You haven’t heard of Wendell Berry, I bet

The worst of American culture moves across the world more than its best. Wendell Berry would have been more known otherwise.

Farmer, poet, novelist and philosopher, Wendell Berry, who turned 90 a couple of weeks ago, has done much to not allow urban America to erase the ideals of rural America. His writings -- fiction, poetry and essays -- celebrate the virtues of local community life, where people work, love and live in harmony with the natural world.

Berry’s ancestors had been farmers in Kentucky since the early 19th century. In an essay titled Imagination in Place (2010), Berry writes that his father, a lawyer and a tobacco farmer, and the other elders around him, instructed him at an early age “to learn farming, to know the difference between good farming and bad, to regard the land as of ultimate value, and to admire and respect those who farmed well.” He adds poignantly: “I never heard a farmer spoken of as ‘just a farmer’ or a farm woman as ‘just a housewife’.”

After studying English literature at the University of Kentucky, Berry taught at Stanford, New York University, and at the University of Kentucky. In 1964, he and his spouse, Tanya Amyx -- they had married during their college days -- bought a 12-acre farm that bordered his maternal grandfather’s farm in Kentucky and moved there the following year.

Over a decade later, in 1977, Berry gave up teaching to become a full-time farmer, along with his wife. Besides growing food for the household, they raised sheep. They only used horses to manage the farm work and avoided buying a tractor and used mechanised tools minimally. Many of his essays show the variety of ways in which he and his wife lived out their commitments to a small-scale farm life. The admirers of Berry know that he uses only pen and paper for his writing and has avoided buying a computer. And that he writes only in daytime so as not to use electric lights at night.

Although inspired by the thought of American-Indian communities and the poet Gary Snyder’s Buddhism, Berry admits that “Western culture” has remained his primary engagement -- both as a source of modern problems and a source of ideas for addressing them. For him, “the affirmation of nature as the final judge, lawgiver, and pattern-maker of and for the human use of the earth (can be traced) in the West through the writings of Virgil, Spenser, Shakespeare, Pope, Jefferson, Thoreau and on into the work of the twentieth-century agriculturists and scientists J Russell Smith, Liberty Hyde Bailey, Albert Howard, Wes Jackson, John Todd, and others.”

Written in 1977, Berry’s The Unsettling of America, offers passionate reflections on how big technology, agri-business companies, and the government’s obsession with increased crop yields have worked to destroy farmland through overuse and poisoned the soil and corroded the character of rural communities. He deplores how “high land costs, taxes, inheritance taxes and interest rates” act as barriers to “ex-farmers, heirs of farmers and would-be farmers” who wish to farm.

For Berry, Thomas Jefferson’s vision of how the democratic ownership of land enabled self-reliant livelihoods, and served as a safeguard of American democracy, stands in tragic contrast with the politics that have given over much of the land to a few big business companies. Public scepticism toward the experts, officials and corporate executives in the agricultural sector, the provision of right prices for farmers’ crops, the promotion of local self-sufficiency in food, and the promotion of technological and crop diversity in conformity with local need are among some of his proposed remedial measures.

The ideals of being kind and loving towards the earth and with each other and of the value of limits and restraint in human life animate the large corpus of Berry’s writings. His advocacy of localism seeks to make cities sustainable as well and asks them to evolve a supportive relationship with the rural hinterlands. The Hidden Wound (1970) is a sensitive exploration of his relationship with the legacy of slavery and racism in his country. Calm, lucid and courageous, his writings over the last few decades show a diverse range of engagements with the American polity.

Berry’s work nurtures a dream that asks the American Dream to give way. His vision, though, lights up the moral imagination everywhere.