The rediscovery of Wendell Berry

Like the rest of the environmental world, The Drinking & Reading Society is finally catching up with Wendell Berry, although some of us have read a lot of his stuff and some have read none. Blame it on the slow food movement and the new concern about what we’re eating. Our book for May is his collection of essays What Are People For? In these selections, I think you can see why he has angered just about every segment of the population – right, left and apolitical:

The supermarkets are crammed with food and the productivity of American agriculture is, at present, enormous. But this is a productivity based on the ruin both of the producers and the source of production. What Are People For? (1985)

I am making a plea for diversity not only because diversity exists and is pleasant, but also because it is necessary and we need more of it. We need a greater variety of species of plants and animals, of human skills and methods, so that the use may be fitted ever more sensitively and elegantly to the place. Our places, in short, are asking us questions, some of them urgent questions, and we do not have the answers. An Argument for Diversity (1988)

The mess that surrounds us must be understood not just as a problem in itself, but also as a symptom of a greater and graver problem: the centralization of our economy, the gathering of the productive property and power into fewer and fewer hands, and the consequent destruction everywhere of the local economies of household, neighborhood and community. Waste (1989)

The industrial eater is one who does not know that eating is an agricultural act, who no longer knows or imagines the connections between eating and the land, and who is therefore necessarily passive and uncritical – in short, a victim. The Pleasures of Eating (1989)

The newfound popularity of Berry’s essays is an example of the principle that while science and technology may change our lives, the arts and humanities change our values. In company with Alice Waters, Michael Pollan and others, the rehabilitation of Wendell Berry is a harbinger of social change on the march. Come Senators, Congressmen, please heed the call.