Prophet in Kentucky

Before people can live in harmony with their communities, or their spouses, or their topsoil, they need to be at peace with themselves, and that is Berry’s main concern. We need to live in real places, not in the generalized lobbies that modern houses often are. We need to be at home in our bodies, too – not in the “useless, weak” husks that we drag daily to the flourescently cheerful “health club,” but a body that each day knows the “elemental pleasures of eating and drinking and resting, of being dry while it is raining, of getting dry after getting wet, of getting warm against after getting cold, of cooling off after getting hot.” Of being tired at sundown and at life’s end feeling “a great weariness... like the lesser weariness that comes with day’s end – a weariness that had been earned and was therefore accepted.”

The rigorous life, with some goal beside a higher “standard of living,” Berry implies, need come not only through farming. The same forces that distort and maim our agriculture – fear of dredgery, the endless demand for more, and faster – also cause many other problems, both environmental and social, that we face. We drive or take a taxi when we should walk or ride a bike – if we were on foot we would not only emit less carbon dioxide, we’d be in closer touch with our communities, the way a farmer on a horse-drawn plow knows his field better than the pilot of a huge combine. And we would use the muscles that we must have been born with for some better reason than bouncing in front of a video. We would be out in the weather, and at day’s end we’d be weary instead of tense.

There are a thousand other ways we could try to shift our lives to create a more sustainable world; but, as Berry makes clear, it would be foolish to underestimate how difficult this will be or how powerful are the habits and interests that must be overcome. As economic actors we, through our investments, require corporations to look ahead a quarter or a year at a time, to make for us as much money as possible, even if that means, to give the tiniest example from the most recent Exxon annual meeting, not building our oil tankers with double hulls. As consumers, even those of us who are well-to-do often demand the cheapest possible food, though this requires the most harmful farming, and the most comfortable cars and houses, though they may well be helping to create an uncomfortable planet.

As citizens we deamnd lower taxes, instead of devoting ourselves to figuring out how to share the world’s greatest concentration of wealth with an increasingly poor nation and world. Suspicious of real change, and of more work and less luxury, we place our faith in frequent incatations about unceasing economic growth and technological expansion, even though our logic tells us they are as unlikely as endless growth in the food supply and our scientific instruments tell us they are starting to harm our planet as surely as poor farming erodes our soils.

Wherever we live, however we do so, we desperately need a prophet of responsibility; and although they days of the prophets seem past to many of us, Berry may be the closest to one we have. But, fortunately, he is also a poet of responsibility. He makes one believe that the good life may be not only harder than what we’re used to but sweeter as well (McKibben 276-277)

McKibben, Bill. The Bill McKibben Reader: Pieces from an Active Life. New York:Henry Holt and Company, 2008.