenuated sense of sin starts talking then of civil war or holy war., If readers were incredulous about Berrys claim that a pencil was a better tool than a computer, its not hard to imagine how many will react to his plea that we extend sympathy to a general whose army fought to perpetuate slavery in America. Seeking Clarity: Wendell Berry's New Book on Race By Katherine Dalton - October 5, 2022 1 Louisville, KY. Wendell Berry is 88, and age has not blurred the beauty of his prose or diminished his ability to take enormous pains on a topic on which he wants to speak clearly. Chuckling, Berry noted that the only thing they changed was the slogan: It Still Screams. He added, That story has been worth a lot to me. We get the old myth of Robert E. Lee as a tragic gentleman soldier who hated slavery but fought for his love of Virginia, and the canard that however bad Southern chattel slavery was, the true horror of America came into view only after the war, when capitalism made slaves of us all, turned us all against one another, and ravaged the earth. As a people, wherever we have been, we have never really intended to be. Much of the rest of the book is devoted to tracing out the conflict of two different tendencies that Berry sees as defining American history: the exploitative one, characterized by the pioneer, the trader, the land speculator, the investor, the tycoon and stock trader, and the nurturing one, exemplified by small, subsistence family farms. he Wendell Berry Farming Program, a tuition-free college degree program that started in 2019 graduated its inaugural cohort of 12 students on May 15, 2021 at. In reality, people accommodate each other., Berry hailed the concentration of talent, work, and courage in Whitesburg, citing its most famous resident, Harry Caudill, whose history of Appalachia, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, came out in 1963 and brought the war on poverty to eastern Kentucky. He also talked about a married couple, Tom and Pat Gish, who in 1956 bought the local newspaper, the Mountain Eagle, and ran it for fifty-two years. The white man, he wrote near the books end, preoccupied with abstractions of the economic exploitation and ownership of the land, necessarily has lived on the country as a destructive force, an ecological catastrophe, because he assigned the hand labor, and in that the possibility of intimate knowledge of the land, to a people he considered racially inferior; in thus debasing labor, he destroyed the possibility of a meaningful contact with the earth.. I no longer have the courage to write if I cant erase. He recalled that his work on A Place on Earth had been a long and awkward struggle, and so having Dans help and encouragement at that time was wondrous good fortune. After more letters and phone calls, he and Tanya invited me to visit. By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. Both slavery and the industrial world can be indefensible. When he learned afterward that the building was being remodelled, he told a workman, Look, when you tear that post out, I want it. Wendell and Tanya were married a year and a half later, and they spent their first summer together at the camp. As he drove into Kentucky for the first time, he said, I felt like the air pressure changed. Taking a walk one day with his foxhound, he was stopped by a white man: He gives me the third degreeWho are you? For what was slavery, other than a way for the wealthy to avoid work by forcing another person to the fields and then stealing the fruits of their sweat? He is also a 2013 Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Bobbie Ann Mason, a Kentucky novelist who has known Berry for decades, e-mailed with me about his fictional universe of Port William. My family lived rather austerely in what Dan called exurban Connecticut, where he chopped wood for our fireplace and tended an organic vegetable garden. It's the use of the word abandon that puzzles me. . When they express alarm about climate change, she tells them, You cant throw up your hands in despair. The economists cant solve it, nor will the engineers be able to design a machine that can innovate our way out of trouble. They want to know how to belong to a place, Mary told me. OK. But there are two points worth making. The immediate villain was President Nixons Agriculture Secretary, Earl Butz, who warned small farmers to adapt or die. But Berry had a bigger target, which he came to call technological fundamentalism: If we have built towering cities, we have raised even higher the cloud of megadeath. Today, some eighty per cent of U.S. government subsidies go to farms with revenues of more than a million dollars a year. Berry was descended from slaveholders on both sides of his family. By Wendell Berry August 31, 2022 When advocating for justice in public life, it's easy to think we're championing the side of love against the side of hate. This will never be presented to us as one large and final choice, but only as a succession of small choices, continuing to the seventh and the seven-hundredth generation. Though these choices are smallwhat food we eat and where it comes from, how we earn our livings and what we spend our time on, what we love and what we pay attention tothey are choices whose choosing will send us down different paths. . As we climbed a steep rise, Wendell talked about how the Fords had felled trees and extracted rocks, so that the hill could be plowed for tobacco. According to Tom Grissom, who is writing a book about the local history of tobacco, Berry was a member of his towns bank board, a trustee of his college, and a Sunday-school teacher at the Baptist church. Whenever the country struggles with a new man-made emergency, Berry is rediscovered. The first is that, contrary to Berrys assumption, the North and the South, the factory and the plantation, were never mutually exclusive systems, but intricately linked, as much recent scholarship has shown. The Gishes moved the papers operations to their house and got out the next issue. Though we have thoroughly rejected slavery, Berry writes that the nations dominant ambition, to never dirty our hands, increasingly from the Civil War until now, was set by the slaveowner. The results have been ruinous: For the sake of freedom from certain kinds of work, we have seriously degraded the creaturely commonwealth of earth, water, and air, and ourselves along with it., This is damage, Berry writes, that cannot be legislated away (though enlightened agricultural policy favoring small farmers and redistributing land to Black agrarians would help). Send me updates about Slate special offers. Jeffrey Bilbro. The novelist Colum McCann told The Atlantic in 2017 that Berrys poems have a real twinkle in their eyes in the face of a dark world. He recited The Mad Farmers Love Song, which features one of his favorite figures in the canon: O when the worlds at peaceand every man is freethen will I go down unto my love.O and I may go downseveral times before that. Dan wrote to Wendell about a load of horse manure that had just been delivered for his garden. John Berry became an attorney, married Virginia Erdman Perry, from Port Royal, and established himself as a prominent citizen of Henry County. On Sep 22, 2019 Michael Burke wrote : I need help understanding the lines in Wendell Berry's poem the wild geese: "Geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky closes. From the Civil War to the present, Port William has been home to a dozen families and to an entertaining supporting cast. Back at Lanes Landing Farm, Berry said that it was time to feed the sheep, so we set out in his battered pickup. In 1969, at the age of seventeen, Smith and seven other young people helped found a film workshop, called Appalshop, to produce stories about eastern Kentucky that countered the conventional narrative about benighted Appalachians. In Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer, an infamous 1987 essay that ran in Harpers, he announced, I do not see that computers are bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me: peace, economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and community stability, good work. When indignant readers sent a blizzard of letters to the editor, Berry noted in reply that one man, who called him a fool and doubly a fool, had fortunately misspelled my name, leaving me a speck of hope that I am not the Wendell Barry he was talking about., I first heard of Wendell Berry when I was ten years old. At first, he wanted to become a pastor, but his father asked him, You want to live off the plate, and be dependent on others hard work? Joseph and Abbie decided that he was right about the value of producing something on your own. Though Berry is careful to state that slavery was indefensible, his hottest anger is reserved for industrialism, whose triumph, he maintains, loosed a virulent racism across the nation. Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter (Shoemaker and Hoard, 2004) 1-59376-078-7 $16.95 190. This extended synthesis of the history of agriculture, the history of race, and the history of work is something new for Berry, and The Need to Be Whole is at its best when Berry, who often sounds like a homegrown, Christ-quoting mix of Karl Marx and the founder of anarchism, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, argues that violence is so far our historys dominant theme, that the willingness to exploit people is never distinguishable from the willingness to destroy the land and that our race problem is intertangled with our land and land use problem, our farm and forest problem, our water and waterways problem, our food problem, our air problem, our health problem. Everything is connected, and what connects it is exploitation. After the towns school closed, along with its bank and its grocery store, Joseph was bused to school in Madison, fifteen miles away; he met Abbie in junior high. He opened the barn doors onto a cavernous space, where light filtered through the siding boards. In 1972, after spending two days flying over the coalfields of Kentucky, he wrote, The damage has no human scale. Dan and Wendell shared a love of the land, a droll wit, and a punctilious commitment to proper usage. This summer, hell publish a sprawling nonfiction book, The Need to Be Whole, followed by a short-story collection in the fall. In the weeks before John Wayne Gacys scheduled execution, he was far from reconciled to his fate. Critics see him as a utopian or a crank, a Luddite who never met a technological innovation he admired. But this is not just history; it offers insight into the land, culture and neighbors that made Wendell Berry, now 87, who he is and why he is what he is.