Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry    (poet, farmer, philosopher)
Born	August 5, 1934
Nationality	US
Alma mater	University of Kentucky
American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer.

Wendell Erdman Berry is an American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. Closely identified with rural Kentucky, Berry developed many of his agrarian themes in the early essays of The Gift of Good Land (1981) and The Unsettling of America (1977). His attention to the culture and economy of rural communities is also found in the novels and stories of Port William, such as A Place on Earth (1967), Jayber Crow (2000), and That Distant Land (2004).

Life

Berry was the first of four children to be born to John Marshall Berry, a lawyer and tobacco farmer in Henry County, Kentucky, and Virginia Erdman Berry. The families of both parents had farmed in Henry County for at least five generations. Berry attended secondary school at Millersburg Military Institute and then got a B.A. (1956) and M.A. (1957) in English at the University of Kentucky. He completed his M.A. and married Tanya Amyx in 1957. In 1958, he attended Stanford University's creative writing program. Berry's first novel, Nathan Coulter, was published in April 1960.

A John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship took Berry and his family to Italy and France in 1961, where he came to know Wallace Fowlie, critic and translator of French literature. From 1962 to 1964, he taught English at New York University's University Heights campus in the Bronx. In 1964, he began teaching creative writing at the University of Kentucky, from which he resigned in 1977. During this time in Lexington, Kentucky, he came to know author Guy Davenport, as well as author and monk Thomas Merton and photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard.

On July 4, 1965, Berry, his wife, and his two children moved to Lane's Landing, a 12-acre farm (4.9 ha) that he had purchased, and began growing corn and small grains on what eventually became a homestead of about 117 acres (47 ha). Berry has farmed, resided, and written at Lane's Landing ever since. He has written about his early experiences on the land and about his decision to return to it in essays such as "The Long-Legged House" and "A Native Hill".

From 1977 until 1980, he edited and wrote for Rodale, Inc. in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, including for its publications Organic Gardening and Farming and The New Farm. From 1987 to 1993, he returned to the English Department of the University of Kentucky. Berry has written at least twenty-five books (or chapbooks) of poems, sixteen volumes of essays, and twelve novels and short story collections. His writing is grounded in the notion that one's work ought to be rooted in and responsive to one's place.

Activism

Berry delivered "A Statement Against the War in Vietnam" during the Kentucky Conference on the War and the Draft on February 10, 1968, at the University of Kentucky in Lexington:

We seek to preserve peace by fighting a war, or to advance freedom by subsidizing dictatorships, or to 'win the hearts and minds of the people' by poisoning their crops and burning their villages and confining them in concentration camps; we seek to uphold the 'truth' of our cause with lies, or to answer conscientious dissent with threats and slurs and intimidations. . . . I have come to the realization that I can no longer imagine a war that I would believe to be either useful or necessary. I would be against any war.

He debated former Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz at Manchester University in Manchester, Indiana in November 1977. In this debate Berry defended the longstanding structure of small family farms and rural communities that were being replaced by what Butz saw as the achievements of industrial agriculture. “My basic assumption when talking about agriculture is that there’s more to it than just agriculture. That you can’t disconnect one part of a society from all the other parts and just look at the results and that alone.”

On June 3, 1979, Berry engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience against the construction of a nuclear power plant at Marble Hill, Indiana. He describes "this nearly eventless event" and expands upon his reasons for it in the essay "The Reactor and the Garden."

On February 9, 2003, Berry's essay titled "A Citizen's Response to the National Security Strategy of the United States" was published as a full-page advertisement in The New York Times. Berry opened the essay—a critique of the G. W. Bush administration's post-9/11 international strategy—by asserting that "The new National Security Strategy published by the White House in September 2002, if carried out, would amount to a radical revision of the political character of our nation."

On January 4, 2009, Berry and Wes Jackson, president of The Land Institute, published an op-ed article in The New York Times titled "A 50-Year Farm Bill." In July 2009 Berry, Jackson and Fred Kirschenmann, of The Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, gathered in Washington DC to promote this idea. Berry and Jackson wrote, "We need a 50-year farm bill that addresses forthrightly the problems of soil loss and degradation, toxic pollution, fossil-fuel dependency and the destruction of rural communities."

Also in January 2009, Berry released a statement against the death penalty, which began, "As I am made deeply uncomfortable by the taking of a human life before birth, I am also made deeply uncomfortable by the taking of a human life after birth." And in November 2009, Berry and 38 other writers from Kentucky wrote to Gov. Steve Beshear and Attorney General Jack Conway asking them to impose a moratorium on the death penalty in that state.

On March 2, 2009, Berry joined over 2,000 others in non-violently blocking the gates to a coal-fired power plant in Washington, D.C. No one was arrested.

On May 22, 2009, Berry, at a listening session in Louisville, spoke against the National Animal Identification System (NAIS). He said, "If you impose this program on the small farmers, who are already overburdened, you're going to have to send the police for me. I'm 75 years old. I've about completed my responsibilities to my family. I'll lose very little in going to jail in opposition to your program – and I'll have to do it. Because I will be, in every way that I can conceive of, a non-cooperator."

In October 2009, Berry combined with "the Berea-based Kentucky Environmental Foundation (KEF), along with several other non-profit organizations and rural electric co-op members" to petition against and protest the construction of a coal-burning power plant in Clark County, Kentucky. On February 28, 2011, the Kentucky Public Service Commission approved the cancellation of this power plant.

On December 20, 2009, due to the University of Kentucky's close association with coal interests in the state, Berry removed his papers from the university. He explained to the Lexington Herald-Leader, "I don't think the University of Kentucky can be so ostentatiously friendly to the coal industry … and still be a friend to me and the interests for which I have stood for the last 45 years. … If they love the coal industry that much, I have to cancel my friendship." In August 2012, the papers were donated to The Kentucky Historical Society in Frankfort, KY.

On September 28, 2010, Berry participated in a rally in Louisville during an EPA hearing on how to manage coal ash. Berry said, "The EPA knows that coal ash is poison. We ask it only to believe in its own findings on this issue, and do its duty."

Berry, with 14 other protesters, spent the weekend of February 12, 2011 locked in the Kentucky governor's office to demand an end to mountaintop removal coal mining. He was part of the environmental group Kentuckians for the Commonwealth that began their sit-in on Friday and left at midday Monday to join about 1,000 others in a mass outdoor rally.

In 2011, The Berry Center was established at New Castle, Kentucky, "for the purpose of bringing focus, knowledge and cohesiveness to the work of changing our ruinous industrial agriculture system into a system and culture that uses nature as the standard, accepts no permanent damage to the ecosphere, and takes into consideration human health in local communities."

In July 2020, Wendell Berry and his wife Tanya Amyx Berry sued the University of Kentucky to prevent the removal of a mural that has been criticized for being "racially offensive." The mural was commissioned in the 1930s and was done by Ann Rice O'Hanlon, a relative of Tanya Amyx Berry.

In August 2022, at a public hearing of the Henry County, Kentucky planning commission, Wendell Berry spoke against re-zoning agricultural land to allow Angel's Envy distillery to develop the property "for bourbon-barrel storage and the development of an agritourism destination." Despite the testimony by Berry and others, the planning commission granted the re-zoning request.

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References

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