Into the woods
Wendell Berry urged Americans to think little, local and deep
The agrarian writer, poet and activist died on August 31st, aged 92
When he could no longer think in the house, Wendell Berry would go to the woods. He went along paths so familiar that his feet led him, rather than his mind. Once there, by some miracle, everything fell into place. He stood humbled amid the serenity and dignity of the trees, watching the play of sunlight through the leaves. His life took its place among all the other lives of the wood, the insects and the birds. Taking from his pocket the tools of his work, a pencil and any old scrap of paper, he could resume writing. The only subject he needed was all around him.
He could have been in New York City. At 28, he had been appointed an assistant professor of English there. But he knew he was not made for urban places. Even more strongly, he realised that he could not escape Kentucky. A tiny patch of land, “12 acres more or less” in Henry County, at the edge of the high Bluegrass, had been farmed by his family since 1803. Before he went away to school, he was sure he would follow. He had learned as a child how to assess the strength of a mule and how to drive a team of them, hooves wet with dew, up to the tobacco plots on the sides of the valley. He knew, thanks to a black hired hand called Bill, how to creep silently after squirrels. The value of that locally rooted, neighbourly, waste-not-want-not agrarian life was so deeply engrained in him that he had to return. For decades, in books, articles and poems, he tried to persuade Americans to understand.
He deeply lamented what had been done to his country. In the name of “progress” and the pursuit of profit, forests had been felled and watersheds, such as his local one on the Kentucky river, paved over until they could no longer retain water. Human-scale paths, respecting the natural contours, had been violently straightened into interstates; industrialised agriculture had ravaged and denuded the land. Self-sustaining smallholdings were left as ruins, while giant corporations fed Americans on food grown far away. Heavy industry’s return for the holy gift and mystery of creation was not thanks and care, but poisonous waste.
The loss of topsoil was what he regretted most. Humus held the past not as history, but as possibility, a richness built up from leaf-fall and decayings over thousands of years. This was what his body would sink into and become. Yet on his farm he reckoned that the loss was knee-deep, in places shoulder-deep. He felt its absence. Where it had been, yellow clay was at the surface, or sometimes bare rock. Farther away, in this coal-devoted state, whole mountains had been blown apart for strip-mining. He took heart from his grandfather’s old bucket, still hanging from a fence-post, in which Nature over the decades had miraculously made a few inches of rich black earth. But where human greed demanded speed, Nature’s restoration work could not be hurried at.
Nor could his. The family farmhouse, Lane’s Landing, needed a year of work before he and his wife Tanya could move in. They installed a bathroom, plumbing and an oil furnace, though he fairly soon replaced that with a wood-burning stove. Getting his hilly farm productive again was a longer struggle. His forebears had made some typical eager-settler mistakes, such as breaking slopes that should never have been ploughed. He made his own, creating a pond that made the hillside slip. Even when he had grassed over the scars, sown clover, expanded to 75 acres and acquired hens and a milk-cow, it made very little income. Clearly they would not have survived without his post at the University of Kentucky. But as he set out to sow or find fuel, driving a team of horses that did better on his gradients than any tractor, he exulted in being what he needed to be: a mad farmer and a contrarian.
As such, he harangued America. The “global economy” was a nonsense: both communism and capitalism privileged the few, not the many. The “free market” was just a means to extend the scope of greed. True freedom was not to live in hock to any corporation, organisation or institution, but to directly control your own life. That meant working with your own hands, co-operating with your neighbours and learning the lives and ways of your own ground. Not a global economy, but a local one. Not “Think Big”, but “Think Little”. This was what small farmers did, which was why their dwindling numbers were a tragedy. Productivity was not a priority for them. They preferred to use the land well.
Critics accused him of romanticising the past and recommending the impossible. He strongly denied that. The past had also been full of bad choices, most of which had contributed to the present horrors. Of course, too, not everyone could be self-sufficient. But even city-dwellers had porches or entryways in which they could grow food. They could go to farmers’ markets and buy local. Above all, they could change their ways of living. He himself wrote only by daylight and rejected computers, to reduce his dependence on strip-mined coal. Such individual protests, though tiny, might ultimately work better than the mass protests he had staged since the 1960s against Kentucky’s addiction to fossil fuel. Public campaigns too often turned into fads that faded before the root problem was tackled. Saving the planet had to be reduced to the scale of each person’s competence.
His scale was the farm, and that minute scrap of earth represented, for him, the whole. Amid his joys and satisfactions he also blazed with anger, and fretted over the sort of world he would be able to leave to his children. But living as he did, on his own patch, he knew exactly how to cope. He went to the woods.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
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