From Mother Jones · Katie Myers · · 2m
Wendell Berry's answer: think little
A Kentucky farmer who wrote 50 books with a pencil spent his life arguing that fixing the world starts in your own dirt.
In brief
A Kentucky farmer who wrote 50 books with a pencil spent his life arguing that fixing the world starts in your own dirt. You heal the world by tending the small piece of it you can actually reach, even if the results arrive long after you're gone. Originally reported by Mother Jones.
He made his choices and kept them
No computer, no smartphone. More than 50 books of poetry, fiction, and essays, written mostly with a pencil at his farmhouse in Henry County, Kentucky. He died August 31 at 92.
Start small, start today
His answer to how a person should live right was to revere the Earth's beauty and do a little work each day to undo the harm we've caused.
No public crisis is private
In his 1972 essay "Think Little," Berry broke with an environmental movement he saw as too busy lobbying politicians and not busy enough changing how people actually live.
“The changes that are required are fundamental changes in the way we are living.”
Plant the forest you won't see
His best-known poem tells farmers to invest in the millennium. The point is to work on a timescale longer than your own life.
“Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. / Say that your main crop is the forest / that you did not plant.”
Nature moves in circles
Activism warned of coming apocalypse. Berry saw no end and no beginning, only cycles of death and rebirth, not a straight line toward destruction or salvation.
Arrested twice, decades apart
He was jailed in 1979 protesting an Indiana nuclear plant, and again in 2011 at a Kentucky sit-in against mountaintop removal mining. He pulled his papers from the University of Kentucky over a $7 million coal donation.
A Luddite in the real sense
His 1987 Harper's essay "Why I am not Going to Buy a Computer" got him called a curmudgeon. Like the original textile workers, he was defending the dignity of his own labor against machines.
He hated dualisms
Humanity versus nature, body versus soul, people who believe x versus people who believe y. Religious but a self-described bad weather church-goer, he preferred fine Sundays walking in the woods.
Dirty hands, honest work
Purity was never the goal. Berry's scholar Jeffrey Bilbro says he accepted compromise as the price of living, then did what he could anyway.
“It is the time's discipline to think / of the death of all living, and yet live.”
In short
You heal the world by tending the small piece of it you can actually reach, even if the results arrive long after you're gone.
