By Ernie Yanarella
Guest columnist
I do not know precisely when Wendell Berry – the man, the writer, the farmer, the teacher, the poet – came into my consciousness and life. (Maybe it was my chance reading of his “Mad Farmer Liberation Front” manifesto or poem!) I recall, however, that it was a good day. From that moment on, he became a constant source of inspiration.
While teaching a course, “Communities,” in an experimental Modern Studies Program I coordinated, I included in the syllabus one of his most popular short stories, “Pray without Ceasing.” Its theme of nonviolence and refusal to succumb to revenge touched me deeply and stirred me to translate its themes into peace advocacy in the Bluegrass as inaugural co-director of the Central Kentucky Council for Peace and Justice. Later, I also found myself proposing to Elizabeth Walker, including in a written text I read to her a passage entitled “Fidelity,” from his chapter, “The Body and the Earth,” in his famous book, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture.
When Dick Levine and I received an MFAP award from the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Studies, we used part of the grant to underwrite a week-long summer seminar on sustainability that culminated in Wendell joining the 15 faculty from diverse disciplines and delivering a presentation that soon after was published in Harper’s magazine with the title, “The Futility of Global Thinking.” The piece critiqued the popular environmental slogan, “think global, act local.” And it caused a stir.
Letting Wendell into my life and teaching could sometimes trigger controversy and challenge. At the time, the Kellogg Foundation provided a grant to provide greater curricular dialogue between the Colleges of Arts and Sciences and the College of Agriculture. When the experimental course program went up for review and approval by the University Senate, my course syllabus was singled out by a faculty Senator, who objected to my incorporation of one of Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson’s articles on the aesthetic and cultural virtues of horse-drawn plows and put me in the hot seat until I agreed to acknowledge the value of mechanized plows in modern farming.
Later, a colleague and I garnered grant funds from the Canadian Studies Program to study the impact of Japanese automobile transplants built in small towns across Ontario and Quebec. One of our interview targets was local civil servants in communities in the vicinity of these automobile plants. Often better educated and more cultured than their American counterparts, each interviewee unfailingly made a bit of humor about Kentucky Fried Chicken and revealed their love and respect for Wendell Berry and their pleasure in reading his novels, stories, and poems. This acknowledgment prompted mutual reminiscences about our favorite writings in his oeuvre.
Whenever Berry held a book signing in the Lexington area, I would try to attend and buy an autographed copy. His continual turn to the Bible for literary and spiritual enrichment informed his agrarian theology and ecological ethics, and it moved me to reflect on my own small-town moorings in a little Hudson Valley town (Beacon, NY) and the virtues that remained in local practices and interpersonal relationships despite the pressures of urban spread, land grabs, and rank commercialization. I came to realize that Wendell’s spiritual grounding was embedded in the land, the soil, and the strengths of agrarian communities, not in the transcendentalism informing the reformed Christianity of my spiritual home. Still, some of those elements of his life philosophy resonated with me — sometimes prompting me to reinterpret them in conventional religious ways and at times speaking to the ecological foundations that pulled me toward Wendell’s earthly grounding.
His death fills me with deep sadness and yet profound gratitude that he and I crossed paths from time to time … in seminar rooms, on campus walks, in lecture halls, bookstores, and through TV broadcasts and radio interviews. (His “Fresh Air” interviews with Terri Gross were among my favorites.) Even in death, I remember his voice, his expressions of love of literature, his attachment to the land, his regard for teaching as a noble vocation, and his moral integrity and courage. Rest in peace, my friend!
Ernie Yanarella is a retired professor of political theory and policy studies at the University of Kentucky. With his spouse, he has been a resident of Versailles for 15 years, serving as a ruling elder at Versailles Presbyterian Church and treasurer of the Friends of Woodford County Library, while also holding the associate editorship of the national journal, “Sustainability and Climate Change.”