Agricultural History Review, Volume 51 Part 2 (2003), p. 248

The San Francisco Chronicle, quoted on the dust-jacket of this book, describes Wendell Berry as ‘an essayist in the tradition of Emerson and Thoreau’. While this description has some justice to it, a more pertinent comparison would be to Louis Bromfield, the novelist whose regeneration of Malabar Farm, Ohio during the 1940s turned him into a leading spokesman for rural communities and for a predominantly organic farming which would conserve natural resources. Like Bromfield, Berry was drawn back to rural life in middle age and he has written extensively on agriculture in its practical, cultural, economic and religious aspects. In 1933, the year before Berry was born, Bromfield published The Farm, a curious novel without dialogue in which he traced the rise of industry and big business in the USA at the expense of the nation’s agrarian population. Berry has in turn described the continued, relentless marginalizing of American agriculture over the past seventy years. The most recent essay in this collection, from 2001, finds him attacking the environmentally-destructive assumptions on which corporations base their enterprises.

Berry’s work thus constitutes a link between the pioneers of organic husbandry and today’s anti-globalization campaign, demonstrating that the ideas of the former have continuing relevance in the context of contemporary agricultural problems. Berry makes several references to the English botanist Sir Albert Howard (though the regrettable lack of an index means that they can be found only after a sustained search). Central to Howard’s philosophy were ideas which Berry considers vital for the future health of agriculture: the Wheel of Life, a natural cycle of growth, death and decay requiring cultivators to return wastes to the soil; the importance of preserving forests, which can teach us nature’s own methods of creating fertility; the need for humility in the face of a natural order which imposes limits on human interference with the created world; and the conviction that health is related to food quality and, therefore, to the vitality of the soil in which crops are grown.

Berry believes that farming should express care for the soil and for the particular locality and region where one tends it. The opening essay, ‘A native hill’, expresses his love of his Kentucky farm and his intimate knowledge of the landscape in which it stands; here he indeed reminds the reader of Thoreau in his descriptions of the paths he walks. In returning to his native state Berry sought, like Bromfield before him, to discover a sense of belonging. But his praise of a Jeffersonian democracy based on the family farm is also a severe critique of the rootlessness of American culture, which either marginalizes, sentimentalizes or mocks the rural.

The hoary charge of ‘nostalgia’ inevitably has to be addressed, and Berry deals with it ruthlessly: an agrarian culture based on respect for the natural world is both more ethical and more efficient than its technological alternative, and offers the means of long-term survival. It is less wasteful; it avoids dependence on corporations; it does not risk international instability and war for the sake of oil; it offers variety of scenery, species and crafts as against mass-produced uniformity; it increases self-sufficiency in food supply, and it encourages local economies, re-connecting producer and consumer. Is it really preferable, Berry asks tellingly, to live in a nation where farmers are outnumbered by prisoners?

Like the British organic movement of the 1940s, Berry emphasizes the cultural component of agriculture: maltreatment of the soil is a cultural problem, caused by wrong values and bringing in its train the break-up of previously stable communities. Industrial farming’s destructiveness is fuelled by commercial rapacity; the answer to environmental degradation is to be found only in values which curb rather than inflame human desires. Ultimately this is a religious issue, and Berry shares with many earlier members of the organic movement a Christian perspective on humanity’s relationship to the natural world. In ‘The gift of good land’ he develops a thoughtful reply to the oft-quoted accusation made by Lynn White Jr, that the Judaeo-Christian tradition is to blame for our ecological crisis. While accepting some of White’s criticism, Berry contends that there is no biblical basis for the dualism of nature and spirit which has led the Christian church to neglect its stewardship of the Creation. He calls for an earthly Christianity which will value Nature’s abundance and celebrate bodily work and skills.

Given the growing resistance to ‘fast food’ and the recent compensatory emergence of a slow food movement, Berry’s insistence, in an essay from twenty years ago, on the need to adjust to the slow rhythms of nature, takes on a certain prophetic significance. The western obsession with speed, he argues, makes it well-nigh impossible to exercise the patience needed to restore land to health and pass it on as an inheritance for later generations. Similarly, Berry’s essays themselves demand slow reading. They are carefully argued, subtle and detailed, and written in a language whose literary cadences serve to emphasize rather than disguise the strength of his feelings and the radical nature of his dissent from American culture. Agrarianism is fortunate to have such an intelligent advocate, sensitive but uncompromising, to argue its case. Yet the opposing forces are more powerful than ever before, and it remains to be seen whether Berry’s work will be remembered as rural America’s swan-song or the inspiration for its renewal.