Wendell Berry Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Poet, novelist, essayist, social critic, and small farmer, Wendell Erdman Berry was born August 5, 1934, in rural Henry County, Kentucky. The years after World War II witnessed large farms replacing small ones, machines replacing horses, and internecine, debt-ridden, assistance-dependent farmers replacing a tight-knit, largely self-sufficient rural community. This agricultural transition that took place in Henry County (and more broadly, the rural United States) during Berry’s formative years would have a lasting impact on his values, livelihood, and ultimately his writing. After completing the creative writing graduate program at Stanford University as a Wallace Stegner fellow, Berry spent one year in Europe as a Guggenheim fellow and two years teaching at New York University, finally to return home to Kentucky in 1964. For over a decade, he split time between teaching at the University of Kentucky in Lexington and farming in Henry County. With the exception of another short teaching stint in the late 1980s, he has farmed and written from his small farm in Henry County since 1977.

To summarize Berry’s work is nearly impossible; even to label him an “environmental writer” is almost unfair. His earliest works were novels of rural life in Kentucky, and his more recent writings include overtly political essays with little central focus on things natural. In all, Berry has published 15 novels and short story collections, and over 30 volumes of poetry. It is perhaps in his agrarian essays, however, that Berry has received his widest readership, highest critical acclaim, and forged what will be his most lasting influence.

Berry’s first collection of nonfiction essays was 1972’s A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural. His Jeffersonian agrarian ideals shine through in countless passages, such as the following taken from the essay “Think Little”: What we are up against in this country, in any attempt to invoke private responsibility, is that we have nearly destroyed private life. Our people have given up their independence in return for the cheap seductions of ‘affluence.’

Most tragically, for Berry, is that rural Americans-even its farmers-have followed this urban trend. The fallout is a rural landscape that is at once depopulated, environmentally degraded, and devoid of the sense of community that held these once ecologically and culturally rich, if always (relatively) monetarily poor, places together.

These themes are most forcefully expressed in his 1977 collection The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. Here Berry makes his first focused attacks on the irredeemably unjust U.S. agricultural-policy/agribusiness-corporation nexus. Often echoing the sentiments of Aldo Leopold, but always more bitter and pessimistic, The Unsettling of America exposes the modern, corporate farm as a wasteful, unnatural, antiecological, profit-driven use of the land. Berry argues that unless small landholders-self-sufficient, community-minded growers and makers-return to an appropriate scale and method of practice, the landscape of natural and human communities will continue to suffer the increasingly toxic effects of modernity. A good starting place for Berry’s biting but crystal-clear and prescient critique is the 2002 collection The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry.

Bibliography:

Andre J. Angyal, Wendell Berry (Twayne, 1995);
Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (Counterpoint, 2002);
Wendell Berry, A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972);
Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (Sierra Club Books, 1996).