Wendell Berry wrote me a few days before his death that “We’re coming to some sort of end.” And with impish anger, “We send word to the heroes of the institutions that they’re shit out of luck.”
I didn’t realize that Wendell was in his last weeks when I wrote him in late August. We had become neighbors and friends when I started farming in Kentucky in 1973. I wrote to thank him for being who he was in my life. He shared what he was thinking about his own life’s work and his question to himself, “Has it done any good?”
I shared with Peter Senge (The Fifth Discipline, etc.) some of my correspondence with Wendell, commenting that I hoped to prove Wendell wrong about being “shit out of luck.” Peter wrote back with his own thoughts:
“I resonate with the timeliness of calling collapse collapse, guided by the term as used by indigenous writers like Vanessa Andreotti. It invites us to grieve for the suffering we have created. It tells us that now is not the time for ‘fixes,’ new props to hold up the industrial growth engine. It, perhaps, pierces the illusion of thinking our way out of the mess we have created. People with 10,000 years or longer histories have known collapse before and tried to encode its lessons. seeing the consequences of concentrating power and wealth and forgetting our place in the larger order of things. Unlike us, they learned to shed the illusion that they stand at the top of some pyramid of human accomplishment. This is why the first lesson those who acknowledge collapse have learned is profound humility, and gratitude. And awe at what we are given – for no price other than embracing humility, gratitude, and reverence.”
I find Peter’s reflections reassuring and powerful, helping me shed some of my own hubris. Wendell observed that, “All we’ve got is a good set of instructions about how to live with our neighbors.”
It seems to me that every wise person I know is living this tension between “coming to some sort of end” (in Wendell’s words) and “humility, gratitude, and reverence.” (in Peter’s words)
Like Wendell, my life focus is on agriculture. I’m privileged to work with farmers who frequently notice nature’s capacity to heal from human mistakes. And yet they also can’t help but straddle a tension between what is and what might be. Some of these farmers have huge machinery and farm thousands of acres. Some might be labeled as part of “industrial agriculture,” but they nevertheless preserve wetlands for birds, plant multi-species cover crops to fill the ground with diverse roots, and find great joy in feeling crumbly soil teeming with life. Many more farmers would embrace a more diverse and regenerative agriculture if there were markets for those diverse crops.
And I know dozens of brilliant, committed sustainability professionals who work for food companies, each with influence, but almost none with much authority. Some CEOs of these same companies hope earnestly that sustainability will be central to their legacy, but if the stock value of their companies decline, their boards will ease them out.
Even Wendell and his family lived within a tension between the end of a system and a future not yet born. In his last novel, Marce Catlett, The Power of a Story, he described an event that animated the lives of his father, brother, himself, and his two children. In 1906 Wendell’s grandfather farmed a small hill farm. The family was short on money, but their year’s tobacco crop didn’t earn enough to pay the sales commission. Wendell’s father, John Berry, was still a small boy in that moment, and he committed his life to trying to make sure that families wouldn’t have to face such an ordeal. He helped organize farmers to bargain collectively with the companies, when that didn’t succeed, he worked for a congressman during the writing of New Deal farm programs in the 1930s, and he went on to become president of the tobacco farmers coop, later succeeded by his son John Jr., Wendell’s brother. The tobacco program Wendell’s father helped create was brilliant: it guaranteed that modest size farms had the right to sell their share of tobacco needed by the market, and it guaranteed a minimum price that the companies were required to pay. When I farmed in Kentucky, I also grew tobacco because it was the way all farmers paid for their farms from hand labor on a few acres, while living on whatever else they did, in my case milking cows. Tobacco sustained farmers, and it also sustained thousands of communities.
You will observe, of course, that growing tobacco was contributing to cancer. Yes, making people sick while also sustaining the most vital small farm economy in the United States. Farmers didn’t realize or intend the health consequences of smoking, but those consequences occurred, nonetheless. That’s the irony of this system that made possible the traditions of quality and neighborliness that Wendell describes in more than 50 books.
We can’t understand the dysfunctions or potential regeneration of human society without understanding systems. Nobody gets out of bed in the morning with a goal of polluting rivers or increasing global temperatures. Yet those things happen as the result of what seem to be individually rational decisions. It’s a mistake to blame farmers who are producing what markets reward, just as it’s a mistake to blame corporate leaders enmeshed in a structure driven by competition for financial returns. Good people with worthy intentions live within what Wendell calls “the institutions.”
Dana Meadows (Limits to Growth, etc.) had a constant refrain: “Blame the system, not the players. And, more importantly, reshape the system.” She wrote in Thinking in Systems that, “The future can’t be predicted, but can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being. Systems can’t be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned.” And in another passage, “We are not helpless in the face of large systems. Systems can be watched, learned from, managed. We are not helpless.”
As Wendell says in one of his sabbath poems, “It all comes down to affection.” He wrote me in his final letter that “Like you, I’ve seen some of the light and have tried to live up to it.”