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Wendell Berry: Quotations from “Good
Reads”
Wendell Berry: America's Greatest Living Prophet
Wendell Berry On Love
Wendell Berry: American Prophet
Wendell Berry: The Failure Of War
Mr. Wendell Berry Of Kentucky ///
Berry’s “Witty” Story
Wendell Berry Interview: “Field
Observations” /// Wendell Berry and Religion
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Alan: With slight modification, here is the distillation of the first 12 minutes of Wendell Berry's interview: 'The great mistake we make is when we assume that the land can be abused to improve the people, or the people can be abused to improve the land. I learned a long while ago through my involvement with strip mining politics that land and people are one thing, that they share one fate. The assumption is that the need is great, that we need above all to keep the motors of running in interest of speed, comfort and convenience; that we will then sacrifice the land and the people in order to achieve that. To do permanent damage to the ecosphere is wrong. And so, when these extraction enterprises destroy permanently parts of the world, there's no excuse for it. I'm not taking anyone seriously who's not talking about rationing. If we had a limitless supply of clean energy we would wear the world out driving on it, and in other ways. The behavior of the coal industry demonstrates to me that corporations can not be depended on to observe any limits - either in their relationship to the land or to the people. We must be able to replace damage in human time. The community is divided between sufferers from the effects of this violent mining and the people who are employed by it. The region itself -- the place where great profitability has been achieved through extractive industry -- has not, on balance, benefited at all.'
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
Wendell Berry received the National Humanities Medal in 2010 for his achievement as a poet, novelist, farmer and conservationist. He summarized his philosophy in this year’s Jefferson Lecture, titled “It All Turns On Affection.” For more than 50 years, Berry has been writing about life in a fictional small town called Port William. Its families are closely bound by marriage, kinship, friendship, history and memory. They help each other with the hard work of farming and take pleasure in the telling of shared stories. In a new collection, characters age and pass on, but their tales of love, joy and sorrow live on.
Guests
Wendell Berry
author of 50 books of poetry, fiction and essays.
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Read An Excerpt
Excerpt from "A Place in Time: Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership" by Wendell Berry. Copyright 2012 by Wendell Berry. Reprinted here by permission of Counterpoint Press. All rights reserved.
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