Posts Tagged ‘Wendell Berry’

Emperors Need Mentors, Too: A Review of My Empire of Dirt

July 1st, 2010  By Jerusha Klemperer

Manny Howard’s new book, My Empire of Dirt, is haunted by the living ghost of Wendell Berry.  First there’s the epigraph by Berry in which he instructs us on how to “use land well,” and it includes knowing and loving the land, and using the right tools. (To paraphrase a master, poorly.)

Then, early on in Howard’s recounting of a season spent trying to turn his south Brooklyn backyard into a homestead, the voice of Wendell Berry comes to him, offering further wisdom. Only problem is, Howard confesses in the epilogue that “On the Farm, Wendell Berry girded me.  Not that I had ever read a word he’d written until I was back at my desk, trying to make sense of the year.” Huh? Read More

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Review Of Wendell Berry’s New Collection Of Essays, What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth

June 10th, 2010  By Kurt Michael Friese

In much the same way that Michael Pollan has told us in recent years not to trust our nutrition to the nutritionists, essayist, sage, and father of modern agrarian thought, Wendell Berry, instructs us that we should never have trusted our economy to economists. At least not to the ones who have been (mis)handling it for the last hundred years or so. Read More

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Listening to Wendell Berry

February 20th, 2009  By Mark Andrew Gravel

Microsoft Word - wendellberry_bw.doc

On a cold, sunny Kentucky day at a solar-powered livestock gathering, otherwise known as the American Grassfed Association’s annual conference, I began to feel something like nostalgia. I say “something like” because it was an ironic reminiscence for a past agriculture I’ve never known yet at the same time feel connected to. Maybe this experience was not nostalgia, but instead an apparition of a sensibility returning to sow the seeds of posterity’s stake. Read More

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The Civilizations that Destroyed Their Soil are No Longer: Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson Weigh In

January 6th, 2009  By Paula Crossfield

spoiled-soil

Yesterday, two of the sustainable food movements great leaders, Wes Jackson, plant geneticist and president of the Land Institute, and farmer/writer Wendell Berry opined on their growing concern for the havoc we are wreaking on our soil. Read More

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