ACCORDING TO LIZ - My first memory of Wendell Berry was in a television interview by Bill Moyers on PBS, two old farts who were making a lot more sense than the day’s talking heads and politicians.
Wendell Berry: essayist and poet, spokesperson for the environment and back-to-the-land farming, activist for holistic living and against Big Ag, a Kentucky farmer who plowed his own fields.
He wrote primarily in pencil and by natural light, opposed to giving more than necessary to the coal-burning company that supplied electricity to his multi-generational family farm.
Final lights out on the last day of August, dead at 92.
Just over a year after Moyers who died, aged 91, in June of 2026.
What I didn’t know at the time was that Moyers, far from being just another squawk-box talking head, had been a director of the Council on Foreign Relations and network TV news commentator, winning multiple awards and honorary degrees for investigative journalism and civic activities, producing documentaries and news journal programs, and powerfully promoting the benefits of public broadcasting.
And was a scathing critic of the corporate American news media.
Like I said, two old farts of a feather. Both guiding lights for an America lost in nightmarish shadows, both bearing candles leading us, cajoling us on to a kinder, gentler future.
And the world is a lesser place without Berry who was one of our most influential voices, extolling land ethics and rural life, popularizing core ideas on sustainable agriculture and permaculture, and driving discussion on environmental policies and the concept that ecological health and community health are inseparable.
He wrote more than 50 volumes of poetry, fiction and essays, an oeuvre that championed the family farm, locavorism, and the importance of interdependent communities. He persistently attacked the use of chemicals, the misuse of technology, the bullying of Big Ag, and the government’s insensitivity to local concerns and issues.
As reported in Sierra magazine: “The national economy that is really run for the benefit of a very few people is preying upon and slowly destroying local communities everywhere. Everything we produce in rural America makes more money for other people than it does for those who produce it. We’re destroying rural America.”
He was viewed as a modern-day Henry David Thoreau or Thomas Jefferson, and his essays and other works were cited as foundational to the next generation’s philosophies on land stewardship.
His was “a prophetic American voice” as his body of work, spanning more than sixty years, burgeoned and was embraced by advocates of agrarian and ecological causes and, despite not enjoying wider mainstream recognition, was pushed up to the politicians. Many of whom are now listening if not acting.
Berry was one of a very few prominent literary figures to address the impact of industrialized agriculture, the dangers of commercialization, and the ethics (not) of profiteering that reached the heights of our government with multiple members of the House and Senate investing in the business of Big Ag while those same corporate interests were destroying the family farm and America’s agrarian heartland.
He had studied creative writing at Stanford under environmentalist and writer Wallace Stegner and was a member of the élite Kentucky-born peripatetic non-conformist authors known as the Fab Five; the others being Gurney Norman, James Baker Hall, and Ed McClanahan, and Bobbie Ann Mason.
In the early ’60s, Berry returned to the Kentucky county in which five generations on both sides of his family had thrived, and where he lived and wrote for the rest of his life. In a 2018 interview, he called it a way to ensure that he would always be bound by the land, the truth.
“It made a permanent connection between me and my native place, and with its landscape. The landscape was there to check me if I was wrong. I could never go away and make up stuff at cocktail parties about the backwoods of Kentucky. I worked with people here in all walks of life and learned from them. It’s been a very rich experience.”
Starting with the 1977 publication of The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture about America’s increasing estrangement from the land, which provides millions with food but is increasingly ignored other than as a product to buy and sell, Berry wrote about the importance of sustainable agriculture and promoted organic techniques.
He wrote about the culture of life on small farms and how farmers flourished in their communities; places and people that were rapidly disappearing in a world that exalted the industrialized agriculture that drove topsoil erosion, polluted water and toxic chemicals.
Many of his works since, fiction and non-fiction, wove together the tapestry of the land and its people as an ideal, while big business and a government worshiping GDP growth and efficiencies, became the force of a new Dust Bowl, destroying that land and their way of life.
“The concentration of farmland into larger and larger holdings and fewer and fewer hands — with the consequent increase in overhead, debt, and dependence on machines is a matter of complex significance, and its agricultural significance cannot be disentangled from its cultural significance.”
In 2010, Berry received the National Humanities Medal from Barack Obama “for his achievements as a poet, novelist, farmer and conservationist,” perhaps the crowning achievement among over 30 awards for his books, other writings, and advocacy, including the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and a Lifetime Achievement Award of the National Book Critics Circle.
Not just an academic, Berry demonstrated against the Vietnam War, factory farming, nuclear power plants, and the death penalty. He risked arrest protesting a coal-fired power plant in D.C. in 2009 and for objecting to mountaintop removal strip mining at the Kentucky governor's office in 2011.
Berry published 30-odd volumes of verse as well as writing more than a dozen novels and volumes of short stories about the world in which he lived; generations of lives interwoven in land loss and a fading agrarian lifestyle.
With old roots, he was a thoroughly modern man. As a teen, he attended the Millersburg Military Institute, a boarding school near Lexington of which he had to say: “The highest aim was to produce a perfectly obedient, militarist, puritanical moron who could play football.”
His sentiments were international, spending time in London and Paris and drawing on agrarian views from around the world.
Although his writing was ofttimes considered radical, he was a conservative in the best sense of the word, treading lightly on this earth and conserving the best of what humanity has to offer.
Presciently observing that, “The next great division of the world will be between people who want to live as creatures and those who wish to live as machines.”
And urging all of us: “[F]riends, every day do something that won’t compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who does not deserve it.”
In celebrating a long life, well lived, Americans – and others all over this Earth, should seize the opportunity to embrace what resonates in his observations, and further explore his legacy as a pithily insightful writer and passionate advocate for the environment and sustainable community-focused agriculture.
(Liz Amsden is a former Angeleno now living in Vermont and a regular CityWatch contributor. She writes on issues she’s passionate about, including social justice, government accountability, and community empowerment. Liz brings a sharp, activist voice to her commentary and continues to engage with Los Angeles civic affairs from afar. She can be reached at [email protected].)
