He reads Wendell Berry and changes his life.

Making the decision to walk away from a sixteen year career at a major class one railroad was not easy. The “fragment of a speech” that is posted below was one of the turning points that greatly fueled my decision to leave a place that in some ways, was a place that I very much enjoyed working.

When I first heard this “fragment,” I was brainstorming for a conference that the organization Railroad Workers United was hosting in Richmond, California. As the national organizer, my task was to welcome many organizations, many that do not normally work together, to an environmental conference to find common ground on very complex issues of public safety, working conditions and labor.

The inspiration that I found from this “fragment” was a question that I had to ask myself over and over for about two years. How complicit do I want to be?

Read the whole piece by John Paul Wright.

Iowa Eliminates Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture

On April 19, 2017, the Iowa state legislature voted to completely defund The Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. Founded in 1987, the Center "helps to identify and develop new ways to farm profitably while conserving natural resources."

Bryce Oates reports in The Daily Yonder:

“Yep. It’s true. After 30 years we’re dead,” [Mark] Rasmussen [director of the Leopold Center] said. “It looks like we’re closing up shop on July 1^st We just learned about the possibility a week ago. It passed the Senate, and just passed the House around midnight this morning (Wednesday).”

All that remains to make the closure final for Iowa Governor Terry Branstad (R) to sign the legislation into law. Rasmussen said he’s sure Branstad will sign the bill this week.

The Leopold Center is funded through the state’s Groundwater Protection Fund, created in 1987 from a fee on nitrogen fertilizer and pesticide sales. The center also maintains an annual appropriation from Iowa State University (ISU) and has a $5 million endowment. The Leopold Center uses the state funds to pay the center’s staff and to support a grants to farmers to document sustainable-agriculture research.

Rasmussen said there is no way to stop the closure. “It’s right there in the text of the bill. ‘Elimination of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture.’ I guess I thought we had a little bit more pride than that in Iowa. I thought we cared a little bit more.”

Larry Koehrsen writes of this "shame" in the Boone News-Republican:

Over the past 30 years, the Leopold Center has been a leader in making over 500 competitive grants to further the cause of sustainable agriculture and resource conservation. Information and data resulting from these projects have been widely distributed to researchers, educators, the agricultural community, and the general public.

We owe much to the leadership of Leopold and the continuation of his legacy through the work of the Leopold Center. Iowa is a better place because of what has been accomplished. And yet, there is so much more to do. We continue to lose topsoil to wind and water erosion. Our rivers and lakes are impaired for recreation and water supply uses. Our agricultural model is not sustainable for the long term.

The destructive legislation was pushed through on a partisan basis with no advance notice. There was minimal opportunity for input from the general and agricultural community.

This was a shameful display of political arrogance. Shameful because so little is being done elsewhere by the legislature to cope with water quality and resource conservation. Shameful because this degrades the memory and heritage of one of the Iowa pioneers of land stewardship. Shameful because the image of Iowa conveyed to the nation and the world has been tainted. Shame on us if we let this action go unchallenged.

 It appears that the legislature's action has yet to be signed by Iowa Governor Terry Branstad. See one Iowan's plea HERE.

"The Loss of the Leopold Center is a Loss for All of Us" (Land Stewardship Project, 4/20/17)

"Leopold Center is honored by farmers, academics around the world" (The Des Moines Register, 4/25/17)

"Where's Aldo? Budget Kills the Leopold Center" (The Daily Iowan, 5/8/17)

Wendell Berry's poetry in ordinary time

I took a job last summer because my bosses loved poetry. They were looking for a nanny for their three-year-old son. When I came to their house for an interview, expecting questions about past childcare experience and summer availability, they sat me down and asked if I’d ever read Wendell Berry.

The 82-year-old Kentucky native is a poet, farmer and environmental activist. My bosses were so inspired by his words, they explained, that they’d named their son after him.

I was sold. A summer of fruit bars, long mornings in the park, lunchtime tantrums and toy cars commenced. Coming out of a disorienting spring semester, in which I had mostly eaten quesadillas and cried every Sunday, I found it reassuring to be in the presence of a tiny human who felt so many things: wonder at every passing garbage truck, betrayal when I flushed the toilet without asking him, unadulterated despair when woken up from a good nap.

Read the rest of Abigail McFee's brief piece at The Tufts Daily.

Wendell Berry to deliver keynote for Appalachian Writers’ Workshop

The 40th annual Workshop will take place July 24-29, 2017. 

The Appalachian Writers’ Workshop at Hindman Settlement School, which is Kentucky’s premier writers gathering, provides an opportunity for aspiring and accomplished writers to immerse themselves in a community of people who appreciate Appalachian literature and who hail from or write about the region. This creative community comes to the Settlement to learn and teach the craft of writing through structured workshops and exchange with other writers. Both published and unpublished writers are urged to attend.

Highlights:

Wendell Berry, Kentucky farmer and renowned author, will deliver the Jim Wayne Miller/James Still Keynote Address following a Kentucky Proud “dinner on the grounds” prepared by James Beard Award Finalist Chef Ouita Michel.

A special 40th Anniversary Celebration featuring award winning writers, Lee Smith and Bobbie Ann Mason, and Kentucky rhythm and bluegrass musicians, The Wooks.

Find more information at Hindman Settlement School.

Wendell Berry answers some questions

Ragan Sutterfield asked Wendell Berry six questions. Here are two of them.

The idea that our lives are “given” comes up often in your writing. What does it mean to be given? How does it change how we live in the world?

I use the word “given” in reference to this world and our life in it. Two things are implied: first, that we ourselves did not make these things, although by birth we are made responsible for them; and, second, that the world and our lives in it do not come to us by chance.

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux once wrote: “The way is humility, the goal is truth.” Your own work reflects a similar understanding. How does humility help us recover the truth about the world and ourselves?

If you think, as I do, that the truth is large and our intelligence small, then a certain humility is implied and is even inescapable. As for my own humility, I am not very certain about the extent of it. I know that I had my upbringing from people who would have been ashamed of me if they heard me bragging on myself like a presidential candidate, and I am still in agreement with them. However, I seem to have a good deal of confidence in the rightness of my advocacy for good care of the land and the people. Without that confidence, I don’t think I could have kept it up for as long as I have.

Read the other four questions at American Catholic Blog. The complete interview can also be found in Ragan's very good book, Wendell Berry and the Given Life.

Wendell Berry on "Southern Despair"

Since the 2016 election, urban liberals and Democrats have newly discovered “rural America,” which is to say our country itself beyond the cities and the suburbs and a few scenic vacation spots. To its new discoverers, this is an unknown land inhabited by “white blue-collar workers” whom the discoverers fear but know nothing about. And so they are turning to experts, who actually have visited rural America or who previously have heard of it, to lift the mystery from it.

 One such expert is Nathaniel Rich, whose essay “Joan Didion in the Deep South” [NYR, March 9] offers an explanation surpassingly simple: over “the last four decades,” while the enlightened citizens of “American cities with international airports” have thought things were getting better, the “southern frame of mind” has been “expanding across the Mason-Dixon line into the rest of rural America.” As Mr. Rich trusts his readers to agree, the “southern frame of mind” is racist, sexist, and nostalgic for the time when “the men concentrated on hunting and fishing and the women on ‘their cooking, their canning, their ‘prettifying.’…”

This is provincial, uninformed, and irresponsible. Mr. Rich, who disdains all prejudices except those that are proper and just, supplies no experience or observation of his own and no factual and statistical proofs. He rests his judgment solely upon the testimony of Joan Didion in her notes from a tour of “the Gulf South for a month in the summer of 1970.” Those notes contain portraits of southerners whom “readers today will recognize, with some dismay and even horror” because (as Mr. Rich seems vaguely to mean) southerners have not changed at all since 1970. The Didion testimony alone is entirely sufficient because she “saw her era more clearly than anyone else” and therefore “she was able to see the future.”

Read the entire piece at The New York Review of Books.

See also: "Wendell Berry Sharpens His Pen and Punctures the Inflated Ego of a Provincial New Yorker" (In These Times)

Thoughts on Wendell Berry and the Renewal of Christianity

For Berry, the American farm is a metaphor for life. In Postmodernity, there is a movement to reduce our neighborhoods into mere real estate, the human mind into a consumer, people into numbers, ideas into information, and vocation into employment. Yes, exploitation happens on the farm in northern Canada, but it also occurs in the suburbs of California, if we follow the farm metaphor to our present “post-everything” age.

In The Unsettling of America Berry explains exploitation as something more of a belief, of an attitude than just an ecological practice:

“The first principle of the exploitative mind is to divide and conquer. And surely there has never been a people more ominously and painfully divided than we are- both against each other and within ourselves. Once the revolution of exploitation is under way, statesmanship and craftsmanship are gradually replaced by salesmanship (The craft of persuading people to buy what they do not need, and do not want, for more than it is worth.) Its stock in trade in politics is to sell despotism and avarice as freedom and democracy. In business it sells sham and frustration as luxury and satisfaction.”

Read the entire article by Eric J. Kregel HERE.

Library of America seems close to issuing Wendell Berry volume

Here's a brief twitter exchange just now in which The Library of America replies to a suggestion from Jeffrey Bilbro that they consider a volume of Wendell Berry's writing:

This gives us something wonderful to look forward to about a year from now.

Laura Dunn speaks about her film and Wendell Berry

Q: This may seem like an obvious question, but what’s the movie about? The title is “Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry,” but the viewer never sees him, other than in old photographs, and only hears his voice on occasion.

I wanted to make a portrait. I didn’t want to do a sprawling issues piece. I had done that, and artistically, I was inspired by the idea of a portrait -- something more intimate.

If you look at the definition of a portrait, it’s a likeness of someone. There are many different ways to draw a portrait.

When I got to know Wendell better, he made it clear that, first, he didn’t want to be on camera and, second, no story could be about him, because we live in a culture where people like to idolize people and put them up on a pedestal that’s not real.

He explained that he is his place, that he’s nothing but for the people around him -- his family, his neighbors, his friends.

That’s where I got the idea of a portrait. It’s the shape of him, but the frames of this portrait are his place -- what he sees, and what he cares about. It can’t be the likeness of his face, because that wouldn’t reflect the essence, just some piece of the essence of this person.

Read the whole interview at Faith & Leadership.

Review of Sutterfield's book on Wendell Berry

Like Berry’s own writings, Sutterfield’s book follows a symphonic structure: Throughout its 12 brief chapters, themes emerge, develop in new contexts, and find creative resolution. It is perhaps helpful to understand Sutterfield’s exploration of a given, creaturely life as having four main movements. The first considers Berry’s understanding of coherent, loving communities. Berry always works as an amateur—in its etymological sense of lover—whether he is tending his small Kentucky farm or writing poems, essays, and fiction. In all its varied forms, his work models the humility and love that characterize neighborly economies.

As finite creatures, we are always acting from a place of inescapable ignorance. Too often, Americans arrogantly seek to overcome this ignorance, but Berry proposes instead that we limit the scale of our actions and endeavors to fit our work into the fundamental patterns of creation. Such proper humility enables authentic love. Because love cannot be abstract, we can never love globally but must, like the Good Samaritan, tend our wounded neighbor.

Read the whole article by Jeffrey Bilbro at Christianity Today.