Wendell Berry — again

I know I have said this before, but Wendell Berry is awesome.   Look at the little nugget I found today!

“If we credit the Bible’s description of the relationship between Creator and Creation, then we cannot deny the spiritual importance of our economic life. Then we see how religious issues lead to issues of economy, and how issues of economy lead to issues of art, of how to make things. If we understand that no artist - no maker - can work except by reworking the works of Creation, then we see that by our work, by the way we practice our arts, we reveal what we think of the works of God. How we take our lives from this world, how we work, what work we do, how well we use the materials we use and what we do with them after we have used them - all these are questions of the highest and gravest religious significance. These questions cannot be answered by thinking, but only by doing. In answering them, we practice, or do not practice, our religion.”

All I can say is “Yep.”

Kim

food independence

They’re all saying it.  Now Sharon’s challenging us to do it.

You all know that I am a huge believer in personal responsibility in food production.  We do our best.   Each year we try to do better.  We learn new skills that allow us to remove ourselves just a little further from the industrial food supply.

I’ve been keeping up with Sharon’s food group.  Each week there is a check-in.  We do planted, harvested, preserved, stored, and prepped.  It is a great way to encourage one another to keep up the good work.  Now Sharon is inviting the world-at-large to participate.  So come on, join the fun, and free yourself from the tyranny of the supermarket shelves.

A few quotes from some of my favorite authors/thinkers.

Carla Emery:

All spring I try to plant something every day - from late February, when the early peas and spinach and garlic can go in, on up to midsummer, when the main potato crop and the late beans and lettuce go in.  Then I switch over and make it my rule to try and get something put away for the winter every single day.  That lasts until the pumpkins and sunflowers and late squash and green tomatoes are in.  Then comes the struggle to get the most out of the stored food - all winter long.  It has to be checked regularly, and you’ll need to add to that day’s menu anything that’s on the verge of spoiling, wilting or otherwise becoming useless.

People have to choose what they are going to struggle for.  Life is always a struggle, whether or not you’re struggling for anything worthwhile, so it might as well be for something worthwhile.  Independence days are worth struggling for.  they’re good for me, good for the country and good for growing children.

Sharon Astyk

Now there’s a Declaration of Independence for you.  Or perhaps the Constitution of the United Food Sovereign People of the World.  It is so desperately needed that we do declare our independence from the globalizing, totalitarian, destructive, toxic, dangerous agriculture that destroys our future and our power and pays to destroy democracy.  And so, when in the course of human events it becomes necessary for people to divorce themselves from a system that has become destructive, and thus:

We the people, in order to form a more perfect union of human and nature, establish justice and ensure food sovreignty, provide for the common nutrition, promote the general welfare and ensure the blessings of liberty, for ourselves and our posterity do ordain and establish this constitution for the United Food Sovereign People of the World.

Wendell Berry

Most urban shoppers would tell you that food is produced on farms.  But most of them do not know what farms, or what kind of farms, or where farms are, or what knowledge and skills are involved in farming. . . The industrial eater is, in fact, one who does not know that eating is an agricultural act, who no longer knows or imagines teh connections between eating and the land, and who is therefore necessarily passive and uncritical — in short, a victim. . . . There is, then, a politics of fod that, like any politics, involves our freedom.  We still (sometimes) remember that we cannot be free if our minds and voices are controlled by someone else.  But we  have neglected to understand that we cannot be free if our food and its sources are controlled by someone else.  The condition of the passive consumer of food isnot a democratic condition.  One reason to eat responsibly is to live free.

What can we one do?

1. Participate in food production
2. Prepare your own food
3. Learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is produced closest to your home
4. Whenever possible, deal directly with a local farmer, gardener, or orchardist
5. Learn, in self-defense, as much as you can of the economy and technology of industrial food production
6. Learn what is involved in the best farming and gardening
7. Learn as much as you can, by direct observation and experience if possible, of the life histories of the food species.

Michael Pollan:

But the act I want to talk about is growing some — even just a little — of your own food. Rip out your lawn, if you have one, and if you don’t — if you live in a high-rise, or have a yard shrouded in shade — look into getting a plot in a community garden. Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do — to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind.

Yet the sun still shines down on your yard, and photosynthesis still works so abundantly that in a thoughtfully organized vegetable garden (one planted from seed, nourished by compost from the kitchen and involving not too many drives to the garden center), you can grow the proverbial free lunch — CO2-free and dollar-free.

why bother

Why bother?

My sister sent me the link above.  It is from one of my favorite authors — Michael Pollan.  And guess who he quotes in his article.  One of my other very favorite authors — Wendell Berry!

Great Quote from the Article:  Going personally green is a bet, nothing more or less, though it’s one we probably all should make, even if the odds of it paying off aren’t great. Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can’t prove that it will.

If  you haven’t read Michael Pollan’s books you are missing a real treat.  If you haven’t read Wendell Berry you are missing a real meal.  He is a great thinker, a great writer, and a great man.

Kim

Wendell’s Wisdom–Industrial economy

Industrial economy: an economy founded on the seven deadly sins and the breaking of all ten of the Ten Commandments.

Wendell’s Wisdom 2

“Think Little” 1970

“If we are to hope to correct our abuses of each other and of other races and of our land, and if our effort to correct these abuses is to be more than a political fad that will in the long run be only another form of abuse, then we are going to have to go far beyond public protest and political action. We are going to have to rebuild the substance and the integrity of private life in this country. We are going to have to gather up the fragments of knowledge and responsibility that we have parceled out to the bureaus and the corporations and the specialists, and we are going to have to put those fragments back together again in our own minds and in our families and households and neighborhoods. We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities. We need persons and households that do not have to wait upon organizations, but can make necessary changes in themselves, on their own.”

Wendell’s Wisdom

“If you don’t have a problem, why pay for a solution?”

Wendell Berry, 1989. “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine”

Our new catch-phrase “Don’t buy the solution if you don’t have the problem.”

The Unsettling of America

The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry

Subtitle: Culture and Agriculture

Read: July 2007. Rating: A book that should be read, re-read, marked up, and also purchased for each of our children!

This is perhaps one of the best books I have read recently. Mr. Berry wrote the book in1977, but it is still very applicable today. He looks at industrial agriculture and traditional agriculture; exploiting versus nurturing; unity versus diversity.

He gives us a picture of a healthy farm. “The health of a farm is as apparent to the eye as the health of a person. To look at a farm in full health gives the same complex pleasure as looking at a fully healthy person or animal. It will give the impression of abounding life. What grows on it will be thriving. It will seem to belong where it is; the form of it will be a considerate response to the nature of its place; it will not have the look of an abstract idea of a farm imposed upon an area somewhere or other. It will look cared for–groomed, so to speak–like a healthy person or animal; it will look lived in by people who care where they live.” He goes on the mention that the healthy farm will have a variety of trees, plants and animals, and be self-sustaining as far as possible.

Here is a yardstick by which to measure our own efforts here at the homestead.

KMH