Exam Study Guide

The October 6 exam will be drawn from texts relating to the EVEN-numbered questions below. Audio REVIEW Part 1 Wendell Berry... Part 2 REVIEW on  Regeneration

1. What do you think of WB's remark to Gary Snyder? viii

2. Are you a Boomer or a Sticker? What do you think of WB's formula? x

3. Do you agree that the best way to conceive the world (or nature, or the universe) as a whole is by embracing a particular place? 5

4. Is any particular world (eg, WB's literary world) more important to you than the world? 7

5. Is human history "the progress of doom"? 9

6. When will we "arrive" in America? 13

7. Are paths better than roads? 14-17

8. COMMENT? "I have been taught what was here to be lost by the loss of it." 24

9. Do you have answers to WB's questions? 26-7

10. Do you ever share WB's feeling, when walking in the woods? 31

1. Do you know anyone who lives on land occupied by their ancestors over two centuries ago? What do you think it does to a person's consciousness, to do that? 38

2. Is there particular significance in WB's move-in day? 39

3. Do you see an important connection between healthy land and healthy people? Do most people see it? Most Americans? 40

4. Do you hope someday to undertake a "reclamation project," if not on a farm then in some other way that you think might enhance your life, your family's, and your community's? 41-2

5. How do we get society to stop "subtracting" more than it adds to the land? 43

6. Do you personally feel a need to "affirm my own life as a thing decent in possibility"? 43

7. Do most of us live "superficially," not practically or responsibly, in relation to the places we call home? Is there a way to remedy that, short of taking up farming (or even gardening)? 44-5

8.  COMMENT?: "The experience of one generation is not adequate to inform and control its actions." 46

9. How do we motivate people to not steal health and goods from the unborn? 47

10. Do you see a connection or resemblance between the description of Paul Hawken's Blessed Unrest (see below) and what WB says about the "shared cause" of the problems that generated the environmental movement, the civil rights movement, and the peace movement? 49

11. Do you agree about the difference between a mere crowd and a vital community? 51

12. Do most of us think about the weather in a way that participates in "public insanity"? 52

13. Do you agree about the power of a "good marriage"? 54 And about the importance of doing something directly about trash, driving less, turning off lights, not turning on the AC, etc.? 55

14. Have you gardened? Has it "enlarged for [you] the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating"? 56

15. Did Black Elk speak wisely? 58

==

59-80 tba

==

1. Was Mark Twain an important influence in your early life? 81 (He was in mine, growing up not too far from Hannibal MO...) Did Twain (Sam Clemens) lack "magnanimity"? 88
2. Do you think "the need to flow, to move outward," to "light out for the Territory" (83-6) and leave one's homeplace has been on balance a good thing for Americans, for the natural and social environments, and for the stability of life generally? Has it stunted our maturity, eviscerated our communities, impaired our relationships? Or do you think westward expansion and personal mobility have been and are mostly good things?
3. Is Aristotle's analysis of tragic drama a clue to what's wrong with our contemporary communal life? 87
4. Is it unusual to encounter regionalists who are not "provincial"? 89
5. Is WB right about our historical "self-righteousness" and the likelihood that our generation will be judged to have been deplorable? 90
6. Do you agree with WB's assessments of globalism and abstraction as "Territories" of escape from responsibility? 91
7. Do you agree with WB about the proper "context of literature"? 93 Can the same be said about philosophy, and every other humanistic discipline?
8. Do you share WB's interpretation of Emerson's statement about suffering? 94
9. Is going home for you a "return to happiness"? 96 If so, are you sure you're not being "sentimental"?
10. Have you ever inadvertently committed "Damage" like WB's pond? 98f. If so, did you learn an important environmental lesson?
11. Do you share WB's sense of the necessity of collecting stories, just as the earth must collect leaves etc., in order to create and sustain a living culture? 103f. How do you think are we doing, in terms of sustaining our local, national, and global cultures? Do we live in a "diminished country"? 104
12. Are our standards too much set by "television and salesmen and outside experts"? 105
13. Do you regret the absence, in most American places now, of the institution of "sittng till bedtime"? 107
14. Is it bad that "succession has given way to supersession"? 111
15. COMMENT?: "the universities are more and more the servants of government and the corporations"...

==

[118-176: tba]

==

1. With the 9/11 anniversary coming soon, what do you think it should have taught us about what WB calls the cultural landscape? Have we learned anything valuable from it?
2. WB offers strip mining as an example of disregard for the cultural landscape that leads directly to destruction of the physical landscape. What other examples come to mind? 178
3. COMMENT?: "The dominant faith of the world in our time is rationality." 179
4. WB distinguishes Rational Mind from Sympathetic Mind. 180ff. Does he mean Rationalist and Empiricist? Does he neglect to distinguish Rationalism from rationalism? Is Rationality as he characterizes it a caricature? (Or a description of Vulcans?)
5. Do the "optimists of scientific rationalism, which is scornful of limits" (183) sound more like the relatively marginal techno-utopians and trans-humanists who want to live forever?
6. Can we properly balance our "creatureliness" (184) with scientific inquisitiveness, and thus achieve a Rational AND Sympathetic Mind?
7. Do you see significant similarities between WB's worldview and Buddhism? 187
8. In light of the "implicit contradiction between tall buildings and airplances," how can we manage the contradiction, still fly, and still have tall buildings? 192
9. Is there no "good use of destructive power"? 193
10. Are rationality and spirituality compatible? 197
11. Is the idea of "nature preserves" anti-environmental? 198
12. Is WB a Luddite? Are country people generally? 201
13. "The idiocy of rural life" was not originated by The New Republic, but by Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto: "The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. " COMMENT?
14. COMMENT?: "The real names of global warming are 'waste' and 'greed'..." 207
15. COMMENT?: "The world-ending fire of industrial fundamentalism may already be burning in our furnaces and engines..."208
16. COMMENT?: "For those who reject heaven, hell is everywhere..." 211 (My comment: you coulda fooled me.)
17. What do you think of "community economy" and the "sharing of fate"? Is it socialism? 214

1. What's the difference between a whole life and a long life? Is our culture confused about that? 220
2. Have you achieved "ripeness"? Do you have any role-models who have? 223
3. What do you think of Wendell's remarks on the failures and futility of the civil rights, women's, and environmental movements? 229-30
4. Are we a nation of fantasists? 232
5. Does writing with a computer (or even just electrical lighting) make you complicit in "the rape of nature"? 234
6. Do you know anyone who does not own a TV set? 235
7. If "most electrical power comes from strip-mined coal" [still more than half, according to my research], are we in too big a hurry to electrify everything (as Paul Hawken urges)? 240
8. Should we expect women to exert a "civilizing influence" on the workplace? 248
9. Is "industrial education" now mostly a form of "baby-sitting and career preparation"? 251
10. Do "educated people" now know more about sports than history?
11. Is writing "of the body"? Is writing with computers "flirting with a radical separation of mind and body"? 257

1. Have you experienced the health and familial benefits of outdoor work? Do you think family life and work are unnecessary? 260
2. Do most people think the function of public school is to "keep children away from home as much as possible"? 261
3. Is our educational system doing a good job of instilling in children a desire to read for pleasure? How could it do better? 262
4. Should we (as John Prine said) blow up our TVs? Are you prepared to face your children's rebellion and scorn, if you do?
5. Do enough of us value "inner quiet" enough to recognize the inherent worth of all places? Do you ever just sit beside an open window and appreciate the place where you are?
6. Is individualism in America mostly "tragic"? 265
7. Do you agree that the economic ideal of competition is false, silly, and destructive? 269 Does it encourage contempt rather than compassion for "losers" (the homeless for example)?
8. Is it wrong to think of the university as primarily "an economic resource"? 272
9. What do you think of Henry Besuden's "bloom" and "delight"? 278 Are these notions likely to be recognized and valued by the managers of large-scale agribusiness?
10. Are activist movements generally "insincere"? 284 Are Nameless Movements likely to be better?
11. Is "practical wholeness" a worthy goal? 289
12. COMMENT?: "Too much money attracts administrators and experts as sugar attracts ants..." Is this illustrated by the contemporary university? 290
13. Is illiteracy both a personal and a public danger? 293

1. Do you care more for your household than your town, more for your town than your county (etc.), but not more for your country than for the world? How do you balance "doorstep and planet"? 296-7
2. What forms of civil disobedience do you support, or would you engage in? 298
3. Was Don Pratt a noble exemplar of virtuous protest? 300
4. Do too many activists expend themselves in the service of abstractions, and sacrifice themselves to politics? 302
5. Is the "American disease" uniquely American? 304
6. Is it obligatory for those who reject the violence (etc.) of our society to "take up some permanent dwelling place"... ? 306
7. Do you "experience hours when [you are] deeply happy and content"? 309 When, where, why, how...?
8. Do you agree that environmental destruction is not inevitable, except by "our submissiveness"? 311
9. Have you also noticed that the centers of large older towns are aesthetically superior to their "corporate outskirts"?  313 Do you agree with WB's analysis of why that is?
10. Can all of us "regardless of party... rise above the greed and contempt of our land's exploiters"? 316
11. Is Richard Dawkins superstitious about brains and the future" 318
12. After reducing minds to just two in the essay Two Minds, WB expands the kinds of knowledge in The Way of Ignorance to include many more. Do you agree? Is he being consistent?
13. Can we afford not to "work or think on a heroic scale" when confronting climate change etc.? 334
14. Is it fundamental to living well and loving life that we occasionally get "utterly outside the lives we live as usual"? 347

==

1. Have you visited www.regeneration.org? Impressions?
2. COMMENT on Jane Goodall's foreword? Do you agree that the climate crisis is interconnected with and insoluble apart from issues of poverty, health care, social justice etc.? Do you share her three reasons for hope? 6-7
3. Do you see the proposal to put "the future of life at the heart of everything we do" as consistent with the urgency of addressing "current human needs, not future existential threats" and an "imagined dystopian future"? 9-10
4. Are you confident that we'll be "going in the right direction at the right speed by 2030"? 10 If not, will you nonetheless engage the crisis and assert your agency?
5. COMMENT?: "there is no difference between a climate denier and someone who understands the problem but does nothing." 11
6. Do pessimists and defeatists lack imagination? 12
7. Have you attempted to exert influence "upstream"? Will you? 13 
8. Does anything in the Readers Reference Guide surprise you? 14-15
9. Will we "cease using the ocean as a dump" anytime soon? 17
10. Will we stop using the ocean as a "lawless commons" anytime soon? 19
11. Are too many academics (like Enric Sala, formerly) effectively writing obituaries for life on earth rather than working for solutions? 20
12. Should we be seeding more kelp forests and consuming more seaweed? 23-4
13. Did you realize how rapidly the mangrove forests had declined in just the past forty years? 27
14. Do you think developers realize or care how badly they're compromising the tidal salt marshes and seagrasses? 29-31
15. Why are we not better at learning from and retaining the insights of indigenous peoples and ancient scholars like Jia Si Xue? 32

1. COMMENT?: "...especially in the Deep South..." 37
2. COMMENT? "'Using' land is what people have been doing for centuries... people are connected to place..." 41
   
3. Do you think the public understands the importance of protecting tropical forest ecosystems? 42-3
4. Have you planted any trees lately, or supported tree-planting campaigns? Do you intend to? 44
5. Do you use/consume palm oil, deliberately or not? Will you try harder not to, after reading about Peatlands? 48
6. Though "agroforestry  systems are making a comeback" (53) we still see reports of bad choices regarding forestlands (like cutting down trees for solar farms). Are these random flukes, or might there be a more sinister explanation? 
7. Does the discussion of indigenous fire management/wisdom reinforce Wendell's message about the power and necessity of localism and long-term commitment to communities? 54-5
8. Are you going to look for ways to get more bamboo into your life (as flooring, furniture etc.)? 57
9. Have you read The Overstory? (If not, I highly recommend it.) What are your thoughts on "the profound ties between trees and people"? What would it mean to really see the world "from the standpoint of trees"? 60-1

1. COMMENT? "Nature is not an 'it' out there. It is us... There may not be any 'individuals' in nature..." 63
2. RE: ecosystem engineers (67)... What do you think of Stephen Tvedten's response to the "dam complaint"? 
3. Should wildlife tourism be discouraged? 71
4.  Do you recall any discussion about Trump's border wall disrupting animal habitats and migratory routes? Do you think most politicians understand or care about these issues if they don't hear about them from their constituencies? 73
5. Is Knapp Castle's rewilding experiment replicable in the U.S.? 76

1. "Land is resilient, like people." 95 Are we as resilient as land? Would we be moreso, if we lived closer to it?
2. Should industrial agriculture be allowed to get away with calling itself "regenerative"? 97
3. COMMENT?: "Foods are enriched because they are impoverished." 99
4. What do you think of Polyface Farm? 10
5. COMMENT?: "It is not the land that is broken, but our relationship to it." 103
6. Do you compost? What's been your experience with that? 104-5
7. Do you feel like a supra-organism? 105
8. What does it say about our bio-illiteracy that we have a stock expression denigrating "lowly worms"?
9. How does shifting from seeing scarcity to seeing abundance depend on imagination? 109
10. A Berry not Wendell says we've become an extractive species because we see ourselves as "transcendent"... 114 Do you see yourself that way? How do we get our feet back on the ground?