Berry, Wendell (1934–)

Wendell Erdman Berry was born in 1934 in Kentucky to a family that had farmed for generations along the Kentucky River. After establishing himself as an author and an academic, in 1964 he returned to Kentucky to farm and to write.

He is the author of novels, books of essays, short stories, and poetry. His major theme eulogizes the destroyed communal life of family farmers. His fiction details how generations of farmers dealt with the impact of changes in U.S. agriculture over the past century in the fictional town of Port William. He affirms the values of hardworking men and women, their struggles, and their lives of caring for each other and the land.

Berry's belief that humans must acknowledge that there are limits to how we can live informs his argument against bigness of all sorts, especially that of agribusiness. Factory farming has removed 98% of the population from the land and from a fundamental appreciation of nature that comes from the proper, loving care of the land.

Berry admires the Amish for their choice in farming practices, particularly their use of draft animals. His argument that we should not automatically assume that what is new is an improvement over the inherited ways has earned him the label of a Luddite. Berry is a spokesman in the anti-globalization movement and has cataloged the damage that multinational corporations have inflicted on the inhabitants of small towns. Other threats that he has opposed include nuclear power and suburban sprawl.

The most systematic presentation of his agrarian philosophy is The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (1986), wherein he argues against the beliefs that work is to be avoided, that uniformity [Page 235]provides freedom, and that humans can be whole apart from healthy communities.

Humans aware of limits understand the fertility cycle, in which all is related; for example, life is intimately connected to death, both in nature and in the human community. Such an awareness comes from being at home in the world, being a good husband of the natural resources, and acknowledging that what has been inherited must be treasured. Because much of modernity rejects these deep commitments, Berry writes out of a deep anger at the practices of coal companies in eastern Kentucky and the unlimited sprawl of urban areas.

His concern with natural history, geography, and the place of humans in the larger natural world are present throughout his poetry and his other writings. Some of his poems address contemporary politics, such as his anti-war poem “Upon Seeing a Siberian Woodsman.” Much of it ponders the mysterious connections of generations living and dead, as well as the emotional geography of being deeply rooted in a place.