The World-Ending Fire

Introduction (Paul Kingsworth)

Soil is the recurring image in these essays. Again and again, Berry worries away at the question of topsoil. This is both a writer’s metaphor and a farmer’s reality, and for Wendell Berry, metaphors always come second to reality.

Wendell Berry’s formula for a good life and a good community is simple and pleasingly unoriginal. Slow down. Pay attention. Do good work. Love your neighbours. Love your place. Stay in your place. Settle for less, enjoy it more.

”A Native Hill” (1968)

We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what was good even for us.

“Think Little” (1970)

• On the intersectionality of civil rights, environmental, and peace movements:

  The mentality that exploits and destroys the natural environment is the same that abuses racial and economic minorities, that imposes on young men the tyranny of the military draft, that makes war against peasants and women and children with the indifference of technology. The mentality that destroys a watershed and then panics at the threat of flood is the same mentality that gives institutionalized insult to black people and then panics at the prospect of race riots. It is the same mentality that can mount deliberate warfare against a civilian population and then express moral shock at the logical consequence of such warfare at My Lai. We would be fools to believe that we could solve any one of these problems without solving the others.

• We are all complicit in acts of environmental destruction: “A protest meeting on the issue of environmental abuse is not a convocation of accusers, it is a convocation of the guilty.”
• Our go-to method of solving problems is to “think big,” AKA make laws and turn to government, which doesn’t actually do much. More effective and important is to “think little,” organize at the level of communities, and begin to act while doing so! This also helps us connect to the soil, weather, land— to earth, more directly than for superficial golf decisions (for example).

“The Work of Local Culture” (1988)

These two kinds of accumulation, of local soil and local culture, are intimately related.

“The Agrarian Standard” (2002)

If nature releases her wealth too slowly, we will take it by force. If we make the world too toxic for honeybees, some compound brain, Monsanto perhaps, will invent tiny robots that will fly about, pollinating flowers and making honey.

“Two Minds” (2002)

The Rational Mind is motivated by the fear of being misled, of being wrong. Its purpose is to exclude everything that cannot empirically or experimentally be proven to be a fact. The Sympathetic Mind is motivated by fear of error of a very different kind: the error of carelessness, of being unloving. Its purpose is to be considerate of whatever is present, to leave nothing out.

• The Rational Mind “is a skeptical, fearful, suspicious mind, and always a disappointed one, awaiting the supreme truth or discovery it expects of itself, which of itself it cannot provide.”

Some Thoughts on Citizenship and Conscience in Honor of Don Pratt (1968)

Shame, like other hardships, must be borne. There is no handy expiation for the curious sense of guilt in having been born lucky, or in being well fed and warm and loved.

Vocab

• Palimpsest: a piece of writing on which other writing has been superimposed on effaced earlier writing