I think of Wendell Berry every time I use my chainsaw.
The American novelist, essayist and unofficial poet laureate of the sustainable agriculture movement died this week at the age of 92. I met him several times through my association with The Land Institute and visited their Kentucky home to write a profile of his wife, Tanya. But my main connection to Wendell Berry is through his writing.
Back to my chainsaw. I lived in cities most of my life, including when I was a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. No matter what subject I was teaching, I always found ways to bring Berry’s words into my lectures, both to give students examples of elegant writing and to prod them to think about what we take for granted in our high-energy, high-technology societies.
John Berry, Sr (left) with his sons John Berry, Jr and Wendell Berry at their home near New Castle, Kentucky, on 22 March 1978. (Pam Spaulding-USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images)
Berry called out the cruelty of the masters of the modern world, especially the ways they denigrated his neighbours and devalued the land in rural America. But he understood that we all are implicated in the degradation of the ecosystems on which our own lives depend. He connected the real costs of our many labour-saving and pleasure-seeking devices to that degradation. Yes, there are corrupt individuals and corrupting social systems to hold accountable, but part of the problem is our species’ acquisitiveness — what Berry’s mentor Wallace Stegner called “the things that once possessed could not be done without”.
In a famous essay from 1989, Berry didn’t exempt himself from this critique of the destructive habits that draw down the ecological capital of the planet:
I am … still in bondage to the automobile industry and the energy companies, which have nothing to recommend them except our dependence on them. I still fly on airplanes, which have nothing to recommend them but speed; they are inconvenient, uncomfortable, undependable, ugly, stinky, and scary. I still cut my wood with a chainsaw, which has nothing to recommend it but speed, and has all the faults of an airplane, except it does not fly.
We need to live with less, which is surprisingly hard:
We are going to have to learn to give up things that we have learned (in only a few years, after all) to ‘need’. I am not an optimist; I am afraid that I won’t live long enough to escape my bondage to the machines. Nevertheless, on every day left to me I will search my mind and circumstances for the means of escape. And I am not without hope. I knew a man who, in the age of chainsaws, went right on cutting his wood with a handsaw and an axe. He was a healthier and a saner man than I am. I shall let his memory trouble my thoughts.
I live in a rural area today and cut firewood with a battery-powered chainsaw to help heat our home. I don’t kid myself that I’m environmentally friendly because my machine doesn’t run on gasoline; the mining and manufacturing that created that chainsaw are ecologically expensive. I am part of the problem, like almost everyone else.
I’ve learned that even with a chainsaw, cutting a winter’s worth of wood is hard work. (Full disclosure: I also have an electric log-splitter that a friend gave me and now feels essential.) But as I cut and split and stack, I think about the extra effort required by the handsaw and axe of Berry’s acquaintance.
Wendell Berry speaking at the Cathedral of the Assumption on 20 March 2015 in Louisville, Kentucky, during the visit of the Prince of Wales and Duchess to the United States. (Photo by Stephen Cohen / Getty Images)
I also think about something else I regularly read to my students. It is his poem “How to Be a Poet”, which I tell students could be titled “How to Be a Human Being”. Berry wrote about how modern life is not only ecologically destructive but also traps us in a manufactured world, cut off from other living things. He suggested we slow down and learn to be quiet, to observe: “Stay away from anything / that obscures the place it is in.”
Every time I read the next lines from that poem, I feel myself on the edge of tears:
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.
We have desecrated most of the world to make possible all the things we imagine that we need, including my chainsaw and log-splitter. We’ve built a world in which our material comfort obscures the cost of that comfort. I agree with Berry: either every part of Earth is sacred or none of it is; and the modern world treats the entire planet as either a mine or a dump.
Yes, we can point to the actions of greedy corporate executives and self-serving politicians, and to capitalism’s perverse practices that glorify consumption. Yes, the affluent do the most damage. But most of the people around the world now embrace and chase that affluence, and we shouldn’t turn away from our own role in Earth-destruction.
President Barack Obama presents a 2010 National Humanities Medal to poet and farmer Wendell Berry, during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC. (Photo by Brooks Kraft LLC / Corbis via Getty Images)
We won’t solve the problem by pointing fingers at others. In fact, any hope for a decent future requires us to understand we don’t face discrete problems to be solved, but rather a predicament to be confronted. We’ve created ways of living that can’t be sustained unless we embrace what Wes Jackson (co-founder of The Land Institute and a longtime friend of Berry) and I call the policy of “fewer and less”: fewer people consuming less energy and stuff.
No one knows how to get there, including Wendell Berry. But his words help me face reality and live in some kind of equanimity. One of my fondest memories from 26 years of college teaching is standing in front of students, encouraging them to appreciate the elegance of Berry’s writing and face the fear it can bring up. I will let that memory trouble my thoughts and comfort me.