Wendell Berry
Jack Carmichael
May 11, 2009
Thoreau, Wilderness, and American Nature Writing
Wendell Berry is a Kentucky farmer, essayist, writer, and activist. Most of his writing centers on the destruction of American farming at the hands of industrial scale “agribusiness”. Berry sees small farming communities as an essential part of our culture; they help us develop strong ties with the people and places where we live. Berry argues his points in essays, where he philosophically describes how the destruction of farming is affecting Americans physically and spiritually. His novels and short stories center on the fictional town of Port William, a small farming community in Kentucky similar to Berry’s lifelong home in Henry County. Berry’s fiction takes readers through the entire lifespan of Port William, from the 1880’s through the 1980’s, and shows how the town was destroyed by the arrival of industrial farming. This essay will show how Port William reflects the philosophical ideas about farming that Berry espouses in his essays. Port William shows how small-scale farming helps communities, by developing a shared history within the town, establishing connections between people and their land, and propagating the importance of morals. The town also models how industrial agribusiness has destroyed small farming communities, through modern technological advances, specialization, and a philosophical shift from nurturing to exploiting.
Berry thinks that small communities develop out of their shared history. When generations of people have lived in the same place, their descendants inherit the memories, stories, and knowledge about the place they live. This inheritance develops a strong connection between people and the place they live. For Berry, “memory that a community has of its dead, and of the pasts of the living would be a precious sort of manual--a kind of handbook, a kind of operator's manual for the use of the immediate place” (Fisher-Smith). This manual shows every generation how to responsibly use the land they inhabit and ensures that the land will survive for future generations. For Berry the mental approach to farming is equally as important as the physical one. Not only does this received history allow a farmer to master the “intricate formal patterns in ordering his within the overlapping cycles-human and natural, controllable and uncontrollable- of the life of a farm”, which would be impossible without the benefit of generations of experience, but it also allows him to develop “a passion for excellence and order that is handed down to young people by older people that they love and respect” (Berry, Unsettling 44). By investing this physical and mental approach in the farmer, the shared history is maintained by every generation, ensuring the survival of the community and the land.
In a purely physical sense this connection with the land teaches every generation how to care for and use their land, but the connection is also spiritual. Berry argues that shared history allows small communities to realize that “we and our country create one another, depend on one another; that our land passes in and out of our bodies just as our bodies pass in and our of our land; that as we and our land are part of one another, so all who are living as neighbors here, human and plant and animal, are part of one another” (Berry, Unsettling 22). This quotation illustrates just how deep a connection received history can foster. Instead of looking at the land only through your own eyes in your own time, you are able to see how your connection to the place you live stretches back into the past and forward into the future. With such a perspective place and people cease to be separate halves, instead they are one community that is forever united and sustaining itself. Such a community values every part of itself, because every part is know to be instrumental in its own survival. These physical and spiritual connections are readily evident in Berry’s fiction.
In the early days of Port William, Berry’s fictional ideal farming community, shared history was the only means of survival, without it the next generation of farmers would not know how to farm the land. During these times shared history was not remarkable only because it was so inherent and necessary. As the town moved into the 21st century and traditional farming was slowly being replaced by tractors and machinery, the last of the old farmers were afforded a unique perspective on the importance of shared history. One of these farmers is Wheeler Catlett, who, lying on his death bed, sees himself a “survivor and heir of a membership going way back” and has “an old feeling that had strung the generations together like beads on a string” (Berry, Distant Land 432-3). With this perspective Wheeler thinks back over his life and sees that he “had never dreamed beyond the boundaries of [his] own place…never coveted anything that was [his] neighbors” and that he and his wife “ate what they grew or what came, free for the effort, from the river and woods. They drank water from their well and milk from their cow, and in the winter sat warm beside a stove in which their own wood burned…And of course they prospered” (433). Wheeler’s thoughts perfectly capture Berry’s ideas. Wheeler feels connected through time to the land and past generations and this connection allows him to prosper because he is content to use what he can create and be free from want. This connection to shared history and the land is evident in many of Berry’s characters, by reading about Port William through the generations you can see firsthand how the community passes on knowledge about itself and creates responsible farmers.
When a community grows out of its own shared history to respect the land it develops a value system that is remarkably different from modern America. In small farming communities helping neighbors, working, and morals are always more valuable than money; the community always comes first. The community shares its workload, problems, and success, because it is impossible for anyone to accomplish anything alone. Each individual relies on the rest of the community for his survival. This acknowledged reliance on community makes work and helpfulness take on new meaning because they hold the community together. This is an obvious departure from modern America, where people seek to distance themselves from their neighbors and isolate themselves in mansions.
These values of hard work and helpfulness developed out of necessity in Port William, because each farmer needed the help of his neighbors to sow seeds and harvest crops. This sense of community is best described by Mary Penn, a young girl who married a poor farmer in Port William and was able to survive only with the help of the community. After growing up on a rich farm in another part of Kentucky, Mary immediately recognizes differences in the small farming community. She sees it as “a world of poverty and community” where “neighbors were always working together” and soon she “became a daughter to every woman in the community” and “thought of herself as belonging there…because of the economy that [she and her husband] had made around themselves and with their neighbors” (Berry, Distant Land 200-1, 205). A community that grows up around shared economic survival stretches community morals into all aspects of life. We see that Berry’s characters are willing to do almost anything for the lost, poor, and hurt, even if they don’t know them. The residents of Port William go to extreme lengths to help their neighbors because morals are an inherent part of living in the community. In this way Berry’s small community is idealistic, because its sense of community fosters a sense of love and openness in every member.
While early Port William serves as a model for small farming communities, as the town enters the 21st century it shows how modern changes have destroyed small town life in America. The town undergoes a threefold change with the introduction of technology, specialization, and a moral shift from nurturing to exploitation. These three factors combine to break down the shared history, connection to the land, and sense of community.
Technology is the first major change to affect Port William. This change takes place in two parts. The first change, the introduction of personal automobiles and a few tractors, is significant only because it opens the door for the second change, the complete mechanization of farming. Cars first arrived in Port William as a novelty, not a necessity. An old farmer named Tol Proudfoot finds that “the car increased by a little bit the frequency of their going about, it increased their range not at all” and soon realizes that “he liked horses better than he liked the Model A, and he drove them better, too” (Berry, Distant Land 137). It takes Tol and his wife three years to find the confidence to drive fifty miles to the state fair, a trip that was unheard of before automobiles, and when they finally convince themselves to go, they get hopelessly lost and never make it (Berry, Distant Land 168). Jayber Crow, the town’s barber, admits to himself that his car has “altered his my mind so that [he], lately a pedestrian [him]self, fiercely resented all impediments on the road” (Berry, Jayber Crow 187). For Jayber, along with most Americans, “ease of going was translated without pause into a principled unwillingness to stop” (187).
In these stories cars seem innocent, they offer the reader a humorous view of old-timers trying to adapt to new technology, but they quickly begin to make more profound changes in the community. As time goes on the reader sees that “the focus of interest has largely shifted from the household to the automobile; the ideals of workmanship and thrift have been replaced by the goals of leisure, comfort, and entertainment” (Berry, Unsettling 40). Cars give people the ability to easily travel distances unheard of in the days of the horse and buggy, which in turns causes people to seek the things they want outside their community, such as goods, services, and entertainment. In this way cars shifted focus away from the community, because people no longer had to rely on their own town for survival. Technology allows people to do things more easily and work less therefore breaking the bonds between people who share work; the community loses its focus on morals in favor of recreation and leisure. These technological changes began the destruction of small communities, a destruction that was continued by the advent of specialization.
Specialization, or the move to infinitely specific jobs, further separates people from the places they live. Berry thinks that specialization is “the disease of the modern character” and sees it as “a way of institutionalizing, justifying, and paying highly for a calamitous disintegration and scattering-out of the various functions of character: workmanship, care, conscience, responsibility” (Berry, Unsettling 19). Berry uses specialization to show that in a highly specialized society people work jobs that cut them off from the cycles of production and consumption; they can no longer see how the world works and what role they play. Because the modern citizen cannot do anything besides one specific job, he has lost control, “the fundamental damage of the specialist system…has been the isolation of the body” (Berry, Commonplace 100). He is “a captive, a potential victim” to the greater world because he cannot sustain himself. The specialist is cut off from the world except in his small area of expertise and has no means to ensure his own survival. The result is that “the community disintegrates because it loses the necessary understandings…of the relations among materials and processes, principles and actions, ideals and realities,…body and spirit,…civilization and wilderness…-just as the individual character loses the sense of a responsible involvement in these relations” (Berry, Unsettling 21). What Berry describes in these quotes is the complete breakdown of communities and the loss of personal power, a bleak future indeed. While Berry is adamant about the direct destructiveness of specialization in his essays as we have seen above, fictional Port William shows how specialization can hurt communities indirectly.
Port William is hurt by specialization not because of its ability to corrode personal power, but rather because it drains the small community of its jobs, money, and young people. Even before the modern era, the people of Port William disdained specialization; farming was seen as the one true profession. This can be seen in the town’s disdain for lawyers and detectives (Berry, Distant Land 372), even the barber is informed by a neighbor that, “you ain’t got what I call a job. You got what I call a position” (Berry, Jayber Crow 122). Eventually the town cannot protect itself from the outside world, the last generation of farmers grows old and “the mold the were made in done throwed away” and slowly their children “began to go and not come back” (Berry, Distant Land 355). The young are “dead in wars or killed in damned automobiles, or gone off to college and made too smart to ever come back, or gone off to easy money and bright lights and ain’t going to work in the sun ever again if they can help it” (Berry, Distant Land 355). People from Port William no longer aspire to take over their family farms, instead they seek higher paying jobs in bigger cities. Slowly there is no one to run the farms and the town cannot support itself. Although Port William is spared having its people subjected to specialization, it is destroyed because it is not big enough to support a modern economy. In this way Berry is able to show us two sides of specialization’s destructiveness, first in his essays by arguing that specialized people lose connections to the essential processes of the world and are left helpless, and second in his fiction by showing how a specialized economy destroys communities that cannot modernize.
The third change that pushes Port William towards destruction is the philosophical change from nurturing to exploiting. Berry explores the difference between nurturing and exploiting in his essays and uses his fiction to show the effects of this change on Port William. In one of his essays, Berry explains the differences between exploiters and nurturers, “The exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The exploiter’s goal is money, profit; the nurturer’s goal is health- his land’s health, his family’s, his community’s” (Berry, Unsettling 7). Berry goes on to show how the exploiter stands for everything he hates about the modernization of America. The exploiter answers only to money or to his corporation, he will destroy communities, families, and land to gain profit. Along with the exploiters desire for money comes a hatred of for work and an unending desire to find leisure and entertainment. The exploiter has an “overriding desire to escape work” because “work is beneath human dignity”, which means he will do anything to make easy money (Berry, Unsettling 12). The nurturer on the other hand, realizes that “work is necessary to us, as much a part of our condition as mortality” (Berry, Unsettling 12). Berry then goes on to explore how the shift to exploitation has affected agriculture specifically.
Berry believes that the exploiter mindset has destroyed farming in America. Instead of nurturing his land so ensure sustained production, the exploiter tries to infinitely increase production, a process that destroys long term productivity. Berry describes how a farmer is changed into an exploiter, “once his investment in land and machines is large enough, he must forsake the values of husbandry and assume those of finance and technology…his thinking is not determined by agricultural responsibility, but by financial accountability and the capacities of his machines” (Berry, Unsettling 45). This process of infinitely trying to increase production and decrease work destroys small farms in favor of giant ones that can cheaply produce food with the use of heavy machinery. This in turn destroys small farming communities like Port William.
The change to exploitative farming in Port William is best exemplified by Athey Keith, a traditional farmer, and his stepson, Troy, who favors mechanized farming. Athey used sustainable farming techniques, such as crop rotation, leaving the majority of his land under grass, not overcutting his woods, and being satisfied with his farm’s output (Berry, Jayber Crow 179). “He was improving his land; he was going to leave it better than he had found it” (179) by giving it a “quality of bottomless fecundity, its richness both in evidence and in reserve” (181) to ensure its productivity for future generations. When Athey’s daughter moves in with her new husband, Athey takes it upon himself to pass on his knowledge of farming so that Troy may be able to live there one day. It immediately becomes apparent, however, that Troy has different ideas. Where Athey is “the farm’s farmer, but also its creature and belonging”, Troy “thought the farm existed to serve and enlarge him” (182). Because their methods of farming were incompatible, Athey decides to give Troy his own acreage to do with what he chooses. Troy begins to buy farm equipment and take out loans in an attempt to “increase profit margin by increasing volume”, and instead of maintaining sustainable crop rotations he decides to only grow corn because it fetches the highest prices (189). Troy shifts from farming to one of Berry’s most hated labels, agribusiness.
For Troy, as for America, the switch to large scale farming is destructive. The once fertile land quickly loses its productivity and Troy quickly finds himself deep in debt. The story of Athey and Troy represents the transformation American agriculture underwent in the middle of the 20th century. This change in farming ultimately deals Port William its death blow. The small community can no longer compete with the modernizing economy, the unity between its people and land has been destroyed, and there is no longer any reason for people to live there. As the last generation of traditional farmers dies, the town disintegrates into large corporate run farms. For the reader, who has watched the town grow, progress, and change over the course of more than a hundred years, the destruction to the town is heartfelt. Having seen the town in all its forms, it is easy to see that the tight-knit farming community that existed before the advent of specialization, technological changes, and the exploitative mindset is vastly superior to modern farming. This realization leaves the reader with the question; why did this happen?
For Berry, the blame for the nationwide destruction of small family-run farming lies on the government. The government’s support of endless economic growth and focus on quantity over quality has replaced farming with industry, without considering the role the farming plays in our culture. The loss of farming has affected our culture in the ways mentioned above, loss of connection to the land, disintegration of small communities, and the fractionation modern American lives. Berry calls this shift “a work of monstrous ignorance and irresponsibility on the part of the experts and politicians” that has “involved the forcible displacement of millions of people” (Berry, Unsettling 41). Berry’s perspective on farming is certainly unique, it is easy to think of increased production on farms as a good thing because it means more food and ignore the role that farming plays in our culture. In its most base form, Berry’s argument doesn’t have to apply to farming specifically, he is really attacking the assumption that more is always better and that a growing economy means happier and wealthier people. Through his fiction and essays Berry shows us that we need to say “enough” and shift our focus away from the economy to our relationships with the people and land we live with.
Works Cited
Berry, Wendell. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977.
Berry, Wendell. That Distant Land. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2004.
Berry, Wendell. Jayber Crow. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2000.
Berry, Wendell. The Art of the Commonplace. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2002.
Berry, Wendell. Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993.
Berry, Wendell. Life is a Miracle. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2000.
Bush, Harold K. “Hunting for Reasons to Hope: A Conversation with Wendell Berry.” Christianity and Literature Winter 2007: May 4, 2009 http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb049/is_2_56/ai_n29336069/
Fearnside, Jeff. “Digging In.” The Sun Magazine, 2008. www.thesunmagazine.org.
Fisher-Smith, Jordan. “Field Observations: An Interview with Wendell Berry.” Orion 1993: 29 April, 2009 <http://arts.envirolink.org/interviews_and_conversations/WendellBerry.html>.
Minick, Jim. “A Citizen and a Native: An interview with Wendell Berry.” Appalachian Journal 31 (2004):300-313.