harmony with the natural world
harmony with the natural world Selected works by Wendell Berry
beware the justice of nature
compromise, hell!
We are destroying our country— I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.
understand that there can be
no successful human economy
apart from nature or in
defiance of nature.
Since the beginning of the conservation effort in our country, conservationists have too often believed that we could protect the land without protecting the people. This has begun to change, but for a while yet we will have to reckon with the old assumption that we can preserve the natural world by protecting wilderness areas while we neglect or destroy the economic landscapes—the farms and ranches and working forests—and the people who use them. That assumption is understandable in view of the worsening threats to wilderness areas, but it is wrong. If conservationists hope to save even the wild lands and wild creatures, they are going to have to address issues of economy,which is to say issues of the health of the landscapes and the towns and cities where we do our work, and the quality of that work, and the well-being of the people who do the work.
Governments seem to be making the opposite error, believing that the people can be adequately protected without protecting the land. And here I am not talking about parties or party doctrines, but about the dominant political assumption. Sooner or later, governments will have to recognize that if the land does not prosper, nothing else can prosper for very long. We can have no industry or trade or wealth or security if we don’t uphold the health of the land and the people and the people’s work. If we know that coal is an exhaustible resource, whereas the forests over it are with proper use inexhaustible, and that strip mining destroys the forest virtually forever, how can we permit this destruction? If we honor at all that fragile creature the topsoil, so long in the making, so miraculously made, so indispensable to all life, how can we destroy it? If we believe, as so many of us profess to do, that the Earth is God’s property and is full of His glory, how can we do harm to any part of it? In Kentucky, as in other unfortunate states, and again at great public cost, we have allowed— in fact we have officially encouraged—the establishment of the confined animal-feeding industry, which exploits and abuses everything involved: the land, its people, the animals, and the consumers. If we love our country, as so many of us profess to do, how can we so desecrate it? Look carefully, if you doubt me, at the centers of the larger towns in virtually every part of our country.You will find that they are economically dead or dying. Good buildings that used to house
needful, useful, locally owned small businesses of all kinds are now empty or have evolved into junk stores or antique shops. But look at the houses, the churches, the commercial buildings, the courthouse, and you will see that more often than not they are comely and well made. And then go look at the corporate outskirts: the chain stores, the fast-food joints, the food-and-fuel stores that no longer can be called service stations, the motels. Try to find something comely or well made there. What is the difference? The difference is that the old town centers were built by people who were proud of their place and who realized a particular value in living there. The old buildings look good because they were built by people who respected themselves and wanted the respect of their neighbors. The corporate outskirts, on the contrary, were built by people who manifestly take no pride in the place, see no value in lives lived there, and recognize no neighbors. The only value they see in the place is the money that can be siphoned out of it to more fortunate places— that is, to the wealthier suburbs of the larger cities.
understand that no amount of education can overcome the innate limits of human intelligence and responsibility. we are not smart enough or conscious enough or Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some of us would like to think so, but in fact this destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market, and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations. We have failed to acknowledge this threat and to act in our own defense. As a result, our oncebeautiful and bountiful countryside has long been a colony of the coal, timber, and agribusiness corporations, yielding an immense wealth of energy and raw materials at an immense cost to our land and our land’s people. Because of that failure also, our towns and cities have been gutted by the likes of Wal-Mart, which have had the permitted luxury of destroying locally owned small businesses by means of volume discounts. So long a complaint accumulates a debt to hope, and I would like to end with hope. To do so I need only repeat something I said at the beginning: Our destructiveness has not been, and it is not, inevitable. People who use that excuse are morally incompetent, they are cowardly, and they are lazy. Humans don’t have to live by destroying the sources of their life. People can
alert enough to work responsibly on a gigantic scale. change; they can learn to do better. All of us, regardless of party, can be moved by love of our land to rise above the greed and contempt of our land’s exploiters. This of course leads to practical problems,and I will offer a short list of practical suggestions. We need to give an absolute priority to caring well for our land—for every bit of it. There should be no compromise with the destruction of the land or of anything else that we cannot replace. We have been too tolerant of politicians who, entrusted with our country’s defense, become the agents of our country’s destroyers, compromising on its ruin. And so I will end this by quoting my fellow Kentuckian, a great patriot and an indomitable foe of strip mining, the late Joe Begley of Blackey: “Compromise, hell!”
in making things always bigger
and more centralized, we make
them both more vulnerable in
1.
Beware the justice of Nature.
2.
Understand that there can be no successful human economy apart from Nature or in defiance of Nature.
3.
Understand that no amount of education can overcome the innate limits of human intelligence and responsibility. We are not smart enough or conscious enough or alert enough to work responsibly on a gigantic scale.
4.
In making things always bigger and more centralized, we make them both more vulnerable in themselves and more dangerous to everything else. Learn, therefore, to prefer small-scale elegance and generosity to large-scale greed, crudity, and glamour.
5.
Make a home. Help to make a community. Be loyal to what you have made.
6.
Put the interest of the community first.
7.
Love your neighbors—not the neighbors you pick out, but the ones you have.
8.
Love this miraculous world that we did not make, that is a gift to us.
9.
As far as you are able make your lives dependent upon your local place, neighborhood, and household—which thrive by care and generosity—and independent of the industrial economy, which thrives by damage.
10.
Find work, if you can, that does no damage. Enjoy your work. Work well.
themselves and more dangerous to
everything else. learn, therefore,
to prefer small-scale elegance and
generosity to large-scale greed,
crudity, and glamour. Biography: Wendell Berry lives and farms with his family in Henry County, Kentucky, and is the author of more than thirty books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. In a commencement address delivered in June 1989, Berry gave some advice that to most modern graduates would sound old fashioned, indeed backward. But the advice he gave was timeless, and his reminder seems apocalyptic in view of the world’s current environmental crisis and. He closed his address with a series of ten commands, which, he said, “is simply my hope for us all.” These instructions are at the heart of Berry’s personal and literary world, and collectively they express the thesis informing all of his work:
make a home. help to make a community. be loyal to what you have made. Berry’s work is an ongoing exploration of man’s use of and relationship to the land, and his writing constitutes, as Gary Tolliver has said, one man’s “continuing search for avenues of reentry into a proper state of harmony with the natural world.” To proponents of modern “progress,” Berry’s ideas must seem regressive, unrealistic, radical. But no advice could be more needed and more practical, if we are to progress. The modern agricultural crisis, as Berry sees it, is a consequence of widening the gap between the way nature farms and the way man farms. Many modern agricultural theories and practices assume universal applications. But such attitudes and practices constitute an affront to Nature— that is, the particular Nature of a particular place. Traditional farmers are sensitive to the particular needs of their farms; through the years and generations they have looked to the Nature of their place to judge which practices, plants, and animals work and thrive the best, given the farm’s conditions.
Berry believes that a “place” has its own ruling Nature. Thus, Berry stresses that a traditional farmer will always consider and adapt his practices to the needs of the land’s primal character. Successful and sustainable agriculture, then, as Berry understands it, is possible only by maintaining a cyclic vision, one attuned with Nature, rather than a linear vision, one seeking conquest of Nature. The more a person is removed from the substance of his work, Berry argues, the greater is his tendency to neglect or to ignore it. He says that a traditional farmer “will walk his fields out of interest; the industrial farmer or manager only out of necessity.” Traditional care requires a comprehensive, intimate, often passionate knowledge of the Nature of one’s place. Berry writes, for example, in The Unsettling of America, “A healthy farm culture can be based only upon
familiarity and can grow only among a people soundly established upon the land; it nourishes and safeguards a human intelligence of the earth that no amount of technology can satisfactorily replace.” Berry is the fifth generation of his father’s family and the sixth generation of his mother’s to farm in Henry County, Kentucky. Loyal to the cyclic vision, he knows the history of his ancestors on the land, and he understands how each has affected the other. Man cannot be independent of nature. In one way or another he must live in relation to it, and there are only two alternatives: the way of the frontiersman, whose response to nature was to dominate it, to assert his presence in it by destroying it; or the way of Thoreau, who went to natural places to become quiet in them, to learn from them, to be restored by them. To know these places, because to know them is to need them and respect them and be humble before them is to preserve them. To fail to know
put the interest of the community first them, because ignorance can only be greedy of them, is to destroy them. Berry’s canon constitutes an urgent call to reevaluate both our use of Nature’s “gifts” and our view of ourselves. And it is a plea to redirect our environmental concerns from the abstract notion of our “planet” to the more grounded, familiar notion of our “place”—our homes and our communities. In his address, Berry asked the Bar Harbor graduates, “How, after all, can anybody—any particular body—do anything to heal a planet?” and he answered, “Nobody can do anything to heal a planet. The suggestion that anybody could do so is preposterous. The heroes of abstraction keep galloping in on their white horses to save the planet—and they keep falling off in front of the grandstand.”
man cannot be independent of nature.
In This World The hill pasture, an open place among the trees, tilts into the valley.The clovers and tall grasses are in bloom. Along the foot of the hill dark floodwater moves down the river. The sun sets. Ahead of night fall the birds sing. I have climbed up to water the horses and now sit and rest, high on the hillside, letting the day gather and pass. Below me cattle graze out across the wide fields of the bottomlands, slow and preoccupied as stars. In this world, men are making plans, wearing themselves out, spending their lives, in order to kill each other.
love your neighbors— not the neighbors you pick out, but the ones you have.
“Listen!” Elton said. He had heard a barred owl off in the woods. He quietly rolled the window down. And then, right overhead, an owl answered: “HOOOOOAWWW!” And the far one said, “Hoo hoo hoohooaw!” “Listen!” Elton said again. He was whispering. The owls went through their whole repertory of hoots and clucks and cackles and gobbles. “Listen to them!” Elton said. “They’ve got a lot on their minds.” Being in the woods at night excited him. He was a hunter. And we were excited by the flood’s interruption of the road.
are you alrig
ht?
Elton quietly opened his door and got out and then, instead of slamming the door, just pushed it to. I did the same and came around and followed him as he walked slowly down the road, looking for a place to climb out of the cut. Once we had climbed the bank and stepped over the fence and were walking among the big trees, we seemed already miles from the truck. The water gleamed over the bottomlands below us on our right; you could not see that there had ever been a road in that place. I followed Elton along the slope through the trees. Neither of us thought to use a flashlight, though we each had one, nor did we talk. The moon gave plenty of light. We could see everything—underfoot the blooms of twinleaf, bloodroot, rue anemone, the little stars of spring beauties, and overhead the littlest branches, even the blooms on the sugar maples. The ground was soft from the rain, and we hardly made a sound. The flowers around us seemed to float in the shadows so that we walked like waders among stars, uncertain how far down to put our feet. And over the broad shine of the backwater, the calling of the peepers rose like another flood, higher than the water flood, and thrilled and trembled in the air.
love this miraculous world that we did not make, that is a gift to us.
It was a long walk because we had to go around the inlets of the backwater that lay in every swag and hollow. Way off, now and again, we could hear the owls. Once we startled a deer and stood still while it plunged away into the shadows. And always we were walking among flowers. I wanted to keep thinking that they were like stars, but after a while I could not think so. They were not like stars. They did not have that hard, distant glitter. And yet in their pale, peaceful way, they shone. They collected their little share of light and gave it back. Now and then, when we came to an especially thick patch of them, Elton would point. Or he would raise his hand and we would stop a minute and listen to the owls. I was wider awake than I had been since morning would have been glad to go on walking all night long. Around us we could feel the year coming, as strong and wide and irresistible as a wind.
I have stirred into the ground the offal and the decay of the growth of past seasons Enriching the Earth
and so mended the earth and made its yield increase.
To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass
All this serves the dark. I am slowly falling
to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds of winter grains and of various legumes, their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.
as far as you are able make y your local place, neighborh thrive by care and generosit
into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth, not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness and a delight to the air, and my days do not wholly pass. It is the mind’s service,
for when the will fails so do the hands and one lives at the expense of life. After death, willing or not, the body serves, entering the earth. And so what was heaviest and most mute is at last raised up into song.
your lives dependent upon hood, and household—which ty—and independent of the
The Silence What must a man do to be at home in the world? There must be times when he is here as though absent, gone beyond words into the woven shadows of the grass and the flighty darknesses of leaves shaking in the wind, and beyond the sense of the weariness of engines and of his own heart, his wrongs grown old unforgiven. It must be with him as though his bones fade beyond thought into the shadows that grow out of the ground so that the furrow he opens in the earth opens in his bones, and he hears the silence of the tongues of the dead tribesmen buried here a thousand years ago. And then what presences will rise up before him, weeds bearing flowers, and the dry wind rain! What songs he will hear!
The Man Born to Farming The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming, whose hands reach into the ground and sprout, to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn. His thought passes along the row ends like a mole. What miraculous seed has he swallowed that the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water descending in the dark?
To Know the Dark To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings, and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
find work, if you can, that does no damage enjoy your work. work well
bibliography
Berry, Wendell. Fidelity Five Stories. New York and San Francisco: Pantheon Books, 1992 Berry, Wendell. Collected Poems 1957-1982. New York: North Point Press; Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1987 Berry, Wendell. The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays. Berkeley: Counter Point, 2005
published works
Fiction Fidelity: Five Stories, 1992 Hannah Coulter, 2004 Jayber Crow, 2000 The Memory of Old Jack, 1974 Nathan Coulter, 1960 A Place on Earth, 1967 Remembering, 1988 That Distant Land:The Collected Stories, 2004 Watch with Me and Six Other Stories of the Yet-Remembered Ptolemy Proudfoot and His Wife, Miss Minnie, Née Quinch, 1994 The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership, 1986 A World Lost, 1996 Poetry The Broken Ground, 1964 Clearing, 1977 Collected Poems: 1951-1982, 1982 The Country of Marriage, 1973 Entries, 1994 Farming: A Hand Book, 1970 Given: New Poems, 2005 Openings, 1968 A Part, 1980 Sabbaths: Poems, 1987 Sayings and Doings, 1975 The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1999 A Timbered Choir:The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997, 1998 The Wheel, 1982
Essays Another Turn of the Crank, 1996 The Art of the Commonplace:The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, 2002 Citizenship Papers, 2003 A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural & Agricultural, 1972 The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural & Agricultural, 1981 Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work, 1990 The Hidden Wound, 1970 Home Economics: Fourteen Essays, 1987 Life Is a Miracle, 2000 The Long-Legged House, 2004 Recollected Essays: 1965-1980, 1981 Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, 1992 Standing by Words, 1983 The Unforeseen Wilderness: Kentucky’s Red River Gorge, 1971 The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, 1977 What Are People For? 1990
Designed, edited, and photographed by Maria Burke in the spring of 2012 for Typography II at Washington University in St. Louis.