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‘Wild Blessings’: Wendell Berry’s Passions, Reframed
Elizabeth Kramer, National Public Radio
Wendell Berry, the Kentucky-based agrarian philosopher, has been described as our era’s heir to Emerson and Thoreau — a writer concerned with the importance of community, and with the lessons we can learn from the natural world.
Now, the Actors Theatre of Louisville is putting his ideas on stage.
There were plenty of ideas to choose from: Since the 1960s, Berry has published eight novels, dozens of short stories, and numerous essays with environmental themes.
But Wild Blessings, the theater piece premiering this weekend at the Humana Festival of New American Plays, is drawn exclusively from Berry’s poems.
… One [of the characters/voices in which Berry writes] is the “Mad Farmer,” a man Berry describes as “a little extravagant” in his willingness to go against the grain. Thumbing through the script, he reads one of the adapted poems — one that, to him, sums up how he and the Mad Farmer both see the world.
To be sane in a mad time,
is bad for the brain, worse
for the heart. The world
is a holy vision had we clarity
to see it; a clarity that men
depend on men to make.
(28 March 2009)
Related from Courier-Journal (Kentucky/Indiana)
Poet will step off farm to hear works read on opening night
‘Wild Blessings’ pays tribute to natural poet, philosopher
Review: ‘Wild Blessings’ captures Wendell Berry’s voice
Wendell Berry spoke at the October 2008 conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ). By all accounts, it was a moving talk and it is apparently accessible from this SEJ conference web page. I haven’t found it yet, but I hope to report on it later. – BA
Second edition of Gaia’s Garden by Toby Hemenway (home-scale permaculture)
Toby Hemenway, Chelsea Green
Gaia’s Garden, Second Edition
A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture
by Toby Hemenway
“”There is so much wisdom in Gaia’s Garden that I would need a dozen columns to do it justice. . . a bold, wonderful, nature-embracing and completely sensible vision of the future.””
—Justin Siskin, Los Angeles Daily News
(Refers to the first edition of Gaia’s Garden.)
The first edition of Gaia’s Garden sparked the imagination of America’s home gardeners, introducing permaculture’s central message: Working with Nature, not against her, results in more beautiful, abundant, and forgiving gardens. This extensively revised and expanded second edition broadens the reach and depth of the permaculture approach for urban and suburban growers.
Many people mistakenly think that ecological gardening—which involves growing a wide range of edible and other useful plants—can take place only on a large, multiacre scale. As Hemenway demonstrates, it’s fun and easy to create a “backyard ecosystem” by assembling communities of plants that can work cooperatively and perform a variety of functions, including:
- Building and maintaining soil fertility and structure
- Catching and conserving water in the landscape
- Providing habitat for beneficial insects, birds, and animals
- Growing an edible “forest” that yields seasonal fruits, nuts, and other foods
This revised and updated edition also features a new chapter on urban permaculture, designed especially for people in cities and suburbs who have very limited growing space. Whatever size yard or garden you have to work with, you can apply basic permaculture principles to make it more diverse, more natural, more productive, and more beautiful. Best of all, once it’s established, an ecological garden will reduce or eliminate most of the backbreaking work that’s needed to maintain the typical lawn and garden.
About the Author
Toby Hemenway is the author of the first major North American book on permaculture, Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, and an adjunct assistant professor at Portland State University. He wrote the foreword for Heather C. Flores’ Food Not Lawns.
After obtaining a degree in biology from Tufts University, Toby worked for many years as a researcher in genetics and immunology, first in academic laboratories including Harvard and the University of Washington in Seattle, and then at Immunex, a major medical biotech company. At about the time he was growing dissatisfied with the …
View Toby’s full profile page
(30 March 2009)
Book is due out April 29, 2009. Toby Hemenway wrote several articles for Energy Bulletin:
Urban vs. Rural Sustainability
Apocalypse, not
The origins of peak oil doomerism
Cities, peak oil, and sustainability
Is Sustainable Agriculture an Oxymoron?
The many faces of relocalization
Christopher J. Ryan, AICP , the localizer blog
Relocalization, which can be defined as a movement to retool our communities to a more local orientation in order to develop greater self-sufficiency, resilience, security, and vibrancy, has made a cultural comeback and is a popular, growing phenomenon again. Groups small and large, urban and rural, with wide ranging ideological perspectives in many countries, wealthy and impoverished, are finding answers in relocalization to long sought questions related to improving their communities and their lives.
Conceptually, relocalization has the opportunity to avoid the short shelf life of social movements because it has such a broad appeal to potentially address such a wide range of critical issues. The fact is that relocalization is a simplified sustainability formula that is not beholden to a systems analysis framework or to traditional sustainability indicators-based data heavy monitoring. That is not to say that those features of sustainability are not without value or merit. It just means that you can pursue sustainability on a shoestring without those complexities, if you must. The beauty of relocalization is that the solutions are simple, time-tested, and possess a number of interlinking benefits. If your local environmental or sustainability group is having difficulty reaching out and growing the group and expanding your roster, perhaps a reframing based on relocalization could help. Because without a very broad local base of support and participation, which relocalization has the capacity to provide, local action plans focusing on energy and climate change may not receive any more consensus than a standard master plan.
Relocalization can address peak oil, climate change, damaged ecosystems, loss of community, the economic crisis, the externalities of globalization, loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs, sprawl, loss of quality manufacturing and craftsmanship, and a host of other things we’ve jettisoned as the price paid to implement the industrial revolution and blindly embrace technology.
(29 March 2009)
Real World Energy Decisions
John Weber Sunweb blog
We must ask ourselves, what do we need materially to live a life of far less energy and earth minerals.
For the first ten years that I lived in the house I built in Central Minnesota, I had no electricity. I cooked with wood and heated with wood. I pumped my water by hand up into a retaining tank on the second floor for gravity feed to the rest of the house. I had a battery-operated radio. I had a solar heated outhouse that was actually only really heated between two and three in the afternoon. All in all, this time was an interesting and wonderful experience with many stories.
My use of electricity was about 1kWh a day including the energy to wash clothes weekly in town. Except for the inverter that ran my computer and occasional appliances like a vacuum cleaner or a power saw, all the electrical use in the house was 12 volt, like your car.
…Most homes in United States use 20 kWh or more a day. Our overall use is even higher. This is the point of this story. In 2000, I did an Excel spreadsheet on energy use per capita by all the countries of the world. Ten percent of the people, including us, use 30kWh of electricity or more per capita per day. HALF of the people in the world use 2 kWh or less of electricity each day – over three billion people. And that number is misleading because in a country like Haiti, the poor do not have anywhere near the average per capita use, the bulk goes to the rich.
This spread sheet included petroleum and natural gas. These great differences held for these energy sources too.
Although morals and ethics could enter into these thoughts, as could class inequities, that is not the point. The point is how much do we need to live a decent non-brutish life?
(28 March 2009)
