CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Wendell Berry: “Stay Away From Anything That Obscures the Place It is In”

Wendell Berry. (Screen capture from an interview with Bill Moyers posted to YouTube.)

I think of Wendell Berry every time I use my chainsaw.

Berry, the novelist/essayist and unofficial poet laureate of the sustainable agriculture movement, died this week at 92. I met him several times through my association with The Land Institute and visited their Kentucky home to write a profile of his wife, Tanya. But my main connection to Berry is through his writing.

Back to my chainsaw. I lived in cities most of my life, including when I was a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. No matter what the subject of a course, I always found ways to bring Berry’s words into my lectures, both to give students examples of elegant writing and to prod them to think about what we take for granted in high-energy/high-technology societies.

Berry called out the cruelty of the masters of the modern world, especially the ways they denigrated his neighbors and devalued the land in rural America. But he understood that we all are implicated in the degradation of the ecosystems on which our own lives depend. He connected the real costs of our many labor-saving and pleasure-seeking devices to that degradation. Yes, there are corrupt individuals and corrupting social systems to hold accountable, but part of the problem is our species’ acquisitiveness—what Berry’s mentor Wallace Stegner called “the things that once possessed could not be done without.”

In a 1989 essay, Berry didn’t exempt himself from this critique of the destructive habits that........

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