Mr. Wendell Berry of Kentucky

Wendell Berry talks with Michael Pollan

Kentucky farmer and writer Wendell Berry interviewed food journalist Michael Pollan last night [1 May 2013] in Louisville. ... Over the course of the evening, they discussed Pollan's new book "Cooked" and the bigger issues it raises. Here are five takeaways from the interview ...

See the complete article HERE.

Hear the complete conversation HERE.

More on Wendell Berry and the Berry Center conference

In his interview with Moyers, Berry blamed many of today's ecological problems on industrialization, unbridled capitalism and political systems that favor wealthy corporations, which make big political contributions to reap far bigger returns in taxpayer subsidies and lax regulation.

"There's no justification for the permanent destruction of the world," Berry said. "It's not economically defensible. It's not defensible in any terms."

Berry, 78, lamented that the three and a half decades since his book's publication have been marked by further environmental degradation, from strip mining and soil erosion to water pollution and accelerating climate change.

"It's mighty hard right now to think of anything that's precious that is not in danger," he said.

via kentucky.com

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2013/04/09/2593281/tom-eblen-environmental-threats.html#storylink=cpy

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

Wendell Berry's complete comments on same-sex marriage

 

Mr. Berry begins around 28:00, but Scott Moore's introductory critique is well worth hearing, too.

Wendell Berry on Same-Sex Marriage

Berry, a prolific author of books, poems and essays who won the National Humanities Medal in 2010 and was 2012 Jefferson lecturer for the National Endowment for the Humanities, offered “a sort of general declaration” on the subject of gay marriage at a “Following the Call of the Church in Times Like These” conference at Georgetown College. Berry said he chose to comment publicly to elaborate on what little he has said about the topic in the past.

“I must say that it’s a little wonderful to me that in 40-odd years of taking stands on controversial issues, and at great length sometimes, the two times that I think I’ve stirred up the most passionate opposition has been with a tiny little essay on computers (his 1987 essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer” published in Harper’s led some to accuse him of being anti-technology) and half a dozen or a dozen sentences on gay marriage,” Berry said.

via abpnews.com

SEE ALSO

"Wendell Berry talks gay marriage with Baptist ministers" (Tom Eblen)

Blog Watch: Wendell Berry on hope for food's future

Berry, who dislikes leaving home, came to New York with his wife Tanya and his daughter Mary Beth, who directs the Berry Center, to accept a leadership award from the James Beard Foundation and speak at the foundation’s conference about trust in the food supply. “Every farmers market is a sign of hope. Every CSA is a sign of hope. Every chef using local ingredients is a sign of hope. Every garden grown in town is necessary to better farming in Iowa. It’s all very encouraging, but the work is far from done,” he told Langholtz and I, perhaps hoping to influence Edible magazine’s editorial tone across the nation. Berry said he was optimistic since people seem to “understanding what I’m saying” in a way he couldn’t have imagined in the 1960s.

via edibleeastend.com

Wendell Berry on the Diane Rehm Show 2

Kentucky author, farmer and environmentalist Wendell Berry was on The Diane Rehm Show yesterday to talk about his new book “A Place in Time.” It’s a collection of 20 stories about life in the fictional small town of Port William. Besides discussing and reading from the book, Berry also talked about the relationship between a land and people, and his views on energy and the environment.

via wpfl.org

This article posts a number of significant quotes from the show ... if you are pressed for time.

Wendell Berry interviewed in The Guardian

Wendell Berry doesn't come to New York very often. The 78-year-old lives in Kentucky, where his family has farmed for five generations.

When he flies to the city next week, it's to collect a Leadership Award from the James Beard Foundation for over half a century of campaigning for better methods of food production. During his career, Berry has demonstrated against everything from Vietnam to nuclear power, from mountain-top coal mining to the death penalty. Most famously, he has campaigned against what he sees as bad farming methods, particularly industrialized farming.

"I'm a writer more than I am a talker," he says when I call him prior to his trip. In a life of extraordinary productivity, as well as his campaigning, Berry has authored more than 40 books of fiction, poetry and essays – he is most frequently compared to William Faulkner. And, in 2010, he received the National Humanities Medal.

via www.guardian.co.uk

Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson Interview

Why has the term “sustainability” become so popular, and is it useful?

Berry: I’ll go out on a limb, and Wes can saw it off. We’re stuck with this word because of the obvious need to sustain the things that we’re not sustaining. But by itself, the word doesn’t mean very much because no word means much by itself. If you’re going to make use of this word, you have to find a context for it in which it can mean something. You can look around and study examples. You can find here and there forests that have been sustainably managed, so far as we can tell. You can find farms that are not running off a lot of topsoil after rains. If you can get it particular enough, you can talk about sustainability and make a little sense. But it’s a matter of getting it into sentences that say something actually verifiable in a context. And I think we have a long, long way to go.

Jackson: The first paper I wrote that described our current work was published in our Land Report and was titled, “The Search for a Permanent Agriculture.” I’d read about the Catholic Church’s idea of “permanence” as a kind of virtue. But “permanence” wasn’t quite right. When I published the paper outside The Land Report, I changed the title to “The Search for a Sustainable Agriculture.” The term must have been floating around in 1978.

I’ve been asked to define the term and give examples. My response has been, “well, give me a definition of justice.” The idea of justice arose in a historical moment, probably out of the idea of fairness, or the perceived lack of fairness. It arose, as I understand it, among the Hebrews, about the time of the minor prophets. Maybe that’s where we are today with “sustainability”—it is a term we the people have resorted to because of the perceived lack of sustainability in our society.

Ultimately it comes back to Wendell’s idea that it is best to have a particularity in order to know what we’re talking about. It is a value term, and I’m in favor of keeping it, but we need to protect its meaning, protect it from being co-opted.

via www.iasc-culture.org

You owe it to yourself to read the complete interview HERE.

from "Why Left and Right like Wendell Berry "

In 1977, Berry put out The Unsettling of America, which may be his most influential book. As an attack on large-scale agriculture, it is very much in keeping with the themes of his Jefferson Lecture. Yet it’s more than an anti-corporate screed. Berry also defends the virtues of the smallholder farm, not as a unit of efficient production but rather as an essential component of a thriving culture that values strong communities and ecological stewardship. “The healthy farm sustains itself in the same way that a healthy tree does,” he wrote, “by belonging where it is, by maintaining a proper relationship to the ground.” Russell Kirk — a longtime NATIONAL REVIEW contributor who, like Berry, fled the academy for a rural homestead — discovered the Kentuckian around this time. “Berry is possessed of an intellect at once philosophic and poetic, and he writes most movingly,” wrote Kirk in a 1978 newspaper column. “Humane culture has no better friend today than he.” Kirk was probably the first prominent conservative to detect an undercurrent of conservatism in Berry’s work: suspicion of progress, support for local autonomy, and a preference for the old ways of doing things.

Berry certainly doesn’t view himself as a conservative, and he seems both puzzled and amused that his work would find favor with conservatives. “Mostly I’m a Democrat,” he says. “I’m a child of the New Deal. My family have always been Democrats.” Berry says he voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and plans to vote for him again this November. He has met Obama once, when the president awarded him the National Humanities Medal two years ago. Michael Pollan, the liberal foodie activist, thinks the connection may go deeper, citing Obama’s criticism of mainstream agriculture and its dependence on cheap oil: “I have no idea if Barack Obama has ever read Wendell Berry, but Berry’s thinking had found its ways to his lips,” Pollan wrote in the introduction to Berry’s 2009 book, Bringing It to the Table.

via www.heymiller.com

Be sure to read the whole article HERE.