Grist/Amelia K. Bates
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and BPR, a public radio station serving western North Carolina.
Wendell Berry made his choices and stuck to them. He did not have a computer or a smartphone. He wrote more than 50 books of poetry, fiction, and essays, mostly with a pencil and paper, from his farmhouse in Henry County, Kentucky. By the time of his passing on August 31, the 92-year-old had lived many lives—as a farmer, teacher, philosopher, environmental activist—and inspired several generations of writers, farmers, and advocates in turn. From these varying perspectives, Berry grappled with humanity and the natural world.
His answer to the fundamental question of how to live right was to start small—to revere the Earth’s endless beauty, and to work a little, each day, to reverse the harm we’ve caused.
“There is no public crisis that is not also private,” Berry wrote in his essay “Think Little.” Written in 1972 as the environmental movement emerged, the piece marked a conflict of Berry’s: Despite strong environmental convictions, he sometimes despaired of the movement’s focus on bending the ear of politicians, without individuals healing the rupture between modern life and the land. “The changes that are required are fundamental changes in the way we are living,” Berry wrote.
Berry hated dualisms—between humanity and the natural world, body and soul, person who believes x and person who believes y.
He extolled this approach in one of his most well-known poems, “Manifesto: Mad Farmer Liberation Front”: “Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. / Say that your main crop is the forest / that you did not plant.”
The language of activism was often at odds with Berry’s worldview. It seemed to warn of a coming apocalypse, but to Berry, the world had no end and no beginning. To move in nature’s time meant to think in cycles of death and rebirth, not a straight line leading toward destruction or salvation.
That didn’t stop Berry from engaging with activism, even when it frustrated him, said Jeffrey Bilbro, an English professor at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, who’s written several books on Berry.
Berry was arrested in 1979 for protesting a nuclear plant in Indiana. In 2011, he was arrested again during a sit-in inside Kentucky state government offices while protesting mountaintop removal coal mining. He remained active in the fight against coal throughout the 2010s, helping to block the gates to a coal-fired power plant in Washington, D.C., and pulling his papers from the University of Kentucky after the school accepted a $7 million donation from Alliance Coal.
After Berry wrote his essay in Harper’s Magazine, “Why I am not Going to Buy a Computer” in 1987, some called him a Luddite. As a Grist article in 2014 pointed out, he was, in perhaps the truest sense, taking after that early 19th century movement, when textile workers at the advent of industrialization destroyed machinery to protect the dignity of their work. Berry refused, as much as he could, to let technology alienate him from his work. For this, he was sometimes criticized or called a curmudgeon.
His views didn’t fit neatly into modern politics. He believed that marriage and family strengthened community ties, but didn’t believe the government had authority to legislate such things. The law of nature, he said in one essay, was universal kinship and kindness, and Biblical stories and Psalms supported that.
“It is the time’s discipline to think / of the death of all living, and yet live.”
Berry was religious, but didn’t always like church, calling himself, according to Bilbro, a “bad weather church-goer” because he preferred to spend nice Sunday mornings walking in the woods. He hated dualisms—between humanity and the natural world, between body and soul, between person who believes x and person who believes y. This lent him broad appeal across the political and class spectrum, especially to those who felt that capitalism and industry had moved humanity away from a more honest way of life, whether through agriculture or other means.
“For an uncompromising person or a person of convictions, I think he recognized the need in a fallen world,” Bilbro said. “Our hands are all dirty, and we’re making these compromises, and it’s better to be honest about the necessity to do so and try to do what we can to live right, even if we can’t attain the purity that we might wish.”
The environmental crisis, according to Berry, takes hold in our lives and evinces itself as a sort of social decay. But living isn’t an unforgivable sin in itself, if we can only leave things better than we found them, knowing that the strip-mined mountaintop where we plant spruce, aspen, and wildflowers might not become a lush forest again until long after we’re gone.
In the poem, “A Discipline,” Berry imagines apocalypse: “it approaches / on every side, there is no other place / to turn.”
And yet, the poem continues, nothing ever really goes away: “It is the time’s discipline to think / of the death of all living, and yet live.”
Only the hard work of tending the land and learning its rhythms again can heal it, he believed. In coming into relationship with the smallest handful of earth, you can understand what it means to fight for change almost too enormous to fathom. To Berry, by tending a sprouted seedling in the ground, you can recognize you are it, and it is you.
