Wendell Berry hasn’t changed.

No doubt you read Michael Pollan’s paean to the garden in the Sunday NY Times Magazine. If not, you can find it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/magazine/20wwln-lede-t.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin. He concludes:

The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.

A passionate and even inspiring piece, but I have to say I don’t see a whole lot of difference between Al Gore’s “change a light bulb” message and Pollan’s “plant a garden.” Neither called for the one thing that will make a difference, a dedicated national leadership that focuses all our energies and resources on solving the (singular) environmental problem.

But that’s not what I want to write about. I want to write about Wendell Berry. Pollan praises him. It seems everyone is praising him after 30 years of ignoring him and calling him irrelevant or a Luddite or worse. He is still a curmudgeon. His criticism still goes to the heart of the American way of life. He has the temerity to ask, “What’s the point?” His message hasn’t changed. Does that mean we are now ready to listen? And what are the implications of that? Not familiar with Berry? This appeared in the January issue of Gourmet, of all places, written by John T. Edge:

... Berry has argued tirelessly for independent communities, small family farms, and local foods. His outlook marries agrarian and environmental ideologies, but he doesn't settle for either. A traditional agrarian values small farms and argues that they are essential to the political and social well being of the nation; Berry claims they are key to our ecological health. Environmentalists often concern themselves with the against-all-odds protection of wilderness; Berry believes land was meant to be worked by man.

While I'm sure that's not all he believes about land, it's an important point, and what Berry means by it is that land was meant to be worked by man and not by machines, namely huge grain combines. Small is beautiful. I have a notebook in which I used to jot down quotations from things I was reading. Here are a few from Berry:

Good cooking must be said to begin with good farming.

You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.

You really cannot specialize the work of conservation. You cannot save the land apart from the people or the people apart from the land. To save either, you must save both.

Same point was made by Paul Hawken in Blessed Unrest. See my Jan. 13, 2008, post: An impossible vision? Anyway, how will you observe Earth Day?