Mr. Wendell Berry of Kentucky

Vandana Shiva comments on Wendell Berry

And [Vandana Shiva] is the founder and moral hurricane powering the Navdanya Research Foundation, a “movement to protect the diversity and integrity of living resources, especially native seeds.” 

In addressing the Louisville crowd, Shiva began with a tribute to Berry. He is “someone opposed to oversimplification, to reductionism, to monocultures; especially mental monocultures,” she said, “which are the products of modern universities.”

via dailyyonder.com

Michael Pollan on Wendell Berry

So I kept reading, and I kept gardening, and I came to Wendell Berry, who became an important resource. Berry had gone through the same frustrations as a farmer that I'd faced in my little plot of land. He learned that farmers, by necessity, must take a less utopian view of nature. If Thoreau and Emerson tell you to back off and admire whatever happens, Berry says you have a legitimate quarrel with nature when it comes to weeds and pests. He's willing to intervene in a way that most American nature writers are not. Berry's argument for active, humane stewardship of land struck me as a value system I could use. I'd learned a set of values from Thoreau in the library, but it was only when I tested them—in the crucible of an actual garden with actual pests on an actual patch of land—that I was able to form my values more fully.

via theatlantic.com

Wendell Berry influences education for farming

At St. Catharine College in rural Washington County, Ky., a new academic program is under development aiming to reflect author Wendell Berry’s merging of studies in agrarianism and the liberal arts.

The program, endorsed by Berry and his family, will house some of Berry’s archives and offer concentrations in such areas as agriculture and ecology, soil stewardship, community leadership and environmentally related arts and humanities.

via courier-journal.com

Wendell Berry to speak at Allegheny College

MEADVILLE, Pa. - Renowned author Wendell Berry will return to Allegheny College on Friday, May 17 to open the second annual Loving the Land Through Working Forests Conference. Conference events are free and open to the public.

The Loving the Land speakers' program featuring Berry begins at 7 p.m. in Ford Chapel, North Main Street in Meadville near the center of the Allegheny College campus.

via yourerie.com

ALSO at allegheny.edu

Blog Watch: Wendell Berry and others on stewardship

Wendell Berry takes a specific approach to stewardship of the natural world in his work “Renewing Husbandry.” He relates his life on a farm, and how it became mechanized during his teenage years, to how man is really meant to interact with nature, and how man should not treat nature. He describes husbandry of the natural world in terms of husbandry of a family. A husband and father must nurture, protect, and cultivate his family in order to see them thrive. Berry says the same is true of man and his relationship to the land.

via A. Wilson's Theology of Nature Blog

Blog Watch: Blogging "Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture"

Kevin Scott is taking on the job of blogging his way through Ellen Davis's Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture.

So here’s another layer of biblical understanding—the rural agrarian view of many of its writers. For example, one of the recurring complaints of the prophets was the way the central government of Israel tended to exploit the agrarian sector. And this exploitation was interpreted by the prophets as a lack of faithfulness to God. Perhaps there is some modern relevance to this perspective from Scripture.

To assist her in seeing the Hebrew Scriptures from this perspective, Davis does this study “in conversation with” modern agrarian writers—the most prominent of which is Wendell Berry—who can shed more light on the rural agrarian perspective.

via kevinscottwrites.com

Blogging Wendell Berry's 'The Pleasure of Eating'

Rick Visser has been blogging through Mr. Berry's essay. Sometimes he just presents a quotation, but other times he expands with personal anecdotes, photos, or video. Take a look.

In his justly famous essay, The Pleasures of Eating, Kentucky farmer, poet and essayist, Wendell Berry lists seven things we can all do to eat responsibly–even if we live in the big city.  I will highlight one item each day for seven days, with the hope that some readers may be inspired to read the entire essay.  It is a foundational text in The Hungry Gap.

Number One:
Participate in food production to the extent that you can. If you have a yard or even just a porch box or a pot in a sunny window, grow something to eat in it. Make a little compost of your kitchen scraps and use it for fertilizer. Only by growing some food for yourself can you become acquainted with the beautiful energy cycle that revolves from soil to seed to flower to fruit to food to offal to decay, and around again. You will be fully responsible for any food that you grow for yourself, and you will know all about it. You will appreciate it fully, having known it all its life.

via thehungrygap.com

Mary Berry reflects on her mother's agrarian vision

I believe I missed this wonderful article when it first became available.

My mother’s name is Tanya Amyx Berry and she is not from the farm in Henry County, Kentucky, where she has lived for over 50 years. She was born in Berkeley, California, in 1936 into a family with deep Kentucky/California ties, which I guess were never fully reconciled. Because of this my mother and her parents went back and forth between Lexington and Mill Valley many times.

My mother-to-be married Wendell Berry in May 1957. They traveled quite a bit during the early years of their marriage. In 1964, they bought a little hillside farm called Lanes Landing on the Kentucky River. Daddy was teaching at the University of Kentucky and Lanes Landing was going to be a weekend place for us. It quickly became the place they would live, raise my brother and me, and share in the work that they do there still.

READ MORE at ediblecommunities.com

Wendell Berry conference news

The conference, sponsored by the Berry Center, builds off Berry’s seminal 1977 book, “The Unsettling of America,” which offered a vision of land stewardship and thinking locally about food production and distribution.

“We’re trying to get beyond that book” said Berry, a Kentucky farmer and author. “I hope we do.”

The conference drew 300 people to the Brown Hotel. It concludes Saturday at St. Catharine College in Washington County, with appearances by Berry, Bill Moyers, Bill McKibben and others. The conference is sold out.

“How blessed we all are to have the opportunity to honor such an exceptional Kentuckian,” said Christy Brown, a board member of the Berry Center. “He’s a prophet.”

via courier-journal.com

WFPL on the Wendell Berry conference

On a warm day last summer on his farm in Henry County, Wendell Berry sat on the front porch, and read what has become perhaps the quote he’s best known for.

“Eating is an agricultural act,” he read.

This is a quote that Berry doesn’t particularly like repeating.

“I suppose it’s the sentence I’ve written that’s been most quoted out of context, in isolation,” he said. “At first I was flattered by this, but now I’m dismayed by it. Because out of context, it strikes me as a rather stupid oversimplification, like all bumper stickers. And I have never been by intention, a composer of bumper stickers.”

Over the past five decades, Berry’s written countless books, essays and poems, and he's kept a farm. Two years ago, a center was founded in his name to continue his family’s work in agriculture, and next weekend the center will hold its first conference in his honor.

The conference will celebrate the 35th anniversary of Berry’s book, The Unsettling of America, and introduce the Berry Center’s work to the public.

via wfpl.org