Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry, and Fred Kirschenmann traveled to Washington DC in mid-July 2009 to promote a 50-Year Farm Bill.
“We need a farm bill that addresses the problem of soil loss and degradation, toxic pollution, fossil-fuel dependency and the destruction of rural communities.”
https://landinstitute.org/media-coverage/50-year-farm-bill/
The Atlantic – The 50-Year Farm Bill
by Wendell Berry [13.11.2012]
The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants. Their best agricultural use is for the production of grazing animals, with most of the land in pastures and hayfields, and perhaps 5 to 10 percent plowed and row-cropped in any year. This was the practice of the best farmers of that country 50 or 60 years ago.
The land husbandry there, as elsewhere, has been in decline since the end of World War II, as agriculture has become more and more industrial, and more and more of the farming people have taken urban jobs or moved away.
But recently and almost suddenly, as ethanol production has driven up the price of grain, our fragile uplands have been invaded by corn and soybeans. Whole farms, with sloping fields that have been in grass as long as I can remember, have been herbicided and planted to annual crops that, because of the drastic reduction of the number of farmers, will not be protected in winter by full-sown cover crops.
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Since its publication by Sierra Club Books in 1977, The Unsettling of America has been recognized as a classic of American letters. In it, Wendell Berry argues that good farming is a cultural development and spiritual discipline. Today’s agribusiness, however, takes farming out of its cultural context and away from families. As a result, we as a nation are more estranged from the land–from the intimate knowledge, love, and care of it.
Sadly, as Berry notes in his Afterword to this third edition, his arguments and observations are more relevant than ever. We continue to suffer loss of community, the devaluation of human work, and the destruction of nature under an economic system dedicated to the mechanistic pursuit of products and profits. Although “this book has not had the happy fate of being proved wrong,” Berry writes, there are good people working “to make something comely and enduring of our life on this earth.” Wendell Berry is one of those people, writing and working, as ever, with passion, eloquence, and conviction.
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Videos
The poems of Wendell Berry invite us to stop, to think, to see the world around us, and to savour what is good. Here are consoling verses of hope and of healing; short, simple meditations on love, death, friendship, memory and belonging; luminous hymns to the land, the cycles of nature and the seasons as they ebb and flow. Here is the peace of wild things.
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22 Feb 2018
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
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.
Articles
A Conversation with Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson [summer 2012]
Out of Your Car, Off Your HorseT
Twenty-seven propositions about global thinking and the sustainability of cities [February 1991]
Literary Influences
Wallace Stegner
Wallace Stegner, in full Wallace Earl Stegner, (born Feb. 18, 1909, Lake Mills, Iowa, U.S.—died April 13, 1993, Santa Fe, N.M.), American author of fiction and historical nonfiction set mainly in the western United States. All his writings are informed by a deep sense of the American experience and the potential, which he termed “the geography of promise,” that the West symbolizes.
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