April 3 Tip: Read about Wendell Berry on Despair & Hope

Wendell Berry: Despair is easy, but he insists on hope

(the April 3 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace)
http://blogs.courier-journal.com/faith/2013/04/01/wendell-berry-despair-is-easy-but-he-insists-on-hope/

The book’s theme was simple — that the health of land and the health of people were inseparable. It represented at once a cry of lament and a manifesto written in prophetic fury against industrial-scale agriculture, strip mining and other land exploitation.
In that 1977 work, “The Unsettling of America,” Kentucky farmer and author Wendell Berry wrote, “We must, I think, be prepared to see, and to stand by, the truth: that the land should not be destroyed for any reason.”
People “no longer know the earth we come from,” Berry wrote. “… The people responsible for strip-mining, clear-cutting of forests, and other ruinations do not live where their senses will be offended or their homes or livelihoods or lives immediately threatened by the consequences.”
This week, some of the nation’s top names in movements promoting sustainable environmental and agricultural practices will gather in Kentucky to assess the building influence of the book.
Three and a half decades after its publication, “it is remarkable how current and relevant the book is in its critique of industrial culture and in its proposals for a better way forward,” said Norman Wirzba, professor of theology, ecology and rural life at Duke Divinity School.
Berry’s daughter, Mary Berry, an organizer of the conference on “From Unsettling to Resettling,” said that when her father wrote the book, he had barely any allies outside his family.
“And now look,” said Berry, who, like her 78-year-old father, operates a farm in Henry County, Ky. “Good people have this on their minds everywhere.”
People are far more concerned now about supporting local food markets, knowing what’s in their food and preserving the land, Mary Berry said. Still, at the same time, the losses in family farms and topsoil continue.

Conference features speakers

The conference — which is fully booked — is scheduled for Friday at the Brown Hotel in Louisville and Saturday at St. Catharine College in Washington County and features such speakers as Bill McKibben, a journalist who has sounded the alarm on global warming; Wes Jackson, president of the Kansas-based Land Institute and a leader in the sustainable-agriculture movement; and both Mary and Wendell Berry.