In a time when our relationship to the natural world is ruled by the violence and greed of unbridled consumerism, Wendell Berry speaks out in these prescient essays, drawn from his 50-year campaign on behalf of American lands and communities
Wendell Berry began his life in post-war America as the old times and the last of the old-time people were dying out, and continues to this day in the old ways: a team of work horses and a pencil are his preferred working tools. The writings gathered in The World-Ending Fire are the unique product of a life spent farming the fields of rural Kentucky with mules and horses, and of the rich, intimate knowledge of the land cultivated by this work. These are essays written in defiance of the false call to progress and in defense of local landscapes, essays that celebrate our cultural heritage, our history, and our home.
With grace and conviction, he shows that we simply cannot afford to succumb to the mass-produced madness that drives our global economy—the natural world will not survive it.
Yet he also shares with us a vision of consolation and of hope. We may be locked in an uneven struggle, but we can and must begin to treat our land, our neighbors, and ourselves with respect and care. As Berry urges, we must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. — Book promo @ goodreads.com
Most of us, for example, not only do not know how to produce the best food in the best way – we don’t know how to produce any kind in any way. Our model citizen is a sophisticate who before puberty understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato. And for this condition we have elaborate rationalizations, instructing us that dependence for everything on somebody else is efficient and economical and a scientific miracle. I say, instead, that it is madness, mass produced. A man who understands the weather only in terms of golf is participating in a public insanity that either he or his descendants will be bound to realize as suffering. I believe that the death of the world is breeding in such minds much more certainly and much faster than in any political capital or atomic arsenal.
The American disease is the assumption that when a man has exploited and used up the possibilities of one place, he has only to move on to another place. This has made us a nation of transients, both physically and morally, and as long as we remain so I think that we will inhabit the earth like a plague, destroying whatever we touch. It seems to me that our people are suffering terribly from a sort of spiritual nomadism, a loss of meaningful contact with the earth and the earth’s cycles of birth, growth and death.
I read another ‘book’ by Berry but it was only 20 pages long and could have just as easily been read online here. It is the published talk, The City and the Farm Crisis, that he gave at the Sixth Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures.
There was not much of a rain, only 0.06″, but we did get rain again yesterday. If I can believe the 10 Day forecast there will not be any more rain during the next 10 days. I have had enough so I hope the weather guesser have got it right this time.