Props for Wendell Berry

Erica Zerr, a friend and Food Not Lawns neighbor, recently wrote this and posted the following interview:

We Can't Have it Both Ways: Sustainable and Industrial/Capitalistic

I have made no secret of my love for Wendell Berry. The writings of the much celebrated agriculturalist (as much as he loathes the word) have always engulfed me with a deep sense of longing for a simpler life, one dare-I-say, closer to the Earth and to God.

I have also made no secret of my belief in sustainable agriculture, local food movements and the importance of the strong domestic skills inherent to traditional preparations of seasonal, fresh food. I believe that is neccessity for food and water that provides the very genesis of human community. We rely on each other, on some form of community structure to supply ourselves, families and neighbors with these most basic needs. Therefore, community relies on a connection to the land.

Mr. Berry has always celebrated the thread of human connection to the land as the greater fabric of community. This existence fosters caring and hard work and moreover, a reverance for the delicate balance of give and take that must happen with the Earth in order for it to continue providing for basic human needs. The human community relies on the sustainability of our most vital resources.

Below is an interview Mr. Berry gave to Heifer International regarding the degredation of not only the Earth's natural resources, but also the degredation of the human community. Mr. Berry points to the historical connection of agriculture to communities and human beings, both wealthy and poor and how simple reliance on the land required all classes to live in close quarters and take care of their communities. As industrialization turned sustainable production into mass production at the expense of natural and human resources, a wedge was placed between the owners, investors, elite and the working class. Sustainable communities which once relied on one another to care for themselves in turn caring for communities were driven further and further apart, separated by thousands of acres, miles, interstates and concrete and suddenly humans were relying not on their neighbors and their land, they were relying on something intangible, a large system of resources of which they could not see. Because human beings no longer had to, or in some cases could not, utilize simply their natural surroundings to provide for their community, the human connection to the land was lost.

Industrialization has not only depleted natural resources at a rate unseen in the entirety of human history, it has also depleted the human community. Humans can no longer rely solely on their connection to one another and their connection to the land to provide for themselves. Industrialization required that human beings begin working for wages to in turn buy the food they once provided themselves. This drove humans off farms and into cities, which grew at an unsustainable rate thanks to natural resource powered industrial food and water systems.

The human existence within community is no longer specifically related to the shared need to provide one and all with basic human needs as Mr. Berry often celebrates in his writings. Industrialization has made it so the main focus of our lives is earning the money which in turn purchases those basic human needs we once provided for ourselves. Even those remaining on the land farm large-scale monocrops which they sell to industrialized food companies in turn for wages which they use to drive into to town and purchase their basic needs.

There is a great movement within urban communities to reach out to the rural community and purchase small-scale agricultural products, grown with the reverence for the land that most small farmers (at least the ones Mr. Berry writes about) have. However, this doesn't solve the problem because it still places wages and cash exchange in the middle of human connection to one another and the land. We can't buy sustainability. The reliance on large stores of cash to purchase goods is inherently unsustainable. Creating more big business, more industrializtion, with the goal of creating more jobs and more money to turn around and purchase more "sustainably produced" goods does not solve the problem. It only feeds the problem, however good the initial intentions.

Arguably, the Earth provides everything human beings need to survive - food, fiber, water, energy and building materials. Humans have known for tens of thousands of years how to care for those things and build sustainable communities based on those things. No more than 100 years ago, humans lived lives without oil. Communities thrived based on human connectedness to one another.

I have said time and time again that I want to live like one of Wendell Berry's heroes. I want to live in Port Royal, Kentucky, where life is a simple as preparing and storing food, tending to the land and animals which assist in the human massage of the land, have a porch where neighbors, close-by, stop by for vists. I want to get around by river and train, sell small stores of extras or a fwe cords of timber to nearby towns in exchange for a small amount of money, enough to pay for services from local artisans, shoe cobblers, black smiths and carpenters and only purchase the things I can not trade some labor/goods for. That world, however distant it seems, still exists in the world. These aren't wealthy communities monetarily, but they are spiritually wealthy. Human beings remember one another, learn from one another.

Mr. Berry lives, farms, works and writes in that place. It is off the beaten path in Kentucky. Many similar pockets of agrarianism, sustainable human relationships with the land, still exists all over the world. All we must do is stop the constant accquisition of more industrialization and more capitalization, scale down and not up. We need to cease constant growth and return the land to small communties, connected and maintained by those who live in the surrounding homes and farms. Work together to once again provide for ourselves. There is enough land and enough water and enough of our old selves left that we can still return to that world.

Without further ado, Mr. Wendell Berry:

Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry: On the Natural Order of Things

Interview by Lauren Wilcox

PORT ROYAL, KY.— To get to the writer Wendell Berry’s farm in Kentucky, it is necessary to leave the interstate for a diminishing series of state highways and country roads. As the roads become smaller they become slower. The fields seem to shrink into large gardens; the trees grow taller and broader; buildings grow older and closer to the road, until the road is a shady street fronted with wood-frame houses. The houses have porches; old men on the porches raise a hand at passing cars. Back where the interstate meets the smaller roads, there is a sign listing things one must not drive onto the interstate, including “Farm Implements” and “Animals on Foot.” It is as if the sign marks not only the intersection of two roads but the intersection of two worlds, and cautions one against trying to merge with the other.

Much of Berry’s poetry, essays and fiction is concerned with this divide: between city and country, product and source, joy and grief, one person and the world. Berry is perhaps best known as a champion of agrarianism. He has empathy and a deep affection for small farmers, whose livelihood he has watched decline precipitously in his lifetime; his novels celebrate their work and mourn its slow erosion. But he is not a romanticist. His agrarian Interview by Lauren Wilcox essays are intellectual and often maverick analyses that touch on every part of our lives: environment, culture, spirituality, government, relationships.

Mostly, I think, his writing is about relationships. He is concerned with sustainable and productive interactions, whether between two people or a people and their land. Any functional relationship will deal with the bad as well as the good, will include waste and death just as it includes birth and growth. This is the natural order of things, and it works as a system of checks and balances, to keep the cycle of life progressing at a sustainable pace, without more waste than we can handle. A road that prohibits “Animals on Foot,” in other words, is a road on which traffic is moving too fast.

Wendell Berry knows this, but he also feels it. The way he renders the world in his poetry and his novels is not altogether happy and not altogether sad but a vivid, unnameable combination of both, the way it feels to love something, to be fully committed to something, that is all the time growing and changing and vanishing. That work, says Berry, is the work of living.

World Ark: In both your fiction and your nonfiction you talk about community and its importance to healthy living. In your writing, this sense of community arises out of a connection to the land that generally comes from farming, from an agrarian lifestyle. I’m curious to know if you think that agrarianism is the only basis of a healthy community. I live in a big city, where there are great, old vibrant neighborhoods with a strong sense of community, but that isn’t based even remotely on farming.

Wendell Berry: But it [that sense of community] is based, a good bit more than remotely, on eating. It’s based as immediately on eating as it can be. And so we don’t want to be led astray on labels. Agrarianism is a label, and you’ve always got to particularize it, but as those people in those neighborhoods become aware of all that’s implied by their need to eat — and their supposable wish to continue eating — they will come to a kind of urban agrarianism.

Suppose they say, ‘We want a dependable supply of good food, produced in a way we can be assured is sustainable.’ If that kind of thinking gets loose in an urban neighborhood, you’ll probably have a few people who will go looking for local produce at the local farmers market. The next natural step is to wonder where they can get a quarter of beef produced locally. And maybe they become aware then that they don’t have a good local processing plant. So an agrarian awareness can spread in an urban neighborhood until its economy will be affected in elaborate and intelligent ways. The city, in that way, begins a collaboration, a cooperative relationship, with its own landscape.

WA: So a healthy community really must be connected to the land in some way.

WB: Well, I think so. It has to have a conscious and responsible connection to its sources, if its sources are going to be maintained. Phoenix, say, is a bad model. It can’t hope to live from its desert landscape. It’s a sort of suspended population. Everything has to come in by longdistance transportation. A better model, if we want to look for a historical one, would be the Greek cities. The Greek city, I’ve read, did not consist simply of the built-up urban center. It consisted of that center and its tributary landscape. So, as I understand it, the Greek cities were full of granaries and other storage places for local food.

It’s silly to sit in a modern city in a kind of idiot complacency and depend on the hidden hand or God or luck to bring food and the other necessities. So the intelligence — and we have a suffi cient amount of intelligence at least to ask questions about what affects us most immediately — intelligence, if it’s in working condition, begins to ask, “Where is this stuff coming from?” And then it asks, “How much do I need?” And then, “Where can I get that much? Do I want to raise my children here and never ask whether they can have a safe food supply or not?”

WA: You’ve been saying that for a long time, long before it became fashionable to say.

WB: [Laughs] I’ve got it memorized.

WA: Do you think that the main problem of industrialization is that it is isolating? That it removes people from the causes and effects of their actions, and contributes to neglect?

WB: No, the main problem is the permanent depletion of resources. We’ve burnt fossil fuels at an astonishing rate. I’ve lived through the burning of nearly all the petroleum that has been burned, and that’s about half of it. And industry’s use of the fossil fuels has sort of been the pattern for its use of everything else. We’re using up topsoil as if it were not a one-time supply, as if it were an inexhaustible resource. The industrial economy has made lots of estrangements and divorces. It has divorced people from the land because it needed to shift them around. It needed a labor supply, and it didn’t believe it needed people on farms. So you had factory centers that drew people in by depreciating their economies at home and appreciating the economies somewhere else.

Industrialism also separated utility and beauty. If a thing was functional, it didn’t make any difference how it looked, and I think you can go only so far with that. If a thing is ugly, I think we need to ask questions about it. How did it get that way? What else is wrong? We know that a great ugliness has accompanied industrialization. I’ve read that the mill towns in England were beautiful as long as they were water-powered because the mill owners lived in the towns. And so for their own pleasure, they saw that the towns looked good, with shade trees and fl owers and that sort of thing. When they started running on steam, using coal, the coal smoke blackened everything and ruined the air. The owners moved away. And that removed any effective motive to make the towns beautiful. The owners’ living circumstances then were separated from the workers’ circumstances. Another disastrous divorce. Industrialization functioned as a way to siphon the wealth of the countryside into the pockets of owners and investors as quickly and cheaply as possible. Caretaking has not been a part of the deal at all.

We’ve reconciled ourselves to this destructiveness and adapted our lives to it, so that now we’re utterly dependent on destruction and the services and amenities have declined. My great-grandfather had better public transportation than I do, and better mail service.

WA: Which was what?

WB: The train, just a few miles away, and the river. He could walk down here from Port Royal, get on a boat, and go anywhere in the world. Never set foot on a vehicle he owned himself. The train station was a short buggy ride away.

WA: You and your wife lived in New York City for a while before moving back here. Do you think your way of thinking about all this would have evolved in the same way if you hadn’t come back?

WB: Coming back here has certainly made me aware of what is going on in a way that I couldn’t have been anywhere else. I know the history here pretty well. I know the local life has declined. Port Royal probably never had more than a hundred people. There were 16 economic enterprises in Port Royal when my mother was a girl and 12 when I was a boy. There were two grocery stores, and my grandparents divided their patronage of those stores to the penny. Now there’s only the bank and a store and the post office. If the store went, the bank and the post office would probably go, too. So we would go down like some other little villages around here. In a hundred years, we would go from a sort of self-suffi cient village that was the center of its own attention, that did most things for itself, to a vending machine. Or less.

WA: Many of our readers have connections to farming themselves, so could you tell us a little about your own farm?

WB: As long as our children were at home we had a fairly elaborate subsistence economy here. Had two milk cows, fi nished a couple of meat hogs a year, raised our own poultry. We’re older now, the children are gone, so we’re just raising sheep — 32 ewes at present. We have a team of work horses to do the work we have to do, and a pretty good garden. The garden gets three or four big loads of manure every year.

WA: Which really helps with the productivity of the land, right? That’s one of the things that Heifer teaches to its project partners.

WB: That’s observing what Sir Albert Howard calls the Law of Return. And it is a law. What you take you’ve got to give back, or else what Howard called the Wheel of Life won’t turn. The wheel turns through birth, growth, maturity, death, decay and back to birth. Round and round. If you don’t keep that wheel turning, you finally exhaust the land.

WA: Today, so much of the effect that our consumption has on the world happens without us knowing. Is it important for us to actually see our personal give-and-take with our environment, our effect on the world?

WB: It’s important at least that we understand our economic relation to the world, the way we live from it, the way we do or don’t take care of it. I think the conservation movement unwittingly helped to drive a wedge between us and our land by implying that we could live most of our lives in circumstances that don’t quite suit us — doing work that doesn’t suit us, work that makes us say, Thank God it’s Friday — and then somehow, on vacation, go to a national park and reconnect with the natural world. But of course that’s not a connection.

WA: It’s a way of thinking that treats the natural world as a precious object, not a part of everyday life.

WB: These people get in their cars and go west across Kansas, which feeds them, and they never look at it, because their chins are on the dashboard looking for the Rocky Mountains. Wes Jackson has watched them doing that. No snowy peaks in Kansas. My own testimony about this is that I know we can connect to nature in a better way. You don’t have to go to the Rocky Mountains to confront nature, to learn from it and ask the necessary questions. If you go to a good farm that has been properly and gracefully fi tted into a place, then you can see that real questions about the terms on which we live have been asked, and answered.

Suppose a family in Louisville is connected with a CSA [community-supported agriculture program] out here. We don’t have any great stands of old-growth timber around here, no great wilderness, no high waterfall, no snowcapped peak, but say that this family would come out, by invitation of their farmer, and have a picnic in the woods on her good farm. And they would see where the food is coming from while they’re there. They would see that you can have a nice outing even in such ordinary countryside as that. They would see how you can live in a place like that, and that living there requires respectable intelligence. And it seems to me that in their minds the breach between the city and the country would begin to heal.

Lauren Wilcox is a freelance journalist and a former World Ark associate editor. She lives in New Jersey with her husband. Lauren recommends these favorite Wendell Berry works: What Are People For? (Essays); The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry; Given: Poems; Jayber Crow: A Novel.