Our Only World

 

The following are bits of essays I borrowed from Wendell Berry. This is taking a calculated chance. Having read many of his books over the years (some purchased, others borrowed ) I am following Wendell’s own premise that the ownership of words and ideas is absurd – he only lays claim to their arrangement on the page. In this case, I’m arranging his words on a page. Mostly gleamed from his 2015 book OUR ONLY WORLD, I’ve borrowed from these essays:

1. Less Energy, More Life     2. On Receiving One of the Dayton Literary Peace Prizes 

3. Contempt for Small Places    4. On Being Asked for a Narrative of the Future

I have also included a portion of a separate Wendell Berry essay, Compromise, Hell!  As usual, images are added to help bolster the narrative. Hopefully, you find some sensibility in all this.

Cheers –  Bruce

 

 

 Condensed excerpts from Our Only World

by Wendell Berry

 

                                                   Book liner notes:

The planet’s environmental problems respect no national boundaries. From soil erosion and population displacement to climate change and failed energy policies, American governing classes are paid by corporations to pretend that debate is the only democratic necessity and that solutions are capable of withstanding endless delay. Late Capitalism goes about its business of finishing off the planet.

 

 

Farmer in Ottawa Valley, August 2005 – photo by Bruce Witzel

 

If we want to do better, we will have to recognize the old mistake as a mistake… We can respond rationally to this predicament only by honest worry, unrelenting caution, and propriety of scale…

 

Swiss chard and celery in our cold-frame March 3, 2021  – bruce witzel photo

 

We will have to repudiate the too-simple industrial standards and replace them with comprehensive standard of ecological health, realizing that  this standard involves necessarily the humane obligation of neighbourliness to other humans and to other creatures. This means that all our uses of the natural world must be governed by our willingness to learn the nature of every place, and to submit to nature’s limits and requirements…

 

 

  Mono Lake, California  October 2012 – photo by Bruce Witzel

 

In this collection of essays, Wendell Berry confronts head-on the necessity of clear thinking and direct action…

 

Wendell Berry at his farm in Kentucky – photo by Guy Mendes

 

 

Found Essays from (and by) Wendell Berry

 

We must not speak or think of the land alone or of the people alone, but always and only of both together. If we want to save the land, we must save the people who belong to the land. If we want to save the people, we must save the land the people belong to…

 

Since the beginning of the conservation effort … conservationists have too often believed that we could protect the land without protecting the people… If conservationists hope to save even the wild lands and wild creatures, they are going to have to address issues of economy, which is to say issues of the health of the landscapes and the towns and cities where we do our work, and the quality of that work, and the well-being of the people who do the work.

 

  Bar U Ranch Historic Site on the Eastern Slope of Canadian Rockies near Oldman River – photo by Bruce Witzel

 

Governments seem to be making the opposite error, believing that the people can be adequately protected without protecting the land… If we know that coal is an exhaustible resource, whereas the forests over it are with proper use inexhaustible, and that strip mining destroys the forest virtually forever, how can we permit this destruction?

If we honor at all that fragile creature the topsoil, so long in the making, so miraculously made, so indispensable to all life, how can we destroy it?

. . . Like a lot of people I know, I am concerned about mountain top removal and climate change. But when we delay our concern until dangers have become sensational we are late. . . Even if we are too late, we must still accept responsibility and try to make things better.

 

(Meanwhile…in Alberta)

Some of the recently proposed coal projects in southern Alberta lie within the Oldman watershed and would draw water from the headwater tributaries that have been previously largely untouched by industry. Map: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal   

https://thenarwhal.ca/alberta-coal-mining-rockies-oldman-river/

 

 

Rachel Herbert and her family have been ranching in the Porcupine Hills of Southern Alberta for four generations. Now, she’s concerned how proposed coal mines will impact the local water supply which she and her neighbours all rely on.

Photo: Canadian Angus Association

 

 

The industrial economy, from agriculture to war, is by far the most violent the world has ever known, and we are all complicit in its violence…

 

 

Toy truck and my lumber – bruce witzel photo

 

 

There is in fact no significant difference of means between weapons of massive destruction and the technologies of industrial production. The means are invariably combustion (internal and external) and poison (by intention, accident, or “act of God”)…

 

  Sault St. Marie, August 9, 2005 – bruce witzel photo

 

But surely, by now, the official rationalizations of our violence have become to obviously hypocritical to be ignored. Violence against our world and our fellow human beings finally cannot be disassociated from the violence of falsehood.

 

How can we continue to insist that our land destroying, water and air-polluting agriculture is the only  way “feed the world”, especially since we have now devoted so much of it to “biofuels” to feed our automobiles? ….

 

 

 

 

 

 

Moreover: Why should we continue to believe that our government is uniquely to be trusted with our weapons of mass destruction, whereas other nations are not to be trusted with theirs? …. What does trustworthiness mean in relation to possession of such weapons?

Why is the cost of our wars now paid almost exclusively by the young people in the armed services, who must pay with their bodies and their lives? ….  Why do not our patriotic trustees of the common good, upon consenting to a war, not resign from their offices and volunteer to put their own “boots to the ground”?

 

Such questions no doubt are merely naive…

 

  Living Memorial Sculpture Garden, Weed California October 8, 2012 – bruce witzel photo

 

We speak of freedom, of our God-given freedom, of defending, using, and enjoying freedom, as if something memorized in grade school and never thought about again. We might as well be talking in our sleep. We have been so thoughtless and careless of our freedom for so long that by now we cannot see that our assumed right to be limitlessly violent would finally bring us to a violence against freedom that may destroy it…

 

   The general purpose of the present economy is to exploit, not to foster or conserve…

 

  Clear cut logging site on North Vancouver Island March 01, 2018 –  bruce witzel photo

 

Maybe we could give up saving the world and start to live savingly in it. If using less energy would be a good idea for the future, that is because it is a good idea.

The government could enforce such a saving by rationing fuels, as it did during World War Two… But to wish for good sense from the government only displaces good sense into the future, where it is no use to anybody…

On the contrary, so few as just one of us can save energy right now by self-control, careful thought, and remembering the lost virtue of frugality. Spending less, burning less, traveling less may be a relief. A cooler, slower life may make us happier, more present to ourselves and to others who need us to be present… The government might even do the right thing by imitating the people…

 

 

If we are serious about these big problems, we have got to see that the solutions begin and end with ourselves. Thus we put an end to our habit of over simplification. If we want to stop the impoverishment of the land and people, we ourselves must be prepared to become poorer…

 

We must understand that fossil fuel energy must be replaced, not just by “clean” energy, but also by less energy. The unlimited use of any energy would be as destructive as unlimited economic growth or any other unlimited growth. If we had a limitless supply of free, non-polluting energy, we would use the world up even faster than we are using it up now.

 

If we are not in favor of limiting the use of energy, starting with our own use of it, then we are not serious. If we are not in use of rationing energy, starting with fossil fuels, we are not serious. If we have the money and are not willing to pay two dollars to keep the polluting industries from getting one, we are not serious.

 

Travelling down to southern Vancouver Island to be with Francis in Victoria 2008                                                        

At the North end of Vancouver Island

 

 

   

If, on the contrary, we become determined to keep the industries of poison, explosion, and fire from determining our lives and the world’s fate, then we will steadfastly reduce our dependence on them and our payments of money to them.

We will cease to invest our health, our lives, and our money in them. Then finally we will be serious enough, our efforts complex and practical enough. By so improving our lives, we will improve the possibility of life…

 

  Kentucky River flows behind Berry in this 2012 image, taken by his former student Guy Mendes.

 

Only the present good is good. It is the presence of good – good work, good thoughts, good acts, good places – by which we know that the present does not have to be a nightmare of the future. “The kingdom of God is at hand” because, if not at hand, it is nowhere.

 

WENDELL BERRY

~~~~~

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Tags: Our only world, Wendell Berry

• April 10, 2021
• appropriate technology, ecology, Politics, social justice, Sustainability.....
• 8 Comments