WENDELL BERRY KNOWS OUR LIMITS
SUBJECT Wendell Berry
OCCUPATION Poet and farmer
INTERVIEWER Helena Norberg-Hodge
PHOTOGRAPHER Guy Mendes
LOCATION New Castle, US
DATE May, 2018
ANTIDOTE TO Senseless agriculture
UNEXPECTED All about limits
Poet, philosopher, novelist, social commentator, farmer. Meet Wendell Berry, once described as “the conscience of modern America.” A man of disarmingly common sense intellect; of a deep, grounded wisdom modestly dispensed in rolling tones that mirror the hills of his beloved home state of Kentucky. At 83, his insights are compelling, his belief in the better side of human nature unshakeable, his core message—that nature comes first—more vital than ever.
I first came to know Wendell in the late 1970s in Florence, where we were both invited by the Italian champion of small-scale agriculture, Giannozzo Pucci. I knew immediately that I had found a soulmate—a man of huge integrity and a pillar of localist strength at a time when globalisation was coming to dominate intellectual thought.
As a young man, Wendell studied literature at Stanford University in the late 1950s before returning to his native Kentucky to teach writing at the University of Kentucky. In 1965, he and his wife Tanya bought a 117-acre homestead called Lanes Landing, which he still farms. Many of his 16 volumes of essays, 11 novels and numerous books of poetry draw their inspiration from his close observations of that land. The Unsettling of America, first published in 1977, was a seminal work on a par with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful. Like Wendell’s many essays, the book has become essential reading for people involved in the local food movement—from young farmers and homesteaders to organisers of farmers’ markets, food hubs, Community Supported Agriculture initiatives and urban gardens, and for all those seeking a connection to the natural world.
Many people today believe that we need large-scale agriculture to feed the world. Wendell disagrees, painting compelling pictures of the fertility of small scale, diversified farming, which accommodates hedgerows, wetlands and the fringes of forests and fields that are crucial habitat for wildlife. In this way, small farms are not only gentler on the land, they are also essential to the preservation of biodiversity—agricultural as well as wild.
On a more fundamental level, Wendell believes that our connection to the land is deeper when we have a long-term working relationship to it. We can appreciate wilderness when we visit it as an “outsider,” but the bond to the natural world is far more profound when we with it. For me, his voice is inspirational and empowering: a constant reminder of the essential goodness of life that truly can provide the foundations for a better future.
