Wendell Berry’s Farm Manifesto Taking Root

by S. Tom Bond on April 4, 2013

Wendell Berry at home

Wendell Berry’s Farm Manifesto Taking Root

Source: www.courier-journal.com

The book’s theme was simple — that the health of land and the health of people were inseparable. It represented at once a cry of lament and a manifesto written in prophetic fury against industrial-scale agriculture, strip mining and other land exploitation.

In that 1977 work, “The Unsettling of America,” Kentucky farmer and author Wendell Berry wrote, “We must, I think, be prepared to see, and to stand by, the truth: that the land should not be destroyed for any reason.”

People “no longer know the earth we come from,” Berry wrote. “… The people responsible for strip-mining, clear-cutting of forests, and other ruinations do not live where their senses will be offended or their homes or livelihoods or lives immediately threatened by the consequences.”

This week, some of the nation’s top names in movements promoting sustainable environmental and agricultural practices are gathering in Kentucky to assess the growing influence of the book. Three and a half decades after its publication, “it is remarkable how current and relevant the book is in its critique of industrial culture and in its proposals for a better way forward,” said Norman Wirzba, professor of theology, ecology and rural life at Duke Divinity School.

Berry’s daughter, Mary Berry, an organizer of the conference on “From Unsettling to Resettling,” said that when her father wrote the book, he had barely any allies outside his family. “And now look,” said Berry, who, like her 78-year-old father, operates a farm in Henry County, Ky. “Good people have this on their minds everywhere.”

People are far more concerned now about supporting local food markets, knowing what’s in their food and preserving the land, Mary Berry said. Still, at the same time, the losses in family farms and topsoil continue.

Conference features speakers –  The conference — which is fully booked — is scheduled for Friday at the Brown Hotel in Louisville and Saturday at St. Catharine College in Washington County and features such speakers as Bill McKibben, a journalist who has sounded the alarm on global warming; Wes Jackson, president of the Kansas-based Land Institute and a leader in the sustainable-agriculture movement; and both Mary and Wendell Berry.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> …………………….. <<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Commentary Added to Article:

“Our Land and a Sustainable Future”

S. Tom Bond, Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV

At one time, almost anyone living in town in the United States was no more than one or two generations removed from the farm. Now cities have absorbed so much of the population many are separated from the farm by several generations. Food has become a commodity. It comes in discrete, wrapped easily merchantable packages. The consumer generally doesn’t know where it comes from, and is encouraged to think it ultimately comes from the corporation that packaged it. They say, “Not to worry, it’s good stuff.”

So the finite nature and the details of process of the world’s food supply is disguised behind the corporate veil, just as is the limitations of the world’s energy supply; and, its unsavory processes are hidden. Only 15% of the food dollar goes to the farmer, and the average item on your plate travels 1600 miles from production to consumption.

I remember reading an article in Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, several years ago, which showed a graph of the population of China against a several thousand year time line on which was marked the introduction of new crops. Millet, dry land rice, barley, wheat, paddy rice, sweet potatoes, corn, potatoes.

As each new crop introduction occurred, a new step in population also occurred, showing the population was limited by food supply. Our friends who depend on corporations wholly for food might have the idea that the market will spare them. Others may think God will spare humans the fate of microorganisms growing in a Petri plate. But the fate of the Chinese shows us otherwise. God didn’t give us our big brain without the obligation to cooperate and use it.

Corporations operate like primitive slash and burn agriculture. They find a resource and use it until exhaustion, then move the business on to fresh ground. For the primitive slash and burn farmers, the biological world seemed infinite, and in a few decades it repaired itself. The mineral resource world our species is exploiting today is limited and non-renewable. Fossil fuel reserves are very limited given the worlds huge population, and nature can never repair the shortages on a practical time scale.

Environmental protection and energy conservation, including energy efficiency, are essential for a sustainable earth. We may never reach full sustainability, but we certainly must try harder to come as close as we can.  My grandchildren and theirs .  ..   …

Leave a Comment

Previous post:

Next post: