Worldwide, farmers and native people are keepers of place, tender of souls and soils, and watchful eyes over life abiding as stewards of all creatures – winged, four legged, two-legged, crawling, bacteria, or microbe. A symphony of life living in right relationship. In their home places, together and united, they tend the commons- common sense, common history, and common place or purpose. They sensibly feed and make food. They are savers of seed- receivers of a legacy of past seed savers- adding, choosing and giving back. They are people engaged in love of land and in gratitude for its generosity.
For farmers and native peoples, these are relationships and responsibilities worth defending against what has been a long assault to remove people from their land. What they needed was an articulate advocate, willing to defend the universal correctness for people to live in deep association with their home/land and the rightness of that association.
Author and poet Wendell Berry passed away last week after 92 productive years. He lived a life as a thinker, farmer, writer, and voice for all rural peoples. As a farmer from Kentucky, on land that his family tended for over 200 years, he wrote eloquently for stewards and their timeless essentiality for caring and loving the land. He lived and celebrated the value of good work and the beauty and marvelous mysteries of nature, humility, and community. He both mourned and railed against the tyranny of the powerful and the institutions that measured success in dollars, treated land as a commodity, and valued technology over the wellbeing of those who know their land and are intimate to that place.
In his 92 years, he and his wife Tanya, as his editor, wrote more than 60 books – clear, concise, and focused on the historical deconstruction of rural places and the tragic impact on those agrarian peoples. He sought to connect the history of his rural home to the devaluation of that life and the model valuing extraction of resources (tons of coal, gas, clean water, the many trainloads of grain, wheat or meat) impacting the human communities that fed the very institutions and policymakers that ignored rural demise. The farmers and rural people were handed the tools and technologies that created abundance, ironically hastening rural deconstruction. Wendell was a farmer, writer, activist, prophet and a teller reminding us of what we are blindly losing.
Understanding that essential connection between people and land, he argued often that we need every farmer we now have, while needing to accelerate the growing of new farmers. Those farmers are essential to care for place- they understand that their farm/ landscapes are best made whole by those who live on the land and are intimate to the communities there. He mourned that so many good people were caught in an exploitive system of concentrated commodity markets; squeezed by costs over which they have little control (think current fertilizer or diesel costs and the Middle East conflict); subject to rule-making that can destroy (think new trade tariffs that damaged US soy and corn export markets); and the concentrated capital that brings non-farmers to owning land for investment values far beyond its crop production value.
Farming and rural life exist on a different timeline than most occupations. The planning and creation of a crop is a yearlong investment that needs the ability to have some certainty as to fair return for a good crop. Long-term care of resources like land and water needs a long view. That view needs critical analysis of technologies that poison farmers or their environment, transferring cost of cleanup, healthcare, or species decline to upcoming generations. Those generations will need to deal with those unaccounted for costs of the present food system, those “externalities.” A timeline for a healthy food system involves creating abundance and making investments in a place to enhance the resources that underlie that production.
Wendell decries the loss of experiential wisdom- listening to the land and its creatures, knowing seasons, and the lessons gained from hard work done well.
I am hoping that my admiration for this writer isn’t seen as sentimentality for something gone and hence a relic of a past, long-gone period of history that we don’t wish to return to. Rural places, some say, were emptied because of opportunities elsewhere greater than what was found on the farm. Yet more often the lack of political, economic, and social support drove people from their lands because of economic insolvency. Rural youth found escape from economic hardship in the military where they disproportionately provide part of our nation’s defense. Closed farms and fewer farmers meant closed rural businesses, churches, schools and a shell of rural main streets.
This is certainly not an argument for throwing away all modern technology. Hardly- we use the tools that are affordable and appropriate to our scale. It is more about choosing one’s tools thoughtfully rather than being subject to tools that do the deciding about what you see or buy. We may need to interject a long-term 50-year perspective to ask ourselves what is the society and food system we hope to support rather than be subject to.
We may be at the beginning of a shift where the refugees of a society choose to differ from the appropriation/ownership/organization of information is seen as knowledge, and where greed and over-accumulation are seen as virtuous. As a keeper of our farm, joined by all who labor on this farm, we are entrusted with the sacred responsibility of handing to future generations a farm that is healthy and whose capacity to produce the food for the coming generations of children will remain enhanced by our tenancy here. We hope that there would be no unpaid ecological debt requiring their payment.
Wendell Berry spoke and wrote eloquently of the beauty of life in nature. He reveled in the blessed moments of being one with a place, He raised a measured, thoughtful voice about injustice, about peace, and about those things of value that were being dismissed in the measurement of value- care, empathy, love for place, native mind, wild things, rhythms of a day and of larger seasons, good work, pride in things well built, and generational respect for those who have come before us.
The gifts of care that we inherited necessitate the need to share and give back, active love best given and received. His voice will be missed, but his writings at his leaving are worth reading. Blessings on your meals.
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free
1968
Paul Muller
