Wendell Berry’s life on Earth

Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer, poet, essayist and environmental activist, died last week at 92. He wrote more than 50 books from his farmhouse, mostly with pencil and paper, and became a guiding voice for readers skeptical of industrial agriculture and technological life.

Berry's activism included arrests in 1979 protesting a nuclear plant and in 2011 during a sit-in against mountaintop removal mining, along with pulling his papers from the University of Kentucky over a coal company donation. His writing, notably the 1987 essay declining to buy a computer, argued for tending small plots of land and life rather than chasing scale.

Colleagues describe a man whose views resisted easy political categorization: religious but wary of church, protective of family and community but distrustful of government legislating either, consistent in his belief that healing the land started with the smallest handful of earth in hand.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.