I have been reading Wendell Berry since the late 1970's. More people need to listen to him. A poet and a farmer - or a farmer and a poet.
Author Wendell Berry at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky. Photograph: Ed Reinke/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Wendell Berry wrote about and practiced “sustainable agriculture” long before the term was widely used. His 1977 book,
The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture,
in which he argued against industrial agriculture and for small-scale,
local-based farming, had a strong influence on the environmental and
local food movements in the US.
Berry has long balanced the
diverse roles of writer, activist, teacher, and farmer. At age 79, he
still lives on the farm near Port Royal, Kentucky, where he grew up, and
uses traditional methods to work the land there. And he still speaks
eloquently about the importance of local communities and of caring for
the land, while warning of the destructive potential of
industrialization and technology.
In an interview with
Yale Environment 360
editor Roger Cohn, Berry talked about his Kentucky farm and why he has
remained there, why he would risk arrest to protest mountaintop removal
mining, why the sustainable agriculture movement faces an uphill battle,
and why strong rural communities are important. “A deep familiarity
between a local community and a local landscape is a dear thing, just in
human terms,” Berry said. “It’s also, down the line, money in the bank,
because it helps you to preserve the working capital of the place.”
Yale Environment 360:
You’ve been writing about and practicing what is now known as
sustainable agriculture since before that term was widely used. In
recent years, there’s been a movement among some people toward
sustainable agriculture. Do you feel sustainable agriculture is gaining
ground in a significant way that could slow the growth of industrial
agriculture, or is it more of a boutique type of thing?
Wendell Berry: Well, we are a young country. By the
time settlement reached Kentucky it was 1775, and the industrial
revolution was already underway. So we’ve been 238 years in Kentucky, we
Old World people. And what we have done there in that time has not been
sustainable. In fact, it has been the opposite. There’s less now of
everything in the way of natural gifts, less of everything than what was
there when we came. Sometimes we have radically reduced the original
gift. And so for Americans to talk about sustainability is a bit of a
joke, because we haven’t sustained anything very long — and a lot of
things we haven’t sustained at all.
The acreage that is now
under the influence of the local food effort or the sustainable
agriculture effort is at present tiny, and industrial agriculture is
blasting ahead at a great rate. For instance, in the last two years, the
high price of corn and soybeans has driven that kind of agriculture
into the highly vulnerable uplands of my home country. I can show you
farms that in my lifetime have been mostly in grass that are now
suddenly covered, line fence to line fence, with monocultures of corn or
beans….
So we have these two things, a promising start on what
we call, loosely, sustainable land use, and we have a still far larger
industrial extractive agriculture operating, really, against the land.
e360:
On your place where you live now and farm, what are some of the
practices that you employ and use to take good care of the land and make
it sustainable?
Berry: The farm that my wife
and I have is in every way marginal. Every foot of it is either steep,
which is most of it, or it floods [Laughs]. So it’s land that you can
learn a lot from in a hurry because it is so demanding of care. The way
to deal with that land is to keep it covered with permanent pasture or
woodland. We have some slopes in pasture that ought to have remained
woodland, but we’ve kept most of it going the way it came to us.
e360: And do you do forest logging there as well?
Berry:
Most of our woodland we don’t use, but some we use for firewood, an
occasional saw log, fence posts, that sort of thing. The emerald ash
borer [a destructive beetle] is now among us, and we are cutting the
large trees that the emerald ash borer has killed. The ash wood is
valuable as sawed lumber, and it’s also wonderful firewood… My son does
woodworking, and so it’s worthwhile to him to have supplies of sawed
boards laid up.
e360:
You write a lot about local agriculture and the local economy, about
local traditions and the importance of connections to the land. Why do
you think this is so important?
Berry: That
starts with the obvious perception that land that is in human use
requires human care. And this calls for keeping in mind the history of
such land, of what has worked well on it and the mistakes that have been
made on it. To lose this living memory of what has happened to the
place is really to lose an economic asset.
I’m more and more
concerned with the economic values of such intangibles as affection,
knowledge, and memory. A deep familiarity between a local community and
the local landscape is a dear thing, just in human terms. It’s also,
down the line, money in the bank because it helps you to preserve the
working capital of the place.
e360: You along
with Wes Jackson of the Land Institute have proposed a 50-year farm
bill. Can you explain what that is and how it would differ from typical
US farm bills?
Berry: Unlike the typical US
farm bill, the 50-Year Farm Bill attempts to address the real and
ongoing problems of agriculture: erosion, toxicity, loss of genetic and
species diversity, and the destruction of rural communities, or the
destruction, where it still survives, of the culture of husbandry. It
begins with the fact that at present, 80% of the land is planted
annually in annual crops such as corn and beans, and 20% in perennials.
It proposes a 50-year program for the gradual inversion of that ratio to
80% perennial cover and 20% annuals. It’s pretty clear that annual
plants are nature’s emergency service. They’re the plants that come in
after, say, a landslide, after the land has been exposed, and they give
it a temporary cover while the perennials are getting started. So our
predominantly annual agriculture keeps the land in a state of emergency.
It’s
hard to make a permanent agriculture on the basis of an emergency
strategy. By now the planted acreages have grown so large that most
soybean and corn fields, for instance, are not seeded to cover crops,
and so they lie exposed to the weather all winter. You can drive through
Iowa in April before the new crops have been planted and started to
grow, and you don’t see anything green mile after mile. It’s more
deserted than a desert. And the soil erosion rates in Iowa are
scandalous.
e360: I know you’ve had people tell
you that your writing has inspired them to think about chucking their
jobs and their city life and go farm. What do you tell them?
Berry:
Well, I try to recommend caution. You don’t want somebody who’s 45 or
50 years old, who doesn’t know anything about farming, to throw up his
or her present life and undertake to make a living from farming at a
time when farmers, experienced farmers, are failing and going out of
business. So characteristically I’ve said, “If you do this, keep your
town job. If you’re not independently wealthy, you’ve got to have a
dependable income from somewhere off the farm.” And I’ve tried to stress
the difference between depending on the weather, on nature, for an
income and depending on a salary. There’s a very wide gulf between those
two kinds of dependence.
e360: Three years ago
you participated in a sit-in at the governor’s office in Kentucky over
the issue of mountaintop removal mining. What was that like, and why did
you get involved with it in the first place?
Berry:
I got involved because I was tired of talking. I saw that we were going
to Frankfort [the state capital] every year and trying to talk to
senators and representatives in the General Assembly, and to the
governor if we could.Their very understandable impulse was to get rid of
us as quickly as possible and have us leave feeling good… There are two
parties in Kentucky — the party of coal and the party of everything
else. Both the Democratic politicians and the Republican politicians,
mostly, in most areas of the state, have to pay homage to coal, to even
think about running for office.
So it was clear that talking
wasn’t going to do any good. I don’t think what we wound up doing did
any good either, but we had to raise the stakes somehow. And so we did
go to Frankfort, confront the governor, and we had a list of requests
that he would have to grant or he would not get rid of us. And he pulled
a pretty smart trick on us. He invited us to spend the weekend. For
obvious reasons, he didn’t want pictures in the paper of these innocent
people being led off in handcuffs, and he said “Just stay, be my
guests.” He outsmarted us. But he couldn’t neutralize us — the
circumstance that he put us in really gave us a lot of visibility, a lot
of contact with the press, and attracted a lot of sympathy.
e360: Do you think any positive developments have occurred since then?
Berry:
No. I think we’ve got to keep up our opposition to land abuse and we’ve
got to continue to communicate what that’s all about and what it
signifies. What it signifies is that some people are willing to go the
limit in earth destruction, to put it entirely at risk and destroy it
entirely to preserve “our way of life.” A lot of people are willing to
tolerate that.
Mountaintop removal is as near total destruction
as you can imagine, because it does away with the forest, it does away
with the topsoil that sustained the forest, it does away with the very
topography — even people’s family graveyards go. And it’s done in
complete disregard not only of the land but of the people who live
downhill, whose lives are threatened, whose water supplies are
destroyed, whose homes are damaged. The people downhill, downstream, and
ahead of us in time are totally disregarded.
e360:
As someone who’s followed your writing over the years, it seems to me
that in some ways you’ve become more radical in your thinking, unlike a
lot of people who as they get older tend to become more conservative. Do
you think that’s true, and if so, why?
Berry:
It’s true. One reason is that as I’ve grown older I’ve understood more
clearly the difficulties that we’re in, the bad fix that we’re in and
that we’re leaving to our children. And as I’ve grown older I’ve
understood that when I put my comfort on the line as a protester or
whatever, I’m doing what old people ought to do. I have less life to
live than the young people. I think the old people ought to be the first
ones in line to risk arrest.
e360: I’ve heard you describing the difference
between optimism and hope, and you said that in terms of the issues you
really care about, you would not describe yourself as optimistic but as
hopeful. Can you explain that?
Berry: The issue
of hope is complex and the sources of hope are complex. The things
hoped for tend to be specific and to imply an agenda of work, things
that can be done. Optimism is a general program that suggests that
things are going to come out swell, pretty much whether we help out or
not. This is largely unjustified by circumstances and history. One of
the things that I think people on my side of these issues are always
worried about is the ready availability of cynicism, despair, nihilism —
those things that really are luxuries that permit people to give up,
relax about the problems. Relax and let them happen. Another thing that
can bring that about is so-called objectivity — the idea that this way
might be right but on the other hand the opposite way might be right. We
find this among academic people pretty frequently — the idea that you
don’t take a stand, you just talk about the various possibilities.
But
our side requires commitment, it requires effort, it requires a
continual effort to define and understand what is possible — not only
what is desirable, but what is possible in the immediate circumstances.
e360: You’ve had many opportunities over the years
to leave Port Royal — you had teaching jobs at universities — but you
made the decision to go back and stay there. Why?
Berry:
Well because I love the place. Both my father and my mother came from
the Port Royal neighborhood, and I was one of the farm-raised young
people who loved both farming and the place. Port Royal is what a lot of
people have been schooled to call “nowhere.” I remember a college
student who told me, “I’m from a little nowhere place in Illinois.” And I
said, ”Wait a minute. I want to ask you something: Who told you that
where you come from in Illinois is nowhere? There is no such place as
nowhere.” We’ve dumped our garbage in our places, we’ve polluted them
and mistreated them in every way, because we thought they were nowhere.
It’s extremely important, it seems to me, that those nowhere places
should be inhabited by people who will speak for them.
e360:
You’ve had four careers, really — writer, farmer, activist, and
teacher. How do you see those parts of your life fitting together?
Berry:
A question I’m often asked is, “How have you balanced these various
pursuits?” And the word “balance” always implies that I have balanced
them, and of course I haven’t. It’s been difficult and sometimes a
struggle to keep it all going.
e360: Difficult in what way?
Berry:
Well, to find time for it all. I’ve known writers — I think it’s true
also of other artists — who thought that you had to put your art before
everything. 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.
• Roger Cohn is the editor of Yale Environment 360
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/mar/06/wendell-berry-americans-sustainability-joke