Try Saying "Earth"

Masala greeted me by pissing into his own mouth

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“Goddamn Wendell Berry.” I quietly cursed the sage of Kentucky as I approached the goat pen, deworming medicine in hand. Masala, a large billy goat with a mean streak and a devilish set of horns, greeted me by pissing into his own mouth then spewing urine in a golden arc over his back. This did not bode well for his cooperation.

Breathing further profanities at Aldo Leopold, Michael Pollan, the Seedsavers Exchange catalog, and the entire new agrarian movement, I climbed over the wire fence and waited for Masala to rear up. Once he was on his hind feet and taller than me by a head, before potential energy turned into kinetic on the downswing, I lunged in, reaching up to grab his horns, then wrestling him sideways toward the fence. When he was pinned against the fence, my fellow farm intern squeezed the viscous deworming liquid into his slavering mouth. Finally, I sprang free and over the fence before Masala could get his bearings for another charge. Exhausted already and smelling like fear-sweat and goat, I trudged off to my next chore, dreaming of desk jobs.

Reading got me into this. The organic canon like J.I. Rodale and Sir Albert Howard. The bougie foodie favorites like The Omnivore's Dilemma. But most of all, Wendell Berry. My housemate post-college had a shelf full of Berry’s books. The wonderful essays in What Are People For, and the crankier Home Economics were stand-outs. He had the poetry and the Port William novels too, but I was reality-hungry. One year after graduating into a recession, befuddled by the world’s irrationality, I craved sense-making and was looking for authorities. So I was drawn to non-fiction, and first and foremost to The Unsettling of America, the most sustained look at rural American history in Berry’s otherwise fragmentary and aphoristic oeuvre.

The story Berry tells in Unsettling, and which he later dramatized in novels like Jayber Crowe, is of the emptying out of rural America. It is a moral drama in Berry’s telling, a struggle between those who stay and those who go, “boomers” and “stickers,” those who steward the land with affection, and those who view it merely as a means of production. This binary struggle is written into the soul of America thanks to our origins as a settler colony, according to Berry. Perhaps it is even older than that: conflicts between settled agriculturalists and nomadic herders are encoded into the myths and founding texts of many civilizations. Cain the farmer and Abel the shepherd are mirrored by the Persian Shahnameh’s rivalry between Iran and Turan.

For a very long time, it seemed that agrarianism was winning this perennial battle—despite the greater impoverishment of individual farmers. And as a land use, agriculture is still ascendant, accounting for nearly half of the earth’s habitable surface, but as an occupation, it entered precipitous decline in the 20th century. This decline is a fall from grace in Berry’s narrative. And his story is perhaps a useful corrective to the dominant narrative of post-war economic growth. But for a certain audience of which I am a member—conservationist by instinct and occupation, prone to finding tragic flaws in modernity’s triumph—Wendell Berry’s view of the world is sufficiently ascendant that it may now be worth throwing a few stones, not at the master himself, but merely for the flow of his historical narrative to eddy around.