Wendell Berry’s wisdom in a time of pandemic
By Gracy Olmstead, Breaking Ground
Our health is therefore predicated on more than our own physical resilience. To be healthy, we must acknowledge—and love—the entire web of life we are part of.
The Dignity And Grit Of The Appalachian Hill Women
By Gracy Olmstead, The American Conservative
Cassie Chambers’s Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains, like Smarsh’s Heartland, considers the dignity and resiliency of poor working-class families in this region of America.
The Forgotten Treasure In These American Lands
By Gracy Olmstead, The American Conservative
This year marks the sesquicentennial of explorer Powell’s expedition down the Green and Colorado Rivers in 1869. Perhaps more than any other man of his time, he comprehended the limits of Western geography, and suggested that inhabiting the land would require a far different set of rhythms than those we had cultivated up to that point. He questioned the entire orthodoxy shaping the West during his age—an orthodoxy that is shaping it still.
Seeding Control to Big Ag
By Gracy Olmstead, The American Conservative
Seeds are the home of life, the promise of the future. They are the foundation of civilization and culture, the guarantor of full stomachs and secure governments. They are the quotidian miracle which prompt wonder in the writings of philosophers and theologians, essayists and poets.
A Price Tag on the American Dream
By Gracy Olmstead, The American Conservative
This is a book about what it means to be poor. It is a book about what it means to be rural. And it is a book about what it means to be a woman. All three of those things, together, could have meant a very different life for Smarsh.
We Weren’t Made for Endless Work
By Gracy Olmstead, The American Conservative
Josef Pieper suggested that our fixation on busyness stems from modern man’s suspicion of grace: “man seems to mistrust everything that is effortless; he can only enjoy, with a good conscience, what he has acquired with toil and trouble; he refuses to have anything as a gift.”
A Renaissance of Localism
By Gracy Olmstead, The American Conservative
People are at last beginning to pay attention to localism. The idea behind the term is old—ancient even—but it appears to be “having a moment,” so to speak, in this fractured and divisive era.
‘Monster’ Turns Our Farmers into Serfs and Sharecroppers
By Gracy Olmstead, The American Conservative
Industrialized agriculture prioritizes efficiency and quantity over human and ecological flourishing: it pushes farmers to plant more commodities over greater swaths of land,