Wendell Berry, champion of rural life

When Wendell Berry, 92, died this Monday, August 31, the West lost a writer who focused on the importance of rural land. He studied under the writer Wallace Stegner at Stanford University and wrote nine novels about characters — some like himself — who farmed and cared about the land.

What also stood out about him was his public leadership — his readiness to march and commit civil disobedience, protesting against national, state and local government when he found their policies harmful and short-sighted. His targets included both a coal-fired and nuclear power plant, our war in Vietnam and the death penalty. He said he also opposed abortion. A Christian, Berry was a critic of organized religion for what he saw as its abstract notion of compassion.

He believed in staying rooted, living a simple life. He wrote, for example, in longhand with a pencil. His wife Tanya then used a manual typewriter to edit and complete his writing.

Berry leaves a sizable body of essays and poems, and 16 poems feature a “mad farmer” who rails against agriculture dominated by corporations that push rampant consumerism. “To be sane in a mad time is bad for the brain,” declares the mad farmer, stand-in for the author.

He also wrote a poem often quoted for its moving simplicity, “The Peace of Wild Things.” It was written in 1968 when the country was roiled by resistance to the Vietnam War; in particular, the draft.

“The Peace of Wild Things”

By Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Gary Nabhan, one of Berry’s admirers and a fellow writer, reacted quickly to Berry’s death. An ethnobotanist, Nabhan himself is a towering moral authority, speaking out from the Southwest against our government’s 30-foot-tall metal wall that blocks wildlife trying to migrate from both Mexico and the United States:

“Oh, we lost a saint today as Wendell Berry passed from standing on and standing up for this land to dwell within it. Since the first Earth Day in 1970, no single individual did more to broaden the environmental movement by including working landscapes than did Wendell,” Nabhan wrote.

“But for all his influence and contributions, it was simply his eloquence, humor and goodwill that won most of us over. My first year in college I carried a copy of his little set of poems, Farming, a Handbook, in my back pocket as if it was a complement to The Bible. “So here’s to the mad farmer who changed American letters, farming, and earth care for the better!”

Another admirer and friend is Taylor Brorby, an assistant professor of English at Montana State University in Bozeman, who is also an author and environmentalist. Brorby said he had a complicated relationship with Berry.

“I don’t know what there is to say about a man who has so consistently frustrated me and who shaped my own thinking beginning 20 years ago, who’s taken me seriously, who has been my pen pal for a decade, and who has now died.

“The last time I saw Wendell, he took me out to the barn to call in the sheep. We stood, overlooking the Kentucky River, and he asked me, both of us staring ahead, if I ever had writer’s block. I was too young to know better and said no. He said for the first time in his life he had it, had been working on essays for years about a book others told him not to publish. And then he turned and asked me, ‘Are you happy?’

“I’ve been thinking about that question ever since. I miss him more than I can say.”

Betsy Marston is the editor of Writers on the Range, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She lives and writes in Western Colorado.