Wendell Berry has been farming the same land in Henry County, Kentucky since 1965. He has published more than fifty books from that farm. He has written poems about specific fence rows, essays about specific neighbors, novels about a fictional small town that is transparently Port Royal with the names changed.
He has turned down most of what New York literary culture offered him and kept farming.
He is ninety-one years old. He was right about most of it.
The argument he has been making since The Unsettling of America (1977) is not complicated, though it has taken him sixty years and fifty books to say it fully: the way a culture treats its land is the way it treats everything. Strip a hillside to extract what's underneath it and you are practicing the same logic that strips a community of what makes it worth staying in. The impatience that will not let a field rest will not let a person rest either. The soil and the people who work it are connected at a level that the modern economy finds inconvenient and has spent a century trying to dissolve.
The South should find this familiar. The argument arrived here before Berry named it.
What He Wrote
Jayber Crow (2000) is the place to start if you have not read him. It is the story of a barber in a small Kentucky town, told in first person across sixty years of the twentieth century, watching the community he loves come apart and staying anyway. It is a novel about what it costs to belong somewhere, and what it costs not to. Berry has said it is his best novel. He is correct.
The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (1977) is the argument in full. It is the book where Berry diagnosed what was happening to the rural South and Midwest and did not expect anyone to listen. Most people did not listen. He was right anyway.
This Day: Collected and New Sabbath Poems is the devotional version. Berry has been walking his farm on Sunday mornings for decades and writing a poem each time. The poems are short. They are about the particular and specific relationship between a man and a piece of ground he has worked for sixty years, and they are, incidentally, some of the most quietly theological writing in American literature. You can open to any page.
What Are People For? (1990) is the essay collection that arrives fastest. The title essay is the one to read. It asks, plainly, what happens to a culture when it designs its economy around the premise that people are only worth what they produce. The answer is not optimistic.
What He Stood Against
Berry opposed the industrialization of agriculture, the evacuation of rural communities, the idea that bigger and faster and more efficient is always better. He opposed strip mining in Kentucky and nuclear weapons and the homogenization of American food. He wrote his essays on a typewriter and did not own a computer. His wife Tanya typed the final manuscripts.
He was not performing simplicity. He was practicing it, which is harder, and he has been practicing it for sixty years in the same county.
His faith is woven through everything and seldom named directly. He is a Christian in the Sabbath-keeping, land-honoring sense. The obligation to the land in his work comes from his sense that the land is not his to destroy, that he is a steward of something given rather than an owner of something owned. He writes about creation care before anyone called it that. He does not use the term because the term arrived after the practice.
Why the South Specifically
Berry's arguments are universal but his location is not. Henry County, Kentucky is not far from Northeast Alabama in the things that have happened to it. The farms closed. The young people who were smart enough to leave did. The knowledge of how to keep a place, how to read the soil, how to tend the watershed, how to be a neighbor in the deep sense, that knowledge left with them.
Southern Gothic art keeps photographing the ruins. Berry keeps asking what caused them. The two traditions are in conversation with each other whether they know it or not.
The question he keeps returning to is the one the South has always had trouble answering: what does it mean to stay? Not to stay out of failure to leave, but to stay as a practice, a commitment, a form of love that does not require the place to be easy or comfortable or improving.
Jayber Crow is the best answer to that question I have read.
Where to Start
If you have not read him: Jayber Crow. Then This Day: Sabbath Poems. Then, when you are ready for the argument at full length, The Unsettling of America.
The 2016 documentary Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry is worth ninety minutes. It is quiet. It lets the land speak as much as the man. It will make you want to go outside.
He is still on the farm.
See also: What Wendell Berry Knew, a more personal essay on Berry's argument and what farming ten acres in Northeast Alabama taught me about why he was right.
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