Wendell Berry’s Advice for a Cataclysmic Age

“Despite Berry’s veneration of his ancestors, he can be unsparing about their sins. “I am forever being crept up on and newly startled by the realization that my people established themselves here by killing or driving out the original possessors, by the awareness that people were once bought and sold here by my people, by the sense of the violence they have done to their own kind and to each other and to the earth,” he wrote in his 1968 essay “A Native Hill.” He saw the rapacious practices of modern agribusiness, Big Coal, the military-industrial complex, and Wall Street as the perpetuation of “some intransigent destructiveness” that drove the European settlers in America.”

I've read a lot of Wendell Berry's work and I don't love all of it, but I do find his voice valuable, especially as we think about how we live in places, how we treat the earth, and how we think about our place in history. I'm fascinated by where he's going now in old age and I'll be adding his latest book to my list.