Move Over, Robert Penn Warren and Harry Caudill: Wendell Berry Is Here

You can't be a liberal in Kentucky unless you read poet/author/philosopher/activist/farmer Wendell Berry. Because there is little in your bag of issues that Wendell Berry has not already subjected to his populist wisdom.

He's a lodestone but also a challenger. His speeches on how to wrest Kentucky's land away from the Big Coal, Big Gas and other corporate forces stealing and destroying it are radical enough to take your breath away.

He shouldn't be as unique as he is.

Tom Eblen at the Herald:

As the first living author inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame, Wendell Berry lamented that many fine books the state’s authors have written about Kentucky issues have had little impact on public discussion or policy.

In most ways, Kentucky is too fragmented a state, Berry said in remarks at a ceremony (last week) at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, where he and five writers from the past were inducted into the Hall of Fame.

“This fragmentation is made possible, and continually made worse, by a cloud of silence that hovers over us,” Berry said. “We have in this state no instituted public dialogue, no form in which a public dialogue can take place.

“This public silence ought to be a worry, especially to writers,” he said. “What is the effect or fate, Kentucky writers may ask, of Kentucky books devoted to urgent public issues — Night Comes to the Cumberlands or Lost Mountain or Missing Mountains or The Embattled Wilderness?”

Lt. Gov. Crit Luallen, who spoke earlier at the ceremony, said afterward that Berry underestimates the impact of those books and others like them. They may not have led to solutions for Kentucky’s many problems, she said, but things would be worse without them.

“People who own the world outright for profit will have to be stopped; by influence, by power, by us.”

If you've never been fortunate enough to hear Wendell Berry - Kentucky's Conscience - speak, here is your chance.

From PBS:

This week on Moyers & Company in a rare television interview, Bill talks to visionary, author and farmer Wendell Berry to discuss a sensible, but no-compromise plan to save the Earth.   

SNIP

Wendell Berry, one of America’s most influential writers who has written more than 40 novels, books of poetry, short stories and essays, has become an outspoken advocate for revolution. He’s calling for immediate action to end industrial farming and return to the sustainable farming methods of years past. In his interview with Bill, Berry says: “People who own the world outright for profit will have to be stopped; by influence, by power, by us.”

Watch the video here.

A Few Questions from Wendell Berry

As promised, Wendell Berry's poem "Questionnaire" and pictures from last night's environmental justice rally in Louisville.

Sign interpreter and Wendell Berry

“Questionnaire”
(a poem by Wendell Berry)

1. How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.

2. For the sake of goodness, how much
evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks
with the names of your favorite
evils and acts of hatred.

3. What sacrifices are you prepared
to make for culture and civilization?
Please list the monuments, shrines,
and works of art you would
most willingly destroy.

Marching to the Rally

4. In the name of patriotism and
the flag, how much of our beloved
land are you willing to desecrate?
List in the following spaces
the mountains, rivers, towns, farms
you could most readily do without.

5. State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security,
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.

Wendell Berry and Tim deChristopher

In Which I Reluctantly Accept Religious Allies

In her book Why Are You Atheists So Angry: 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless, Greta Christina makes an excellent case for why even the most liberal religious types are responsible for freakazoid abominations.

I kept thinking about that case at yesterday's rally for clean energy in Louisville, at which the case against fossil fuels kept getting subsumed by frantic pleas to invisible sky gods to ... shit, I don't know - turn fly ash into fairy dust?

Peter Smith at the Courier:

About 2,000 people gathered on the Belvedere on Thursday in what organizers touted as Kentucky’s largest environmental rally ever — an assortment of religious and environmental groups calling for clean energy to ease what they warned would be the apocalyptic consequences from climate change.

Participants held up banners calling for the use of wind, geothermal and other alternatives to fossil fuels, citing their link to global warming, mountaintop removal and other ecological consequences.

“We can choose another way,” said the Rev. Peter Morales, president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, which co-sponsored the rally during its national General Assembly in Louisville this week.

“We can change our personal habits, we can change our culture, we can change our political system, we can change our economy,” he said. “We need not live in a way that degrades the planet and that puts people at odds with one another.”


Another co-sponsor was Kentucky Interfaith Power and Light, which works to mobilize a religious response to global warming.

Kentucky farmer, activist and author Wendell Berry read a searing poem that made the same point without resort to superstition.  If I can find the full text, I will post it tonight with my own pictures from the rally. Meanwhile:

Stop Praying. Start Acting.

If It Doesn't Offend Anybody, It's Not Free Speech

Because if all you're going to do is praise motherhood and apple pie, you don't need the First Amendment.

So good on the conservative Sixth Circuit for slapping down the Kentucky Bar Association.

From Andrew Wolfson at the Courier:

In a nationally watched case on lawyers’ free-speech rights, a federal appeals court has ruled that the Kentucky Bar Association violated the First Amendment when it threatened to sanction an attorney for criticizing the state Legislative Ethics Commission.

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held Friday that the bar association chilled the free-speech rights of Henry County lawyer John M. Berry Jr. when it warned him he could be punished for challenging the integrity of a ruling dismissing an ethics complaint against Senate President David Williams.


The appeals court said a rule barring lawyers from making reckless or false statements regarding the integrity of judges or legal officers was unconstitutionally applied against Berry because everything he had said about the Ethics Commission was true or protected opinion.

Berry is the brother of noted Kentucky farmer, author and activist Wendell Berry.  No political cowards in that family.

Read the whole inspiring thing.

"Knowledge Without Affection Leads Us Astray Every Time"

For those of us who have read Wendell Berry for decades, who know him as that Henry County farmer with a way with words, it's easy to forget the man is a national treasure.

Tom Eblen at the Herald:

The National Endowment for the Humanities chose the Kentucky farmer, poet, essayist, novelist, activist and philosopher to give the 2012 Jefferson Lecture at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. It is the federal government's highest honor for scholarly contributions to the humanities.

SNIP

Berry, 77, delivered a searing indictment of corporate domination and the industrial economy, saying it has abused the land and people and threatens our survival. You can — and should — watch the video of Berry's lecture and read the full text of his essay, titled "It All Turns on Affection." Both are online at NEH.gov.

SNIP

"Now the two great aims of industrialism — replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth in the hands of a small plutocracy — seem close to fulfillment," Berry said. "At the same time the failures of industrialism have become too great and too dangerous to deny."

Even the term economy has lost its original meaning, which had to do with household management and husbandry, he said. Most economists now "never ask, in their professional oblivion, why we are willing to do permanent ecological and cultural damage 'to strengthen the economy.'"

Corporate industrialism, he said, "has failed to sustain the health and stability of human society. Among its characteristic signs are destroyed communities, neighborhoods, families, small businesses and small farms. It has failed just as conspicuously and more dangerously to conserve the wealth and health of nature."

Read the whole thing.

Watch the video and read the lecture here.

Show Your Love for Mountains

Show your sweetheart what kind of lover you really are this Valentine's by taking her/him to the I Love Mountains demonstration at the State Capitol in Frankfort.

From Kentuckians for the Commonwealth:

When Kentucky author Wendell Berry and the 13 other Kentucky Rising leaders emerged from the State Capitol to join the I Love Mountains Day rally last February, he said:

"We do not think of what we have done as in any sense a symbolic gesture. We are humbled, instead, by the realization that our effort cannot be carried to success by us, or by any other few of us. If the adventure of the last few days, by this small company of friends, is to be more than a symbolic gesture, that can be only because all of you who are here, and many of our friends who are not here, will take it up, make it your adventure and your cause, until this great house will become the true home of justice to all the people of this state, and of faithful care for the divine gifts of land and water, and of life itself."

So we'll be back at the State Capitol on February 14 with a powerful and visible presence as KFTC members continue to answer Wendell Berry’s call, You see, right now is our best chance in generations to end mountaintop removal mining and build a clean energy economy that generates good jobs in every Kentucky community. We won't stop until we have: a thriving democracy, clean energy jobs, affordable, renewable energy, and healthy communities.

All over eastern Kentucky and Central Appalachia, residents in communities like Eolia, Hueysville, Benham, Lynch and Montgomery Creek are speaking up to protect their health and homeland from the destruction of coal and to create a more sustainable economy.

Will you join us and be one of the more than 1,200 people standing up for clean water, clean energy, and a just economic transition for eastern Kentucky?

And will you volunteer to bring with you at least one other person with you? If each us brings a friend, imagine how much more powerful our voice will be!

More information about the day, including a schedule, and registration information can be found on our website here.

The march around the Capitol starts at 12:30, and the rally at 1 p.m. Come early and buttonhole your state legislators inside.

Wendell Berry to Receive National Humanities Medal Today

UPDATE Below

If President Obama is smart, he won't give Wendell a chance to speak, because Wendell will read him the riot act on mountaintop removal, farm subsidies and global warming.

Ceremony at 1:45 p.m. today.

Wendell E. Berry for his achievements as a poet, novelist, farmer, and conservationist. The author of more than 40 books, Mr. Berry has spent his career exploring our relationship with the land and community.

h/t Page One Kentucky.

UPDATE: Video of the ceremony:



Full transcript here.

Weekend Sit-in at KY Governor's Office

UPDATE Below

As much of a cowardly waste of oxygen as Gov. Steve Beshear is, he knows better than to give a protester-enamored national media photographs of Kentucky icon Wendell Berry, age 76, being handcuffed and dragged out of the Capitol.

From the Herald:

Bags of groceries packed with bread, sandwich meat and granola bars lined the interior of Gov. Steve Beshear's outer office on Friday night as a group of high-profile environmentalists hunkered down for a weekend sit-in at the Capitol.

The group, which includes noted Kentucky authors Wendell Berry, Silas House and Erik Reece, was not satisfied by a meeting with the governor earlier Friday about mountaintop mining. They had said they were going to stay until they were arrested.

But the group was told shortly before 3 p.m. that they would be allowed to spend the weekend at the Capitol.

Kerri Richardson, a spokeswoman for Beshear, said the state decided the group appeared not to be violating any laws.

"As far as we can tell, they aren't doing anything wrong," Richardson said.

Mickey McCoy, an Inez native and a member of the group, said they plan to stay in the Capitol at least until Monday, when the annual "I Love Mountains" rally is held in Frankfort.

The issue is not "mountaintop mining." The issue is mountaintop removal mining, which destroys entire watersheds, ecosystems and communities along with the actual 450 million-year-old mountain itself.

On a scale of permanent environmental destruction, it ranks with the devastating BP oil spill killing the Gulf of Mexico.

The annual I Love Mountains rally in Frankfort begins at 11 a.m. Monday, Feb. 14. It's gonna be gorgeous - 45 degrees and bright sunshine. Be there.

UPDATE, Feb. 13: See Media Czech, Matt Murray at the Kentucky Kernel, and Kentucky Rising.

Berry Turns His Back on UK

Wendell Berry has been the voice of Kentucky's farms and mountains and rivers for half a century. Now the integrity that defines his work has led him to reject the Commonwealth's flagship university.

Cheryl Truman at the Herald:

Wendell Berry, perhaps Kentucky's best-known writer, is pulling many of his personal papers from the University of Kentucky's archives to protest the naming of Wildcat Coal Lodge.

Berry excoriated his alma matter (sic) in a Dec. 20, 2009, letter, saying the decision to name a new dorm for UK basketball players the Wildcat Coal Lodge "puts an end" to his association with the university.

"The University's president and board have solemnized an alliance with the coal industry, in return for a large monetary 'gift,' granting to the benefactors, in effect, a co-sponsorship of the University's basketball team," Berry wrote in the typewritten letter. "That — added to the 'Top 20' project and the president's exclusive 'focus' on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics — puts an end to my willingness to be associated in any way officially with the University."

Berry, among the most revered of Kentucky writers and a former recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, told the university "it is now obviously wrong, unjust and unfair, for your space and work to be encumbered by a collection of papers that I no longer can consider donating to the University."

The papers, which measure 60 cubic feet in volume and would fill about 100 boxes, remain at UK while Berry negotiates their transfer to the Kentucky Historical Society in Frankfort. He said the papers include letters he has received over the years, drafts of various books and corrected proofs.

Berry, 75, said UK's push to become a "Top 20" research university has caused it to stray from its land-grant university obligation to address Kentucky's problems.

"The coal business came up, and that for me was just the last straw," Berry said Tuesday. "I don't think the University of Kentucky can be so ostentatiously friendly to the coal industry ... and still be a friend to me and the interests for which I have stood for the last 45 years. ... If they love the coal industry that much, I have to cancel my friendship."

The University of Kentucky Press published some of Berry's many books of essays, poetry and fiction that focused on the relationship between people and the land, including The Unforeseen Wilderness, a collection of photographs and essays that may have helped save the Red River Gorge from an Army Corps of Engineers dam project in 1971.

Wendell Berry is a state treasure, Kentucky's environmental conscience and a nationally-revered writer whose works will outlive UK's basketball program. This is a wake-up call for UK, but it's hitting the snooze button.