Wendell Berry is a prolific writer, an environmentalist, and a farmer. He has received numerous honors, such as the National Humanities Medal and the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle, and is a fellow of the Academy of Arts and Sciences. His recent books include The Art of Loading Brush: New Agrarian Writings, What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth, and Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food.
For Love of Place: Reflections of an Agrarian Sage
“Come, friends, let us sit down together. Not in a lecture hall, not in a laboratory, not in a political forum. Here on the banks of the Kentucky River, let us sit down together and see what went on here. What’s going on here now? Why is it the way it is now? What do we want?”
January 30, 2019
Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, Mary Berry in Conversation
The problem of sustainability is simple enough to state. It requires that the fertility cycle of birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay—what Albert Howard called “the Wheel of Life”—must turn continuously in place, so that the law of return is kept and nothing is wasted. For this to happen in the stewardship of humans, there … Read more
December 23, 2016
“It All Turns on Affection”
Boomers, he said, are “those who pillage and run,” who want “to make a killing and end up on Easy Street,” whereas stickers are “those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.”
August 12, 2016
Wendell Berry on Climate Change: To Save the Future, Live in the Present
All we can do to prepare rightly for tomorrow is to do the right thing today.
March 24, 2015
Wendell E. Berry Lecture: “It all turns on affection”
The boomer is motivated by greed, the desire for money, property, and therefore power.
Stickers on the contrary are motivated by affection, by such love for a place and its life that they want to preserve it and remain in it.
April 25, 2012
What must we do?
We must not work or think on a heroic scale. In our age of global industrialism, heroes too likely risk the lives of places and things they do not see. We must work on a scale proper to our limited abilities. We must not break things we cannot fix. There is no justification ever for permanent ecological damage. If this imposes the verdict of guilt upon us all, so be it.
May 5, 2011