Blog Watch: "I Heart Wendell Berry"

When I FINALLY came to Wendell Berry – having known (but sadly not read) his fiction and his essays on things like computers – it was with a mind and heart hungry to learn. I wasn’t disappointed. His writing is clear and lucid, without the aggressiveness that characterizes some of Salatin’s work. Yet, he is saying the same things – we must farm small and diverse. We must learn to live locally, to conserve our environment, to treat our animals well. We must stop thinking that the measure of success for a farm is how much income it brings in, but instead measure it by how well it sustains the people who tend it and the people around them.

via www.andilit.com

Blog Watch: "I Heart Wendell Berry"

When I FINALLY came to Wendell Berry – having known (but sadly not read) his fiction and his essays on things like computers – it was with a mind and heart hungry to learn. I wasn’t disappointed. His writing is clear and lucid, without the aggressiveness that characterizes some of Salatin’s work. Yet, he is saying the same things – we must farm small and diverse. We must learn to live locally, to conserve our environment, to treat our animals well. We must stop thinking that the measure of success for a farm is how much income it brings in, but instead measure it by how well it sustains the people who tend it and the people around them.

via www.andilit.com

Blog Watch: "My introduction to Wendell Berry at the Paideia Prize banquet last night"

I had heard that his books were pretty good. And soon I fell to reading his novels. It was a bit like going through the wardrobe and entering another world.

The world I entered was a world of life, and death, and joy, and sorrow, and peace, and far-off war, and laughter, and weeping, and charity, and violence; it was a world of work, and play, and friendship, and love. There was something striking about this world, and for a long time I couldn’t put my finger on it. And then one day I realized what it was: It was not another world that I had entered. The world that I had entered was this world.

All roads lead to Port William.

via vereloqui.blogspot.com

Wendell Berry and Others in Berkeley

Wednesday, Oct 31, 2012 | 4:00 pm

Wheeler Auditorium

Panelists: Wendell Berry, Michael Pollan (Graduate School of Journalism), Robert Hass (English), and Miguel Altieri (Environmental Science, Policy, and Management).

via townsendcenter.berkeley.edu

And the nexty day: A Reading and Discussion

Blog Watch: "Let Wendell Berry Be Wendell Berry"

Look to Wendell Berry for inspiration, as I do; but don’t be demanding of him, or asking of him, that he must validate your own, no doubt equally well-thought-out, viewpoints.

via sycamorethree.blogspot.com

Blog Watch: Wendell Berry's shelf life

I just finished reading the Wendell Berry essay “Conservation is Good Work” and noticed at the end a right justified date: — 1991.

I had an unexpectedly profound moment realizing the essay was written he wrote this essay more than 20 years ago. His uncompromising common sense and truth telling has always been for me a balm, an uncomfortable reminder of my own complicity, and an inspiration. What struck me just now is that everything he’s saying seems so contemporary and of the moment: Eat locally, shorten supply lines, understand the destructions and toxins entrained by your choices and daily life, we are held as ignorant hostages by the global economy.

via paulstark.name

Wendell Berry among honorees by James Beard Foundation

Today JBF revealed its 2012 crop of Leadership Award recipients. These individuals, whose work focuses on creating a more healthful, sustainable, and safe food world, will be honored at our third annual food conference this October. Read up on the recipients below, then read the full press release here.

 

Wendell Berry, Author, Bringing it to the Table
For the brilliant insight he has brought to America's agrarian movement for more than six decades.

via www.jamesbeard.org

Rod Dreher shocked by Wendell Berry on Gay Marriage

I must admit this genuinely shocks me. Nobody familiar with Berry’s work could possibly expect him to be a conservative culture warrior on the gay marriage subject. But endorsing same-sex marriage is not something I expected from him. To be sure, he does so on strictly limited grounds, implying that it’s not because he necessarily approves of homosexuality, but because it strikes him as unjust that gays face legal penalties because of their inability to contract a marriage. [Side note: A lot of what gays face in this regard strikes me as unjust too, but I would support remedies short of legal marriage.]

via www.theamericanconservative.com

 

See also HERE (Jerry Salyer) and HERE (Robert Heid).

From Wendell Berry in "Humanities"

There is a fundamental contradiction between industrial technologies and processes and the necessarily biological and ecological basis of agriculture. My friend Bill Martin who is a forest ecologist found in an engineering textbook the sentence, “Soil is that part of the earth’s surface that does not require blasting.” What we are seeing in land use everywhere now is what I take to be a military principle: maximum force relentlessly applied. This is blatantly evident in the Appalachian coal fields right now. The coal companies are destroying mountains, watersheds, and people, with a military ferocity. But the same thing is happening more slowly in the corn-and-bean fields and animal factories of industrial agriculture.

via www.permacultureproject.com

Blog Watch: "Walking out on empire"

So what do we do now? At what point does one realize that his or her paradigm isn’t working anymore, and give up and walk out on empire? How do we start walking, and where do we go? Here are some quotes from notable people who are choosing to turn at the crossroads and walk away from empire and then to talk about the transition. These quotes highlight some of their answers to the question of “what now?”

• Wendell Berry says, “The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope for survival.”

via prosperouswaydown.com