For Wendell Berry, My North Star

“Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places and desecrated places.” — Wendell Berry

We sat on his porch by the Kentucky river, and I can still hear to this day his voice. Resonant. Deliberate. Pointed yet kind. The voice came with a Kentucky drawl and it just held your attention.

The man, too, spoke slowly in measured and whole sentences. Somehow, his storytelling managed to address the seriousness of the ecological crisis in an understandable way. With humility, not judgement.

His voice sounded as true as the flight of a sand hill crane. Or as strong as a willow. It was a voice unburdened by cliches. One that rejected machine thinking, that honoured the mysteries of faith. A voice, both poetic and prophetic, that was ultimately shaped and informed by the memories, work, tragedies and stories of generations of the hill dwellers in Henry County, where he was born. Uncompromising.

That was Wendell Berry, the great American poet, conservationist and essayist. He died at the end of August at the age of 92 at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky.

By any measure he was a remarkable warrior against the excesses of modernity, and a peaceable one at that. The American environmentalist and author Bill McKibben called him “the prophet of responsibility,” and Berry occupied that ground like an oak tree. He never talked much about identity and rights. What mattered to him was character, and that is something shaped and informed by how one honours one’s responsibilities to one’s community and place.

“I think life ought to have some pleasure on it,” Berry once told me. “And pleasure, to me, comes from contact with elemental things: other people, plants, animals, community life, useful work.”

A North Star

Berry “sort of” farmed 125 acres of marginal land and taught English for a time at University of Kentucky. He quit when it started taking money from coal companies that painted the abomination of mountain-top removal as an economic necessity.

In between, he wrote poems about the wonder and difficulties of marriage, work and life. He also penned some of the most critical and essential essays about the decline of American empire, and he did so decades before the Trump revolution made the spiritual rot as obvious as roadkill.

His writings never offered easy solutions or pat answers. Nor did he trade in the commodity of last words.

Instead, he doggedly outlined our difficult predicament: cultural survival in materialist society enthralled by its ever-evolving thirst for ecological destruction.

He defended the small family farm because he liked to eat good food and live in a working democracy. He understood the connections between the two, and he wanted more Americans to connect the dots.

Fundamentally, he recognized that if we don’t have lots of independent people informed by tradition and the experience of living locally, then we’d be nothing more than slaves to machines. Or sales pitches. And he was right about all of it.

For me, at least, Berry’s death demands more than a moment of reflection. For many men of my generation, he was a reliable North Star in the darkness of consumer society.

No matter the battle or tragedy at hand, he reminded us to live with grace and love with generosity. So I owe him a deep and lasting debt.

His profound sayings and doings about living a local and responsible life indelibly changed the focus of my journalism, and my life.

He identified the origins of America’s cultural crisis

Berry had a different take on the writing game. He viewed every writer as a regional scribe which, by definition, set a higher moral standard for the consequences of one’s writing. He knew that what a novelist or reporter wrote about a place did not enter some literary world and disappear. On the contrary. It “can and does affect, and in practical ways, the life of a place,” he said.

He understood every story came down to one question: how to live rightfully in that geography?

In his own quiet way, his ideas forced me to ask a different set of questions as a reporter. Who am I writing for? And what impact will it have on my community? What will my boys and Doreen think of my choices?

I haven’t stopped asking those questions. And that’s because Berry set a good example, which is perhaps all we can do in this life.

I sought out Berry at a time when, as 32-year-old reporter, I was struggling with the direction of my trade. I was looking, frankly, for some direction.

Journalism’s industrial loyalties, technological conceits and urban biases had unsettled me. Is the world merely a source of material to be mined, or does one’s roots imply an unwritten set of duties and responsibilities to a region and all its living communities? What are my obligations?

In his essays and books, Berry provided the outlines of an exacting answer. “When people do not live where they work, they do not feel the effects of what they do,” he wrote in his 1977 masterpiece, The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture. The book described how a careless industrial machine, created by a marriage of petroleum and technology, had brutalized the family farm, ruined landscapes and uprooted millions of people long before social media and computers would commit similar harms to the souls of urbanites.

Other critics had written eloquently about the mechanization of transportation and communication. But Berry described how these same forces had not only ruined our soil, contaminated our waterways but impoverished our thinking about community and place.

When perilous forces start to undo the essentials of agriculture, reasoned Berry, the culture begins to shrivel and die with it. No one wanted to admit it at the time, but Berry had identified the origins of America’s cultural crisis. That crisis has matured and now haunts the entirety of North America.

I met Berry in May 1987, a year before he penned one of his most popular essays, “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer.”

At the time he was already being described as America’s rural conscience. His pal, the American novelist and essayist Ken Kesey, compared him to “Sergeant York charging unnatural odds across our no-man’s land of ecology.”

The American author and essayist Edward Abbey called Berry “our contemporary Isaiah.”

And his mentor, the novelist Wallace Stegner, considered him “a husbandman of an ancient and precious kind.”

But for me to profile the man and his ideas for Harrowsmith magazine, a publication long dead, took some coaxing.

Berry, a highly disciplined writer, didn’t have much time or trust in nomadic journalists. And he didn’t know me from Adam.

So it took months of written correspondence to arrange a two-hour sitting on a Sunday afternoon.

I drove nearly 1,000 km from Beaverton, Ontario to Point Royal, Kentucky.

Fortunately, Berry warmed to my presence and proved to be a generous host. In the end we talked for nearly six hours. He introduced me to his border collie, Maury, and showed me the property, provided I did not make it sound like some kind of “demonstration farm.”

Berry even invited me to lunch the next day with his wife Tanya, a woman as surefooted and vital as her husband.

During that visit Berry, then 54, talked about the importance of small farms, rural communities and the abusive impacts of technology on people.

He warned about the perils of urban thinking, or the “bigger is better” mentality. He expressed gratitude for the good work of his friends and allies such as Gene Lodgson, Wes Jackson, Maury Tellen and his brother John.

We talked about his love of draft horses and cheviot goats along with the difficulties of marginal hillside farming. We covered a lot of ground.

‘Between people and machines, I chose people’

Much of our conversation, of course, dealt with technology, a subject now on everyone’s mind due to the popular revolt against AI and the tech titans.

“If we’re going to use the world without ruining it, we have to use it with intimate knowledgeable care,” said Berry. “And so there’s a point at which the replacement of human beings by machines degrade both humanity and nature.” And to Berry, that was the point of paramount interest.

I asked him if he considered himself a Luddite.

“I’d say I’m something of a Luddite,” he replied. “Between people and machines, I chose people. And between a healthy place and a healthy community and the welfare of the machine economy, I chose the healthy place and community, and I don’t hesitate.”

He went on. “What I’m arguing for is immensely attractive to me. I love a well-cared for farm or a well-cared for animal or a well-cared for garden. Just the way I love anything else in this world that is pleasing,” he said.

“And this seems to be something that’s markedly absent from the talk and visions of the technologists. I don’t get the feeling from reading about their plans and visions that there will be anything very attractive about the world that they want to make.”

I think most people today now realize the awfulness of the truth Berry expressed some 40 years ago.

He brought realness. And hope

The second thing that impressed was Berry’s realism. He knew life could be dark and tragic. He didn’t think we could avoid the social and political fallout from decades of industrial destruction. Better than most of us, he understood that we lived in a “malignant” age, and he even called it that. He saw no quick fix to our predicament.

“The damage is going to be suffered,” he said. “A certain amount of damage is now inevitable. We’ve already lost about one-third of our soil. There’s already serious drinking water contamination. We’re already breathing, drinking and eating carcinogens. There’s no just way to avoid this. It’s not as if we have the possibility of rational choice whether or not to suffer these consequences. We are already suffering them. What’s obvious, and this is why I’m not an optimist, is that the change that happens is going to come as a result of suffering. And I don’t know how much suffering is going to be required.”

My last impression of Berry was his expansive humanity.

During our conversation, he talked about the difference between the invisibility of grounded thinking versus the adulation of individual intelligence.

It was possible, he said, that a family that had farmed a place for several generations in a loving manner would engage in intuitive patterns of behavior that even they would not understand.

That kind of thinking didn’t have much place in this modern world.

At the end of my visit Berry stood on his porch and said, “It’s been worse,” meaning that the experience of being interviewed was not all that bad.

As I drove away, lightning bugs danced outside his house, and the cicadas continued their song.

‘To make a living is not to make a killing’

Throughout his life, Berry swam upstream without complaint. He believed there is a world of pleasure in contrariness.

When “itinerant professional vandals” praised higher education as a means of getting ahead, he defined education as an enablement to serve one’s community.

When urban planners advocated that cities should grow like fires, he advised that communities should grow like trees.

When economists preached the importance of concentration, Berry wrote about the beauty of diversity.

When the high priests of culture championed salesmanship as a nation’s ruling ethic, Berry chose to speak about competence and good works.

When scientists described humans as biological machines, Berry wrote that life is a miracle.

When the American empire waged war, he advocated for peacefulness towards enemies.

To this day his books Home Economics, Another Turn of the Crank and Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community: Eight Essays remain gospels of solace and guidance on how to live rightly in an abusive world.

Berry just concerned himself with the verities, the things that last and matter in life.

Years ago, the brilliant journalist Bill Moyers interviewed Berry at a gathering in Kentucky.

Berry, as usual, spoke eloquently about defending the precious things of this world and how age does radicalize one’s being.

He spoke against money, the obscenity of strip mining, the concentration of power and the disastrous replacement of people by technologies.

“The aim of the industrial revolution from the beginning is to replace people with technology,” he said.

He also talked about one of his major themes: “leadership from the bottom.” The corrupt and the powerful must be stopped, and by stopping he didn’t mean throwing bombs. The only force that can begin to undo the damage belongs to ordinary people who can see where something needs to be done, and then do it without institutional permission or the approval of political parties.

He added that resistance against malignant forces that endures must have solid roots. And those roots can only take hold wherever people make common cause with a place and become patient enough to understand its complexities.

Hope is making a good example with good work in that place. “To make a living is not to make a killing. It is to have enough,” he said.

As contrary as ever, he emphasized there are no big solutions to our problems and if there were, they would be as tyrannical as the current system. The answers, he said, must come in millions of small acts and changes.

“It can’t be hurried. The situation calls for a lot of patience in an emergency, and that’s a terrible trial.”

And then he reflected on the point of resisting powerful corporations and wicked technologies.

It had nothing to do with the goal of success. Or victory.

Namely, we must resist to preserve qualities in our hearts that would be destroyed by acquiescence: “We don’t have a right to ask whether we are going to succeed or not. The only question we have the right to ask is, what is the right thing to do? What does the Earth require of us if we want to continue to live on this earth?”

And that’s a voice I still hear on his porch, the fire that we must carry forward.