Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry
Wendell E. Berryis an American novelist, poet, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. A prolific author, he has written many novels, short stories, poems, and essays. He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a recipient of The National Humanities Medal, and the Jefferson Lecturer for 2012. He is also a 2013 Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Berry was named the recipient of the 2013 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award. On January...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth5 August 1934
CityHenry County, KY
CountryUnited States of America
Hunger is a powerful persuader if it happens, and it's conceivable that it could happen. Country people have always known this.
Any religion has to have a practice. When you let it go so far from practice that it just becomes a matter of talk something bad happens.
Specialization is the great evil of civilization.
There is a religious principle: Love thy neighbour as thyself. But it's also an economic asset. If you've got a neighbour, you've got help, and this implies another limit. If you want to have neighbours, you can't have a limitless growth economy. You have to prefer to have a neighbour rather than to own your neighbour farm.
To have good farming or good land use of any kind, you have got to have limits. Capitalism doesn't acknowledge limits.
The discussion about food doesn't make any sense without discussion at the same time of land, land use, land policy, fertility maintenance, and farm infrastructure maintenance.
The connections between people and land are dangerously oversimplified and mainly technological.
If you're a writer and you are at all inclined to speak as a Christian in some way, you realize very quickly that the conventional language is pretty much useless. It takes a long time to get past that, or it has taken me a long time. People in conventional Christianity have spoken lightly and sometimes frivolously of God for a long time. It's a word that needs to be used sparingly, in my opinion.
Without animals, something essential is removed from the minds of the farmers.
Corn and bean people, I'm afraid, have extremely specialized minds.
There are lots of bad things that can happen to a food economy that's both extensive and centralized. There's no substitute for petroleum. To have a growth economy based on a declining fuel supply is bound to be stressful.
You can't live entirely alone. You have to have some kind of a support system.
People talk about "job creation," as if that had ever been the aim the industrial economy. The aim was to replace people with machines.
When you take away the subsistence economy, then your farm population is seriously exposed to the vagaries of the larger economy. As it used to be, the subsistence economy carried people through the hard times, and what you might call the housewife's economy of cream and eggs often held these farms and their families together.