Wendell Berry, revisited

On the long bus ride to and from Chicago, I had some time to kill, so I did some reading not related to any of my classes (although it inevitably connected!). I read a few essays out of Wendell Berry's "Bring It To the Table: On Farming and Food", a collection of a bunch of his works. Lot of good things to think about!

One of my favorite bits is from "A Defense of the Family Farm (1986)":

Throughout this period of drastic attrition on the farm, we supposedly have been "subsidizing agriculture," but, as Wes Jackson has pointed out, this is a misstatement. What we have actually been doing is using the farmers to launder money for the agribusiness corporations, which have controlled both their supplies and their markets, while farmers have overproduced and been at the mercy of the markets. The result has been that the farmers have failed by the millions, and the agribusiness corporations have prospered...

From "Conservationist and Agrarian (2002)":

I am a conservationist and a farmer, a wilderness advocate and an agrarian. I am in favor of the world's wilderness, not only because I like it, but also because I think it is necessary to the world's life and to our own. For the same reason, I want to preserve the natural health and integrity of the world's economic landscapes, which is to say that I want the world's farmers, ranchers, and foresters to live in stable, locally adapted, resource-preserving communities, and I want them to thrive."