Tyson, Chicken Rancher 🐓Mar 8

A couple of years ago, I started reading Wendell Berry’s Port William novels and some of his essay collections. His thoughts and values have made a tremendous impact on me, which I’ll try to explain briefly.

His book The Unsettling of America (1977) makes an argument for what people today might call de-growth or at least systems thinking aiming for sustainability.

He asks us to question the assumptions of our modern capitalistic society. “What are people for?”

Berry points to the self-sufficient communities that used to exist across rural America as holding the answer. His work shows us the beauty and meaningfulness of such communities, where people were committed to one another and the land. When you bring in a lot of expensive equipment and get into debt, then turn away from the land to seek money, you lose a lot. In his fictional community of Port William, Kentucky, we see what we’ve lost and what we might recover if we wake up and change our values. I read somewhere that if you enjoy a local farmers’ market, you probably partly have Wendell Berry to thank.

I remember watching an interview he did on YouTube one night and just breaking down sobbing. I think it was this interview and I can’t remember what particularly moved me: https://youtu.be/e4qoIGUd0IA?si=JdAY6fImC9JDHEbV&t=1475 Admittedly, I might have been a little drunk at the time.

I hadn’t thought about what we had lost with our current prosperity until I finished his books. It’s led me to be very intentional about forming relationships with my neighbors and supporting local businesses. I will probably never be self-sufficient in terms of food (it’s too much work!), but just having the skills is enough and important. I want to re-purpose and fix quality things. I want to reduce my spending so that we have more options for how we live. I want to take care of the ecosystem on our property and advocate for the land that I inhabit with my community. All these are things that I might have done before anyway, but that I’ve come to see as part of a coherent vision thanks to Wendell Berry’s work.

The man is still alive, but he’s 91 this year. What a treasure for our nation. If you’re interested in an alternative vision for society, check him out!

#wendellberry

Wendell Berry and Eric Schlosser: The World-Ending Fire

YouTube
Show threadLeeRaylMar 8
@tsupasat being in proximity of you, this resonates with me. Something I think about all the time as I ride through dusty dying towns throughout Cascadia. Places where you paid the grocery bill once a month and ran a tab. When the doctor in town made house calls. People exchanged labor for what they needed. Harvest season community hauls sharing the bounty. I long for the days I never had.
Show threadroyalMar 8
@leerayl @tsupasat Where to begin with Berry?
Show threadTyson, Chicken Rancher 🐓

@royal @leerayl I think it depends as he's an essayist, poet, and novelist. I'm not really into poetry, so can't speak to that.

The book he's most famous for is The Unsettling of America, which I enjoyed but it's a longish non-fiction book that explains the problems with industrial agriculture.

I personally really enjoyed his Port William novels. His only fiction focused on this single rural community over the span of 4-5 generations from the Civil War to the 1990s. It's pretty impressive when taken together, but it's very much a particular taste. I think a good book to see if you like that world or not is a collection of 20 short stories called A Place in Time. You get introduced to different characters and families, and get a feeling of what the rest of the books would be like if you choose to continue. Another small book, a collection of five short stories, is called Fidelity. If your "people" come from a rural background, you might like these stories. I learned a lot about what life was like on the farm.

Mar 8 at 5:26amWeb