How Many Here Know the Words, Works and Wisdom of Wendell Berry?

[Clara T]

Afterword from Missing Mountains:
We Went to the Mountaintop But It Wasn’t There  
 
BY WENDELL BERRY 

In a little more than two centuries—a little more than three lifetimes such as mine—we have sold cheaply or squandered or given away or merely lost much of the original wealth and health of our land. It is a history too largely told in the statistics of soil erosion, increasing pollution, waste and degradation of forests, desecration of streams, urban sprawl, impoverishment and miseducation of people, misuse of money, and, finally, the entire and permanent destruction of whole landscapes.

Eastern Kentucky, in its natural endowments of timber and minerals, is the wealthiest region of our state, and it has now experienced more than a century of intense corporate "free enterprise," with the result that it is more impoverished and has suffered more ecological damage than any other region. The worst inflicter of poverty and ecological damage has been the coal industry, which has taken from the region a wealth probably incalculable, and has imposed the highest and most burdening "costs of production" upon the land and the people. Many of these costs are, in the nature of things, not repayable. Some were paid by people now dead and beyond the reach of compensation. Some are scars on the land that will not be healed in any length of time imaginable by humans.

The only limits so far honored by this industry have been technological. What its machines have enabled it to do, it has done. And now, for the sake of the coal under them, it is destroying whole mountains with their forests, water courses, and human homeplaces. The resulting rubble of soils and blasted rocks is then shoved indiscriminately into the valleys. This is a history by any measure deplorable, and a commentary sufficiently devastating upon the intelligence of our politics and our system of education. That Kentuckians and their politicians have shut their eyes to this history as it was being made is an indelible disgrace. That they now permit this history to be justified by its increase of the acreage of "flat land" in the mountains signifies an indifference virtually suicidal.

So ingrained is our state’s submissiveness to its exploiters that I recently heard one of our prominent politicians defend the destructive practices of the coal companies on the ground that we need the coal to "tide us over" to better sources of energy. He thus was offering the people and the region, which he represented and was entrusted to protect, as a sacrifice to what I assume he was thinking of as "the greater good" of the United States. But this idea, which he apparently believed to be new, was exactly our century-old policy for the mountain coalfields: the land and the people would be sacrificed for the greater good of the United States—and, only incidentally, of course, for the greater good of the coal corporations.

http://www.newsoutherner.com/Missing_Mountains.htm

[SmokingJacket]

1. I heard him read a few years ago.

He was incensed at the state of the country then -- around 1995. Can't imagine what he's feeling these days.

This country could use a little of his wisdom, but it's never been further from listening to him...

[Clara T]

3. He is one of todays greatest philosophers/thinkers

and it's all accessible, common sense wording. Has an uncanny ability to say much of what most everyone is thinking, even those who are called conservatives. Not some ivory tower academic, though he teaches/taught at U of Kentucky, just philosophizing to rooms of purportedly liberal thinkers and greenies.

Also an 11th generation farmer. They farm without machines on his farm.

Highly recommend this book:


Quotes from The Unsettling of America

"In The Unsettling of America I argue that industrial agriculture and the assumptions on which it rests are wrong, root and branch; I argue that this kind of agriculture grows out of the worst of human history and the worst of human nature. . . . Every good and perfect gift comes from politicians, scientists, researchers, governments, and corporations. Evils, however, are inevitable; there is just no use in trying to choose against them. Thus all industrial comforts and labor- saving devices are the result only of human ingenuity and determination (not to mention the charity and altruism that have so conspicuously distinguished the industrial subspecies for the past two centuries), but the consequent pollution, land destruction, and social upheaval have been 'inevitable.' . . . That is to say that what happened happened because it had to happen. Thus the apologist for the ruin of agricultural lands, economies, and communities have shown always that they did nothing to stop it because there was nothing they could have done to stop it. . . . If an utterly brainless and destructive agricultural economy has been inevitable for half a century, why should it now suddenly cease to be inevitable? . . . But if the publication of The Unsettling of America and subsequent events have shown me that throwing a rock into a frozen river does not make a ripple, they have also shown that beneath the ice the waters are strongly flowing and stirred up and full of nutrients. Beneath the cliches of official science and policy, our national conversation about agriculture is more vigorous and exciting now than it has been since the 1930s."

. . .

"In the decades since World War II the farms of Henry County have become increasingly mechanized. Though they are still comparatively diversified, they are less diversified than they used to be. The holdings are larger, the owners are fewer. The land is falling more and more into the hands of speculators and professional people from the cities, who--in spite of all the scientific agricultural miracles--still have much more money than farmers. Because of big technology and big economics, there is more abandoned land in the county than ever before. Many of the better farms are visibly deteriorating, for want of manpower and time and money to maintain them properly. . . Among the people as a whole, the focus of interest has largely shifted from the household to the automobile; the ideals of workmanship and thrift have been replaced by the goals of leisure, comfort, and entertainment. For Henry County plays its full part in what Maurice Telleen calls 'the world's first broad- based hedonism.' The young people expect to leave as soon as they finish high school, and so they are without permanent interest; they are generally not interested in anything that cannot be reached by automobile on a good road. Few of the farmers' children will be able to afford to stay on the farm-- perhaps even fewer will wish to do so, for it will cost too much, require too much work and worry, and it is hardly a fashionable ambition.

"And nowhere now is there a market for minor produce: a bucket of cream, a hen, a few dozen eggs. One cannot sell milk from a few cows anymore; the law-required equipment is too expensive. Those markets were done away with in the name of sanitation--but, of course, to the enrichment of the large producers. We have always had to have 'a good reason' for doing away with small operators, and in modern times the good reason has often been sanitation, for which there is apparently no small or cheap technology. Future historians will no doubt remark upon the inevitable association, with us, between sanitation and filthy lucre. And it is one of the miracles of science and hygiene that the germs that used to be in our food have been replaced by poisons."

. . .

"But in order to complete an understanding of the modern disconnection between work and value, it is necessary to see how certain 'aristocratic' ideas of status and leisure have been institutionalized in this system of education. This is one of the liabilities of the social and political origins not only of our own nation, but of most of the 'advanced' nations of the world. Democracy has involved more than the enfranchisement of the lower classes; it has meant also the popularization of the more superficial upper-class values: leisure, etiquette (as opposed to good manners), fashion, everyday dressing up and a kind of dietary persnicketiness. We have given a highly inflated value to 'days off' and to the wearing of a necktie; we pay an exorbitant price for the looks of our automobiles; we pay dearly, in both money and health, for our predilection for white bread. We attach much the same values to kinds of profession and levels of income that were once attached to hereditary classes.

"It is extremely difficult to exalt the usefulness of any productive discipline as such in a society that is at once highly stratified and highly mobile. Both the stratification and the mobility are based upon notions of prestige, which are in turn based upon these reliquary social fashions."

http://www.ecobooks.com/books/unsettli.htm

[LiberalAndProud]

2. Thanks for sharing that.

[Clara T]

4. You're Welcome- Wendell Berry on What is an Economy

Berry is a strong defender of family, rural communities, and traditional family farms. He has developed 17 rules for the healthy functioning of sustainable local communities. The underlying principles could be described as 'the preservation of ecological diversity and integrity, and the renewal, on sound cultural and ecological principles, of local economies and local communities':

1 Always ask of any proposed change or innovation: What will this do to our community? How will this affect our common wealth.
2 Always include local nature - the land, the water, the air, the native creatures - within the membership of the community.
3 Always ask how local needs might be supplied from local sources, including the mutual help of neighbours.
4 Always supply local needs first (and only then think of exporting products - first to nearby cities, then to others).
5 Understand the ultimate unsoundness of the industrial doctrine of 'labour saving' if that implies poor work, unemployment, or any kind of pollution or contamination.
6 Develop properly scaled value-adding industries for local products to ensure that the community does not become merely a colony of national or global economy.
7 Develop small-scale industries and businesses to support the local farm and/or forest economy.
8 Strive to supply as mush of the community's own energy as possible.
9 Strive to increase earnings (in whatever form) within the community for as long as possible before they are paid out.
10 Make sure that money paid into the local economy circulates within the community and decrease expenditures outside the community.
11 Make the community able to invest in itself by maintaining its properties, keeping itself clean (without dirtying some other place), caring for its old people, and teaching its children.
12 Sees that the old and young take care of one another. The young must learn from the old, not necessarily, and not always in school. There must be no institutionalised childcare and no homes for the aged. The community knows and remembers itself by the association of old and young.
13 Account for costs now conventionally hidden or externalised. Whenever possible, these must be debited against monetary income.
14 Looks into the possible uses of local currency, community-funded loan programmes, systems of barter, and the like.
15 Always be aware of the economic value of neighbourly acts. In our time, the costs of living are greatly increased by the loss of neighbourhood, which leaves people to face their calamities alone.
16 A rural community should always be acquainted and interconnected with community-minded people in nearby towns and cities.
17 A sustainable rural economy will depend on urban consumers loyal to local products. Therefore, we are talking about an economy that will always be more cooperative than competitive.

http://www.heureka.clara.net/art/berry.htm

[villager]

5. he's a damn fine poet, too

thanks for bringing him up at DU...

[Clara T]

6. Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
 
 
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Rest of poem here:
http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=6722&poem=33501

[Mrs. Overall]

7. I love his poetry book entitled The Wheel--

beautiful images of nature as he stresses the idea that we, as people, are part of the earth's rhythms and cycles.

[OneBlueSky]

8. Wendell Berry is a brilliant "geologian" . . .

read anything you can find by him . . .