Happy Birthday Wendell Berry

I stole this from the Writers Almanac e-mail from Garrison Keillor

born near Port Royal, in Henry County, Kentucky (1934). His family - on both sides - have farmed tobacco in Henry County for at least five generations. His father had a law degree, and his brother was a lawyer, but Berry knew his brain didn't work that way. He went to the University of Kentucky and then received a prestigious Wallace Stegner Fellowship to study creative writing at Stanford, mentored by Stegner himself. He missed the farm, but figured it was not in the cards for him. "My education had implied, over and again, that you couldn't amount to anything in a place like this," he said. "I grieved over that. I liked the work of the farms. [...] But, at Stanford, I thought I was at the commencement of some kind of an academic vagabondage that would carry me I didn't know where." It carried him to Italy and to New York, and then one day he was offered a teaching job at the University of Kentucky. He took it, even though all his friends thought he was crazy to leave New York.

His first novel, Nathan Coulter (1960), was set in Port William, a fictional version of Port Royal. Over the years, he continued to write about Port William, using the same characters, re-creating the voices of the people around him. He said: "I have made the imagined town of Port William, its neighborhood and membership, in an attempt to honor the actual place where I have lived. By means of the imagined place, over the last fifty years, I have learned to see my native landscape and neighborhood as a place unique in the world, a work of God, possessed of an inherent sanctity that mocks any human valuation that can be put upon it."

In 1965, Berry became the sixth generation to farm in Henry County. He bought a farm called Lane's Landing, and raised sheep, and grew hay and corn. When he became a farmer, his writing took a backseat. "I've known writers - I think it's true also of other artists - who thought that you had to put your art before everything," he said. "But if you have a marriage and a family and a farm, you're just going to find that you can't always put your art first, and moreover that you shouldn't. There are a number of things more important than your art. It's wrong to favor it over your family, or over your place, or over your animals."

Berry considers himself a Christian, and criticizes the Christians who fail to take climate change and the environment seriously. He's an activist for (and against) many other issues, too, including the death penalty, nuclear power plants, the coal industry, the war in Vietnam, sustainable agriculture, and dependence on fossil fuels. In 1973, he began corresponding with poet Gary Snyder. In many ways, they were opposites: Snyder lived in California, Berry in Kentucky; Snyder was a practicing Buddhist, Berry a Christian. They didn't always agree. Berry worried about fighting evil: "You can struggle, embattle yourself, resist evil until you become evil [...] And I see with considerable sorrow that I am not going to get done fighting and live at peace in anything like the simple way I thought I would." Snyder didn't believe in the concept of evil the way that Berry envisioned it, and told Berry he was fighting "ignorance, stupidity, narrow views [and] simple-minded egotism." But over more than 40 years, they have exchanged almost 250 letters, on subjects ranging from writing to religion, from farming to philosophy. Their letters are collected in Distant Neighbors (2014).

Berry has written novels, stories, poems, and essays. His books include The Unsettling of America (1977), Jayber Crow (2000), Hannah Coulter (2004), and The Mad Farmer Poems (2008). This past January, he became the first living writer to be inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame. His most recent book is a collection of essays: Our Only World (2015).

I had the pleasure of meeting him when I keynoted a conference in 2008: Call Me a FOCer: Big Ideas under a Big Sky

a gathering that he organizes at Mountain Sky Guest Ranch in Montana. He told me that he was pulling together a meeting of friends to discuss ecological economics, sustainable agriculture, and public health, while cultivating a deeper understanding of what’s necessary to achieve a livable future on our overpopulated, overburdened, and over-polluted planet. Charlie is a fan of Herman Daly, and he wanted people at this meeting who could present Herman’s economic vision (Peter Victor, Josh Farley and I were all invited because of our Dalyist point of view). I hesitated to accept the invitation, mostly because I’ve been working to reduce the amount I travel (I’ve been avoiding air travel and trying to adjust to a more local existence). But Charlie’s charms won out, and I agreed to attend, although I determined I would drive to the meeting. I know that driving 900 miles is a sorry way to save on carbon emissions, but it was the best I could do, and I’m glad I did it.

The friends of Charlie (FOCers) are a remarkable gang. On paper, their credentials and accomplishments are formidable. In real life, they’re not only the “best and brightest,” but they’re also caring, hard working, and utterly unpretentious. They chair university departments, manage public programs, conceive and conduct major research projects, run nonprofit organizations, and write influential books. It’s comforting to know that these brilliant minds are hard at work finding ways to make society sustainable.

His book (among very many) The unsettling of America is a classic critique of our way of life, especially agriculture.

He is two years my senior but hundreds of years beyond me in his thinking.

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elenacarlena's picture

Happy Birthday, Sir, and many more!! Thank you for introducing this group to a national treasure.

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Please check out Pet Vet Help, consider joining us to help pets, and follow me @ElenaCarlena on Twitter! Thank you.

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don, also meant to thank you for posting this essay...

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ThomM's picture

Having never lived on a farm, I had not given much thought to the connection between humans and the land before reading it. We had just been through the "long national nightmare" of Watergate, the economy was in shambles and was not responding to the WIN buttons (Whip Inflation Now), the Arab oil embargo and the and the Iranian hostage crisis foreshadowed our shift in foreign policy focus from Viet Nam to the Middle East, and the conservative movement was on the rise with Ronald Reagan and his shining city gated community on the hill. The world seemed to be collapsing all around us. Enter Wendell Berry with his idea that we had lost something more when we lost our connection to the land with the disappearance of the family farm and the rise of corporate agribusiness. I spent the next couple of years dreaming of buying some land and becoming a farmer like my great grandfather, ultimately facing the realization that systemic changes had already closed that door for most of us. My environmentalism however, would from that time on be more deeply rooted in the understanding of the ancient bond between humans and the earth that Wendell Berry so elegantly outlined.

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Wendell has a counterpart \co-conspirator in Wes Jackson, founder of the Land Institute in Kansas. Both Wes and Wendell were speakers at the Quivira Coalition Conference www.quiviracoalition.org several years back. I believe Wes will be a speaker there in November. Both brilliant men in all the best ways. Wes is a bit more subtle, or boiled down, than Wendell, and their interaction was marvelous. I'm including a link to a talk by a Canadian forestry woman, re forest communication which is mind manifesting, and proves that, no matter how far out, or deep in , we humans go, Mother Nature has already been there for a looong time !Thanks for the post.
trees talk with one another

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Love Wendell Berry. Thanks for this.

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