On Wendell’s Passing…
Wendell Berry, the great rural American philosopher-doer, passed away on August 31, 2026. We lost an amazing human who deeply influenced my thinking about my life and role in the world, and who helped me to better understand the relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world. Unsettling of America was the first thing I read that spoke to what I saw and experienced in rural America: the continuous loss of family farms and the decline of rural life and communities due to a colonization of the economy, lifestyles, and thinking. We have been lead to believe that the growth economy, consumerism, and industrialization in all aspects of our lives would be good, while at the same time we were observing the opposite (that is, we were suffering from what we were dependent on). Because the economic system driving these changes was too big and ambiguous to understand and influence, we chose to blame or put hope in politicians of particular parties; which one we blamed or placed hope in swinging like a pendulum between the 2 parties. We failed to recognize the parties and politicians were complicit in the economic and belief systems that were resulting in our cultural and ecological destruction. Mr. Berry offered agrarianism as a counter to these destructive economic and political forces.
Agrarianism is about culture built around agriculture, provisioning, and rural life. It comes with the sensibilities of conservation (“enough over too much”), frugality, working with nature, independence imbedded in community, neighborliness, and valuing physical labor. All of the ideas included here are embedded in and result from agrarianism. Tapped Maple Syrup grew out of core idea of agrarianism: that working lands are the basis of a healthy and sustainable relationship between humans and nature. Given the tendencies of industrial agriculture to colonize rural communities, the best way for rural communities to sustain their lands is to use them to provision for local and regional economies. Wendell states that “if a place … does not keep and care for and use enough of its natural and human goods for its own maintenance and its people’s thriving, the result is destruction, permanent damage” through corporate extraction. Tapped is an effort to provision from our forests to stave off the destruction of these lands.
In honor of his life and work, what follows is a summary of and reaction to Wendell Berry’s book The Art of Loading Brush: New Agrarian Essays in which he reaffirms, updates, and clarifies his ideals and ideas of agrianism. He also reestablishes his position as the most important thinker and doer in and about rural life. I indicated the pages where the ideas show up in the book. I’m not going to do the book justice, so you really should read it. Mostly I wrote this for my own use as a way to process his ideas and connect them to other things I’m thinking about and work on. Throughout this article, I often refer to Mr. Berry simply as Wendell. I think that’s because I think of him as a friend and companion, although we’ve never met in person. I hope he’s not offended by that, as I mean it as an indication of my endearment and appreciation for him as he’s shaped so much of my thinking and understanding about rural America.
To me, Wendell Berry is the great rural American philosopher-doer. Unsettling of America was the first thing I read that spoke to what I saw and experienced in rural America: the continuous decline of rural life and communities due to a colonization of the economy, lifestyles, and thinking. We have been lead to believe that the growth economy, consumerism, and industrialization in all aspects of our lives would be good, while at the same time we were observing the opposite (we were suffering from what we were dependent on). Because the economic system driving these changes was too big and ambiguous to understand and influence, we chose to blame or put hope in politicians of particular parties, which one we blamed and placed hope in swinging like a pendulum between the 2 parties. We failed to recognize the parties and politicians were all complicit in system that was resulting in our cultural and ecological destruction. Mr. Berry offers agrarianism as a counter to these destructive economic and political forces.
Agrarianism is, at its core, a culture built around agriculture, provisioning, and rural life. It comes with the sensibilities of conservation (“enough over too much,” p 9), frugality, working with nature, independence imbedded in community, neighborliness, and valuing physical labor. All of the ideas included here are embedded in and result from agrarianism.
Sense of Place
Being connected to place is a theme in agrarianism. I agree with Mr. Berry and Gary Snyder that certain kinds of understanding can only come from staying put and being observant (p 209). That understanding accrues through generations, and is the basis for sustainable relationship with the land (using this term here as Aldo Leopold would to mean the whole community of life in an area).
In many ways, I consider myself a “placed” person. Although I don’t live on the land I feel most connected to, I still have a connection there. I’ve done considerable academic and professional work around understanding what place and sense of place are/mean. An idea that Wendell presented, however, really struck me. He indicated that really being “placed” means being “owned” by a place (p 6) and being chosen by the place (p 180). This flips around the relationship we often think of in which we are of a place, but that place is ours. Being owned by place is a deeper relationship. Being owned by place means it has more influence in and sets limits upon your life. In this case, those limits are beneficial, establishing the boundaries in which you can function and providing guideposts by which to measure your work (p 55). Creativity is inspired by limits, and place provides a good measure by which to determine if creativity is put to good use. Good work, effectiveness, and success are determined by the health of the place (and by place, we mean both the human and natural community). What do we have now as guideposts? Wealth, a personal sense of accomplishment, career advancement? These are poor indicators for quality of life, and are, in many, contributing to declines in our human and natural communities through the pursuit of personal enrichment and accumulation of material wealth.
I was recently asked how my work as a kid contributed to my connection to place. I worked hard as a kid; working with my dad and uncle in their logging operation from a pretty young age. It was my first career and I “retired” after about 15 years. The person wondered if it drove me away from that place. I can readily say that all my days working in the woods weren’t fun. In truth, there were a lot of angry, frustrating days filled with sweat, mosquitoes, and physical labor. However, those experiences only deepened my relationship with the land. Just like with a relationship with someone based on only platitudes and niceties, a purely aesthetic relationship with the land is shallow. Deep relationship comes through struggle, disagreement, reconciliation, and respect. Mr. Berry also talks about the importance of working in place. Good work goes beyond production to maintenance (p 38), caring for the land and deepening the relationship. In the research I’ve done on sense of place, the idea and action of reciprocity is an important theme that emerged. Reciprocity is a two-way relationship in which people recognize what is provided to them and therefore desire to give back to and take care of their communities and the land. It’s this relationship which is able to sustain the land and local economies in the face of colonialism (p. 80, 83; more on this below).
Colonization
Economics is the driving mechanism of rural colonialism. We must address our economic system if we are to sustain our lands and rural communities. Currently our communities are being exploited for the benefit of the global wealthy, the extracted “resources” (as this is the only thing the global economy values them for; including energy, food, minerals, fiber, water, wood, ideas, young people) are exported to urban areas. Industrial agriculture is the result of the application of growth capitalism principles to agriculture. These principles are, essentially, growth, efficiency, and production. In industrial agriculture, we see the growth in the size of farmers, the concentration of farm ownership, the loss of small farms, the scaling of fields to fit larger and larger equipment (tractors, irrigation, harvesters), the maximization of productive acres (e.g., the loss of fence rows, minimization of stream borders, draining of wetlands), and the purchase of pretty much all farm needs. These practices, and the absence of cooperation to limit production, result in the oversupply of low price commodities, further pressuring farmers to increase in size, efficiency, and production (p. 40). The production of surplus leads to a shift in control or power from farmers to corporate interests. Power comes from control of surplus (p. 94). Industrial farmers are no longer free, independent members of communities, they are controlled by their consumerist needs (purchasing all of their farm inputs) and commodity corporations (p. 77); and they no longer provide sustenance for their families and communities (p. 9). As Thomas Jefferson said, this dependence begets subservience (p. 222). That’s true for all of us, not just farmers, who are dependent on the consumer economy for all of our needs. For all these reasons, industrial agriculture is failing and depleting rural communities. So is industrial logging, industrial education, industrial economics, etc.
The math on all of this is pretty simple, as a couple examples provide. If you have 30 farms with 100 dairy cows each (or 30 small logging businesses, 30 commercial fisherman, etc.), you have 30 families who are business and landowners, paying property taxes to support local roads, schools, etc., caring about the future of the land and the community. If, in place of those 30 farms, you have 1 farm of 3000 dairy cows, you have 1 business owner, and likely around 20 employees. Those 20 employees may or may not live in the community, may not even have full rights of a citizen, but regardless there is a qualitative difference between being an owner and an employee in your commitment to a place (again, refer to Jefferson), let alone the likelihood of being able to make a living. Only the owner in this situation is likely able to make a livable wage, have the time and commitment to be engaged in the community, and have some influence over the quality of schools, infrastructure, etc. The reduction of 30 family farms to 1 corporate farm explains the democratic decline of rural communities. Here’s another one to describe the economic decline, as Mr. Berry presents it (p 82): compare the price of beef a farmer sells it for compared to what she buys it for in the store. Given that all of the processing and distribution happens outside of the community by fewer and larger companies, that provides the financial extraction from a rural community to a corporate business.
Everything is commodified in an industrial economy. Land is simply real estate, not home or a place to care for (or be owned by) (p. 29). This brings to mind Derek Jensen’s questions posed a few years ago: what would you do if your family were planning to live here for 500 years? How would you behave? How would you treat the soil? The water? Your community? How can you make a living that provides “enough” and improves conditions for your children and beyond (p. 9)? In industrial agriculture or capitalism, these are irrelevant questions. For agrarians, these are the essential questions.
People are also commodified in an industrial economy. When we think of job skills that people need to fill the needs of employers, we’re thinking of people as commodities, being shaped to fit corporate needs. Wendell encourages us, instead, to think of people’s vocations and the work that they are called to do. Instead of job skills, we should think about skills and knowledge are need locally to serve the communities needs. We need to think of work not being just about production but also the maintenance of the systems within which we’re working, and work should be defined partly by the needs of the economy, and also by the ecology and culture of the place in which the work is done (p 38). This provides individuals with a greater opportunity to live meaningful lives, and it creates the potential for each community to provision itself while sharing the excess goods and service to urban areas. This is how a regional economy that benefits both urban and rural communities is developed (see below).
Rural Politics
Politically, the challenge we have is that neither liberals nor progressives are addressing any of this. As Wendell states, “We all are living from, and living always less well from, a colonial or predatory economy, run by plutocrats, to whom we and our land are ‘resources’ to be used or used up at their pleasure” (p 83). The decline of rural America has resulted from policies that focus on efficiency and profitability in production to address the issue of “too many farmers” which has been supported by both parties (p 83). “For liberals and Democrats it is a policy of neglect, of not-thinking, of faith in technology. For the conservative Republican corporate Christian capitalists, it is a policy of laissez-faire, which is to say ‘freedom’ to take as much as possible from Rural America” (p 83).
Politicians are complicit in the economic system, and, as much as anything, politics is about removing/ignoring limits and exploiting resources. Wendell highlights how both parties deal with eliminating limits, liberals support unrestrained personal freedom conservatives unrestrained economic activity; these are more allied than often recognized and play off each other (p 54, 83-84). Admittedly, it’s difficult, nearly impossible, to get elected through a campaign about limits. The politician who promises to overcome limits is more attractive, even when those promises are unrealistic (as we are currently witnessing).
Sustainability and Working Lands
We often think of sustainability as leaving nature to itself, or intervening as little as possible. It’s true we are completely dependent on nature’s ecosystem services to provide for all of our physical needs. However, the richest, most diverse, most productive ecosystems on earth have long been inhabited by people. And, in reality, these human and natural communities co-evolved with humans playing a management role in these systems. The best way to understand these co-evolved systems is through the idea of biocultural diversity, that is, the biological and cultural life developed together sustained each other. A map of biological diversity correlates strongly with human language/societies (see http://terralingua.org/).
Wendell argues that sustainability is really best understood through working lands, where humans and nature are in relationship. Working with the land is the best way to sustain the land. He recognizes that farming is the primary relationship between our human economy and the natural world (p 53), and therefore the health of our farmland tells us a lot about the sustainability of our economy. Given the tendencies of industrial agriculture to colonize rural communities, the best way for rural communities to sustain their lands is to use them to provision for local and regional economies. Wendell states that “if a place … does not keep and care for and use enough of its natural and human goods for its own maintenance and its people’s thriving, the result is destruction, permanent damage” through corporate extraction (p 83).
Economics
Wendell states that the only defense against the colonial, industrial economy is a self-reliant, self-determining local economy (p 84). I would expand that a bit to bring in Jane Jacob’s work on regional economies. I believe a regional economy is the right scale to think about these things, primarily because urban areas have needs that can’t be met within the city and there is a density of wealth, creativity, and market that rural areas don’t have. Jacob’s states that if there is a strong mutually beneficial relationship between urban and rural areas, both can prosper. The key is for the cities to look to localize their supply of goods and services, and to support innovation in rural areas to meet those needs. There is the potential for rural areas to provision for themselves, that is, to respectfully and responsibly “attend to [their] need for food, clothing and shelter” first and then share surplus with regional cities (p 35). The effectiveness/success of this economy needs to be gauged by the “health of local land and local people” in the rural and urban areas (p 80).
Conclusion and What to Do?
Wendell raises one of the most essential questions to ask ourselves: “How can I make myself … capable of seeing what is the right thing to do, and of doing it” in my place? (p 147). That’s the challenge I’m (re)setting myself to. A big part of the answer about what to do has to do with paying attention to what our places need. To become owned by a place, to be driven by its limits, and determining the work we do partly by the economy and also by the ecology and culture is what we need to do. For me, I know I need to maintain my reciprocal relationship with our maple forest, continue to care for our little prairie, continue to build the soil of our yard and garden, and figure out how I work to support family farms, forests, and other working lands across our state.
As part of this response about what to do, it’s also important to recognize that we are all “suffering from what [we] are dependent on” (p 82). That is, we, as Americans (and particularly I, as a white, middle class, educated American) benefit from the exploitive economy while at the same time suffering from the effects of that economy through such afflictions as placelessness, isolation, dependence, overconsumption, and environmental degradation. Many of us are hypocrites, living lives dependent on exploitation, while criticizing the system. It’s alright, we don’t have much of a choice at this point. But, we need to recognize it and try to overcome that dependence.
Is agrarianism enough for sustainability? Will it eliminate environmental destruction and social inequity? Some of that depends on population. In a world of 7 billion or 10 billion, no. But, it will get us closer, and I believe it is as far as we, as a society, can willingly go. It promises a modest material existence and quality of life in which we can live happy, fulfilling lives (p 221). Truly sustainable human society may not exist beyond the lifestyle of hunter-gatherers or subsistence agriculture, but very few of us are willing to go that far by choice.
So, what do we can we do about it? There are no simple, concrete answers. What follows are a few of my incomplete and imperfect ideas:
Provision as much for ourselves as we can. Continuously develop new land-based and culturally-focused skills.
Minimize consumption as much as possible. Remember, dependence begets subservience.
Become owned by our place. Dig in, and figure out what to do. Accept its limits and do good work that is productive and sustains the place.
Buy as much as possible locally, that is at locally owned stores selling local goods. Not only does the money stay locally, but it helps to provide the provisioning capacity of our community.
Decentralize, convert to renewables, and municipalize our energy sources.
Work to build economic relationships between urban and rural areas. Do I know someone who can grow, make, create something that is needed in an urban area? How can I encourage them and connect them?
Figure out how we can make land accessible to beginning farmers, loggers, land artists, and other land based provisioners.
Help to create a culture of creativity, inclusivity, and empowerment in our communities. Lots of people have good ideas who never pursue them.
More things … (add to the list)
Please add to the list. Better yet, create your own based on what you’re learning from the place that owns you.