Leopold Center - Learning from Wendell Berry: Two observations

When I handed Wendell Berry my copy of his book, The Art of the Commonplace, a compilation of his essays on agrarianism, for his signature, I did not realize that he viewed these essays’ continued relevance as something of a disappointment. Berry shared that he had hoped the book’s concerns – insights and critiques on the eroding condition of domestic culture and agriculture, many penned and published decades ago – would have become obsolete as people developed a greater sense of connectedness with their food, rootedness in their place, and reverence for their use of creation. For better or for worse, his ideas remain as pertinent, or more so, in today’s society as when they were originally conceived.

It is not news that our national rural population is shrinking and the number of farmers with it. Wallace Stegner, one of Wendell Berry’s teachers, categorizes people as either “boomers” or “stickers.” Boomers leave their native place to become itinerant seekers of the highest monetary return for the smallest expenditure of work. Stickers want to settle into a community and have some continuity in their lives, even if it means forgoing the opportunity for greater income; they plant perennial flower beds because they expect to be able to see them bloom the following year.

It is easy to see which type of person is more valued in our economy. Yet the number of American “stickers” who consider farming their primary occupation has dwindled below 1 percent of the overall population, and the U.S. Census Bureau has struck this profession from its record-keeping as statistically insignificant.

Some ask: If farming only accounts for 3 percent of our country's Gross Domestic Product, why shouldn’t farming responsibilities be reallocated to parts of the world where the populace is more attuned to the work and the lifestyle? Berry attributes this mental and social shift toward agriculture to “industrialization.” We have adopted a quantitative standard for progress; we ask how many rows can we plant or harvest with one pass, and how many acres of our neighbors’ land can we acquire when they sell in order to gain economic efficiencies of scale. But what is the worth of that which is now draining from farmers’ tiles and bank accounts? What does the loss of that neighbor cost?

The tradition of neighborliness is not irretrievable. Pockets of it still can be found and emulated. Berry speaks of an Amish farmer with whom he is acquainted who, when stopping to rest his team of plow-horses at the crest of a hill, could see 13 other farmers and their teams who he knew would come to work his field should he be stricken by illness or death.

One of my own most vivid memories is driving home from college one autumn night to visit my grandfather on his deathbed. When turning the corner towards my family’s farm, I was struck by the headlights of three combines and several familiar pickup trucks in our soybean field bringing in the last of the harvest. Our neighbors had come together to help my family finish our fieldwork so we could all be with my grandfather when he died.

If these examples are at all transferable, I think they prove that a more qualitative standard for community and interdependence can be valuable and progressive. We must ask whether standards for technology and progress are appropriate for ourselves and our community. If we are pressured to change in a way that goes against our values, we must, as Berry said, “stick out our bottom lip and refuse to do it.” Culture and agriculture go hand in hand; one cannot change without the other.

Wendell Berry is a poet. He's also a farmer, teacher, carpenter, historian, authority on strip-mining, ecologist, connoisseur of Kentucky bourbon, world-renowned essayist, spinner of fine tales, and a long list of other things. He has spent a good portion of his life advocating against our modern fetish for specialization and is thus, rather reasonably, its living antithesis.

Perhaps this is why Berry took the time to meet with students from Iowa State University’s Graduate Program in Sustainable Agriculture. For, ragtag and motley as we may seem from some more “traditional” academic perspectives, like Berry, our integrity of subject matter has given us an integrity of character. And, as Berry expounds upon in The Unsettling of America, our modern “ecological crisis” is substantially “a crisis of character.”

While he readily answered our technical questions on agricultural sustainability – with the noteworthy ease of a specialist – the heart of our discussion was, perhaps not surprisingly, ethical and philosophical: the imposition of industrial production criteria upon ecological systems, the social propriety of technologies, notions of progress, the value of natural inconsistency, and “the need for a lot of little solutions” found through active civic engagement.

The notion of ethical civic engagement was paramount, Berry explained. Science and technology must be reined in by our human interest in ethical self-determination. Science for science’s sake is thus unethical, as is the scientist who is not civically engaging the broad implications of her or his science.

We scientists do not have to live up to our maladroit and reclusive stereotypes; in fact, we should not. Wendell Barry makes a good case that not only do we have personal integrity, but also a soundness of knowledge and its applications to gain.