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I first learned about Wendell Berry in college, working towards my degree in Natural Resources Planning and Interpretation at Humboldt State University in far northern California.
Last month, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Mr. Berry for this year’s Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, the most prestigious honor bestowed by the federal government for “distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.”
An excerpt from his speech hit close to home: “So I am nominating economy for an equal standing among the arts and humanities. I mean, not economics, but economy, the making of the human household upon the earth: the arts of adapting kindly the many human households to the earth’s many ecosystems and human neighborhoods. This is the economy that the most public and influential economists never talk about, the economy that is the primary vocation and responsibility of every one of us.”
And just because now I’m thinking about the man, the myth, the legend Mr. Berry, here is just a small part of one of my favorite Wendell Berry poems:
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
“Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.”
Amazing.
I was just thinking today (while mixing soil in my raised beds) that it is pretty much an emotional and psychological imperative that humans play in the dirt.
Isn’t that beautiful? That whole poem screams to me.
Hehe, Wendell Berry was the bane of my existence in my high school junior honors English class.
What did those bastards make you read? And how can you not love the whole concept of investing in the millenium by planting sequoia? I mean, ain’t that a purty concept?
I think it was this one, The Unsettling of America – Culture and Agriculture: http://www.amazon.com/The-Unsettling-America-Culture-Agriculture/dp/0871568772/
I can appreciate it now…at age 17, not so much