Environmental Ethics: Wendell Berry

Monday, November 2, 2020

Wendell Berry

LISTEN. We had a nice weekend up on Monteagle Mountain, amid the turning and rustling leaves. It would have been nice to suspend time there a little longer, to postpone whatever's about to happen tomorrow (and tomorrow and tomorrow) and get a little more perspective on these strange days. Stop the merry-go-round etc. But time marches on, the sun is up again, there are votes still to cast and count and lessons to learn.

I spent some time on the mountain with Wendell Berry, whose steadiness and sanity are tonic. Why don't people like him run for president? Could have something to do with their steadiness and sanity.

The rare interview he did with Bill Moyers a few years ago, featuring film footage of Berry and friends occupying the Kentucky governor's office to protest mountaintop removal and other environmental atrocities, is a delight and an inspiration. "We don't have a right to ask whether we're going to succeed or not. The only thing we have a right to ask is, what's the right thing to do?"

In his 2016 talk at Johns Hopkins Berry said "the concept of limitlessness is a fantasy, and so is the notion that we can have limitless economic growth. The concepts of enough and plenty have been replaced with 'all you can get' and 'all you can make.'"

His advice to settle in somewhere and really understand what it means to have and love a home-place, to set a worthy example and contribute to the expansion of the meaning of home for those who follow us , is golden.

From the latest collection of Berry's essays, The World-Ending Fire:

“Our understandable wish to preserve the planet must somehow be reduced to the scale of our competence-that is to wish to preserve all of its humble households and neighborhoods.”“Our human and earthly limits, properly understood, are not confinements but rather inducements to formal elaboration and elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning.” GBks

The Library of America has also issued two compendious editions of his nonfiction.

And of course there are all those novels and poems and short stories.

There's also a bio called Wendell Berry and the Given Life, with a foreword from Bill McKibben. Berry is religious in a way I am not, but I think his form of spirituality is not restrictive. Pantheists, humanists, and naturalists (among others) can all agree that we're "creatures" whether we affirm a creator or not.

We have room for another text or two in Environmental Ethics, before the Fall semester concludes. If the class is up for it, we could all use a little more steadiness and sanity. Send more Wendell Berry. (Chuck too.)

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TEXTS Fall '24

First things first--a proper education

“The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It's proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or "accessing" what we now call "information" - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.” ― Wendell Berry

The college project

“The American college may be considered a continuation, at the human level, of the self-education process of the earth itself: universe education, earth education, and human education are stages of development in a single unbroken process...The entire college project can be seen as that of enabling the student to understand the immense story of the universe and the role of the student in creating the next phase of the story.” --Thomas Berry, “The American College in the Ecological Age,” in The Dream of the Earth

“Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.”
― Vandana Shiva, Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis

“Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“How can we be so arrogant? The planet is, was, and always will be stronger than us. We can't destroy it; if we overstep the mark, the planet will simply erase us from its surface and carry on existing. Why don't they start talking about not letting the planet destroy us?”
― Paulo Coelho, The Winner Stands Alone

“When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: if you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren't pessimistic, you don't understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren't optimistic, you haven't got a pulse.”
― Martin Keogh, Hope Beneath Our Feet: Restoring Our Place in the Natural World

“When the last tree is cut and the last fish killed, the last river poisoned, then you will see that you can't eat money.”
― John May, The Greenpeace Story

“We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly.”
― T.S. Eliot

“There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it's not really there.”
― Bill McKibben, The End of Nature

“We know, at least, that this decision (ending factory farming) will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve publish health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in history.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“An attitude to life which seeks fulfilment in the
single-minded pursuit of wealth - in short, materialism - does not fit into this
world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the
environment in which it is placed is strictly limited.”
― Ernst F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”
― Aldo Leopold

“Saving the world requires saving democracy. That requires well-informed citizens. Conservation, environment, poverty, community, education, family, health, economy- these combine to make one quest: liberty and justice for all. Whether one's special emphasis is global warming or child welfare, the cause is the same cause. And justice comes from the same place being human comes from: compassion.”
― Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World

“The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. The ecological balance cannot be re-established unless we recognize again that only persons have ends and only persons can work towards them.”
― Ivan Illich

Environmental Ethics

Monday, November 2, 2020

Wendell Berry

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Peripatetics

	Michael Pollan (@michaelpollan) http://michaelpollan.com/
5/14/15, 10:57 AM All the lectures and talks from Edible Education 101 are now online. All told, a great introduction to food politics bit.ly/1Fausvx