This essay was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom’s kind permission.

This might be an opportune time to make a disclosure: I am a BP shareholder. Admittedly, I’ve never attended the company’s annual meeting, and if I did, I would have very little weight to throw around.

Those who believe that the price of my BP stock will recover in the next year might be wrong. Even if the stock bottoms out, however, that won’t restore a shattered Gulf, nor will it change a system that prizes easy consumption and deferred responsibility. We can only correct for the catastrophe oil has wrought by living according to a different measure.

I own two shares of BP stock. I received my stake in the company as a Christmas gift in 1989, when I was 14 years old. The previous June, I had taken a “summer enrichment” course in the Des Moines public schools, designed as an introduction to the world of business. The teacher gave each of us in the class a modest hypothetical budget to invest in the stock market.

Earnest young capitalists, we made our picks and then followed the quotes in the morning paper. I invested heavily in Amoco and finished the summer feeling that my portfolio had done quite well. As a result, my younger brother decided that I should receive a real piece of the enterprise that was once John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. He conspired with my mom to get me an Amoco share for the holidays.

I’ve watched the oil industry as an interested party ever since. In 1998, my Amoco stock split, turning my one share into two. Then, a few months later, the company was acquired by BP. This “oil mega-merger,” as the BBC called it, gave me a stake in yet another energy titan. It also allowed the combined corporation to shed 6,000 jobs, prompting its new chief executive, Sir John Browne of BP, to confidently assure the press that “he hoped the merger will increase pre-tax profits of the two partners by ‘at least’ two billion dollars by the end of 2000.”

The merger proved profitable indeed. Over time, the price of my stock nearly doubled. I received dividends every three months, usually of around 60 cents per share. And by the mid-2000s, BP was making some $20 billion per year in profits. The numbers looked good.

Of course, these are not the only numbers to consider. In fact, in the wake of BP’s disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, they don’t seem like the right numbers at all. It’s time for a different accounting: What has that catastrophic spill cost our society? What price do we pay for our dependence on oil? How do we measure these things?

Costs of business

When I first began receiving Amoco’s annual reports, they featured photos that celebrated robust industrial capabilities, like multicolored sunsets behind fields of horsehead oil pumps in Texas. These days, there’s still some of that, but the reports tend to have more shots of solar panels, white windmills, and smiling school children (our future). Someone looking at the annual review the company sent me in 2001, for instance, might have been fooled by the photos of lush, palm-heavy landscapes in Indonesia, California, and Trinidad into thinking that it was a mailing from Conservation International.

Such changes in public relations were born of tragedy. Back in 1989, not three months before my summer business class, the Exxon Valdez collided with the Bligh reef in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, breaching its hull. Even according to conservative estimates, it spilled more than 10 million gallons of oil and contaminated more than 1,200 miles of ecologically sensitive coastline. For years afterwards, we saw Exxon deal with the fallout of the catastrophe.

However many thousands of boats and booms the company deployed, it only managed to recover about 8 percent of the oil released. The rest evaporated, coated beaches, or sank to the bottom of the sea. The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council estimates that 250,000 seabirds, 2,800 sea otters, 300 harbor seals, 250 bald eagles, up to 22 killer whales, and billions of salmon and herring eggs were killed by the spill. Two decades later, some 16,000 gallons of leftover oil still poison wildlife in the Prince William Sound.

The cost to the planet was steep. The cost to Exxon could have been severe as well. While the company claims that it spent $2.1 billion on its clean-up efforts, it might have had to pay many times that in fines and lawsuit settlements. The government initially threatened $5 billion in criminal penalties, and in 1994 a federal jury ordered the company to pay $5.2 billion in punitive damages to Alaskans who had filed a class-action lawsuit. For a time, things at Exxon looked grim.

Although these were the worries of a rival corporation, Amoco investors did get a taste of what Exxon was experiencing. In 1990, after a dozen years of litigation, a federal judge in Chicago ordered my company to pay $132 million in damages to the French government and other parties. They had all been harmed 12 years earlier when the Amoco Cadiz ran aground off the coast of Brittany, releasing 68 million gallons of oil. At the time, it was the largest tanker spill ever. It killed millions of sea urchins and mollusks, thousands of tons of oysters, and almost 20,000 birds.

In terms of the overall business, however, the judgment was only a blip on Amoco’s radar screen. In the end, Exxon never made any $10 billion payout for its disaster either. The first Bush administration allowed the company to plead guilty to a small number of charges and settled for penalties and fines of around $1 billion. The judge who ultimately approved the settlement had earlier worried that the amount was too low: “I’m afraid these fines send the wrong message,” he said, “and suggest that spills are a cost of business that can be absorbed.”

It was a prescient concern, especially given the resolution of the class-action suit. In that arena, Exxon’s lawyers proved patient and skilled. They held up the case in court for years until, in 2008, nearly two decades after the spill, the Supreme Court ruled that damages paid by the company would be limited to an exceptionally absorbable $507.5 million.

Will climate disobedience heat up in the months before Copenhagen?In the early morning of October 8, 2007, a small group of British Greenpeace activists slipped inside a hulking smokestack that towers more than 600 feet above a coal-fired power plant in Kent, England. While other activists cut electricity on the plant’s grounds, they prepared to climb the interior of the structure to its top, rappel down its outside, and paint in block letters a demand that Prime Minister Gordon Brown put an end to plants like the Kingsnorth facility, which releases nearly 20,000 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each day.

The activists, most of them in their thirties and forties, expected the climb to the top of the smokestack would take less than three hours. Instead, scaling a narrow metal ladder inside took nine. “It was the most physically exhausting thing I have ever done,” 35-year-old Ben Stewart said later. “It was like climbing through a huge radiator — the hottest, dirtiest place you could imagine.”

In the end, the fatigued, soot-covered climbers were only able to paint the word “Gordon” on the chimney before, facing dizzying heights, police helicopters, and a high court injunction, they were compelled to abandon the attempt and submit to arrest. They could hardly have known then that their botched attempt at signage would help transform British debate about fossil-fuel power plants — and that it would send tremors through an emerging global movement determined to use direct action to combat the depredations of climate change.

The case took on historic weight only after the Kingsnorth Six went to court, where they presented to a jury what is known in the United States as a “necessity” defense. This defense applies to situations in which a person violates a law to prevent a greater, imminent harm from occurring: for example, when someone breaks down a door to put out a fire in a burning building.

In the Kingsnorth case, world-renowned climate scientist James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, flew to England to testify. According to the Guardian, he presented evidence that the Kingsnorth plant alone could be expected to cause sufficient global warming to prompt “the extinction of 400 species over its lifetime.” Citing a British government study showing that each ton of released carbon dioxide incurs $85 in future climate-change costs, the activists contended that shutting the plant down for the day had prevented $1.6 million in damages — a far greater harm to society than any rendered by their paint — and that their transgressions should therefore be excused.

What surprised both Greenpeace and the prosecution was that 12 ordinary Britons agreed. The jury returned with an acquittal, and the freed defendants made the front pages of newspapers throughout the country. The tumult also produced political results. In April, British energy and climate change minister Ed Miliband announced a reversal in governmental policy on power stations, declaring, “The era of new unabated coal has come to an end.” Discussing Kingsnorth, Daniel Mittler, a long-time environmental activist in Germany, told me recently, “it was probably one of the most impactful civil disobedience cases the world has ever seen, because it was the right action at the right time.”

If Not Now…

The idea that now is the right time for more resolute action to address the climate crisis is spreading fast enough to dot the global map with hot spots of disobedience. As it turns out, the Kingsnorth Six are part of a rapidly growing population. Joining them are the Dominion 11, arrested after forming a human blockade to stop the construction of a coal plant in Wise County, Virginia, in November 2008, and the Drax 29, who went on trial this summer for boarding and stopping a train delivering coal to a power plant in North Yorkshire, England, last year.

In fact, arrests are piling up quicker than journalists can coin name-and-number nicknames. The Coal Swarm website keeps track of an ever-lengthening list of protests. New headlines now appear weekly:

“Activists scale 20-story dragline at mountaintop removal site in Twilight, WV”
“14 Arrested at TVA headquarters in Knoxville, TN”
“10 activists board coal ship in Kent, England”
“Activists shut down Collie Power Station, Western Australia”

In August 2007, Al Gore, Nobel-prize-winning author of An Inconvenient Truth, told Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, “I can’t understand why there aren’t rings of young people blocking bulldozers and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power plants.” By the time Gore made that statement, some young people had already started blocking bulldozers, and many more, young and old, would soon follow.

Still, Gore can be excused for feeling that such measures were overdue. With global warming, perhaps more than any other issue, there is a disjuncture between a widespread acknowledgment of the gravity of the situation we face and a social willingness to respond in any proportionate way.

The landmark 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggested that a two degree Celsius rise in average temperature, likely by 2050, would create severe water shortages for as many as two billion people and place between 20 percent to 30 percent of all plant and animal species at risk of extinction. It gets worse from there. An April 2009 Guardian poll reported: “Almost nine out of 10 climate scientists do not believe political efforts to restrict global warming to 2C will succeed.” More probable, they believe, is “an average rise of 4-5C by the end of this century,” a level that could create hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing areas afflicted by desertification, depleted food supplies, or coastal flooding.

That these consensus predictions may feel remote and improbable to much of the American public does not reflect a real scientific debate, but rather a common reluctance to face unpleasant facts — and also the considerable success of the coal and oil lobbies in dampening the electorate’s sense of urgency about the issue. Those two realities are precisely what direct action intends to confront.

An Inconvenient Politics

When Vice President Gore started endorsing civil disobedience, Abigail Singer, an activist with Rising Tide, a leading network of grassroots climate groups, noted, “It’d be more powerful if he put his body where his mouth is.” She had a point.

As it happens, 68-year-old James Hansen, arguably the most famous climate scientist alive, has been less reticent about putting himself on the line. His involvement has furnished a great deal of mainstream respectability to those turning to more confrontational means of expressing dissent, and the trajectory of his political engagement catches an important trend.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Hansen published many groundbreaking papers demonstrating the reality of a warming planet. Just as the work scientists had done in the early 1980s proving that human activity was creating a hole in the ozone layer had resulted in a 1987 treaty against chlorofluorocarbons, Hansen assumed that the work of those documenting climate change would result in swift legislative remedy.

“He’s very patient,” Hansen’s wife Anniek told Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker. “And he just kept on working and publishing, thinking that someone would do something.” This time around, however, industrial interests proved far more entrenched. In order to help move glacially slow climate negotiations forward, Hansen started speaking out and, more recently, has begun risking arrest at demonstrations.

Of course, there is never a shortage of people who will question the tactics of civil disobedience and direct action. “We’re every bit as worried about climate change as the protestors,” a spokesperson for the E.On corporation, the energy company that runs Kingsnorth, said upon the announcement of the famous verdict, “but there are ways and means to protest and we would suggest their demonstration was not the way to do it.”

There are far less compromised skeptics, too. Many harbor a distaste for social-movement theatrics or operate on the belief that, sooner or later, science will speak loudly enough to force the political situation to sort itself out. Harvard University oceanographer James McCarthy expressed such a view when the IPCC released its 2007 report. “The worst stuff is not going to happen,” he said, “because we can’t be that stupid.”

Sadly, the latent hope that politicians will eventually come to their senses cannot suffice as a political strategy. The stark facts of segregation in the American South never put an end to that longstanding injustice; it took an unruly civil rights movement to force change. In this case, presumably less farsighted and more profit-hungry energy companies than the climate-concerned E.On have invested tens of millions of dollars in convincing elected officials and newspaper editorial boards that reducing emissions of greenhouse gases is neither practical nor particularly needed. The operative force at work here is not stupidity, but political power.

Hansen and others motivated to confront the industry head on have concluded that, unless there is a public counterbalance to the organized money of those who profit from the status quo, what science has to say will be largely irrelevant, no matter how theoretically convincing it may be. Unless citizens themselves become inconvenient, the truth will remain a minor consideration.

The Disaster You Can See

It is no accident that, on June 23rd, when Hansen was arrested for his first time, it was in West Virginia, the heart of coal country. Because coal is the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions both in the United States and worldwide, and because there is enough coal left in the ground to heat the planet to catastrophic levels, that fossil fuel has been the focus of much new protest. As long as U.S. and European power plants continue spewing coal smoke, their governments will have absolutely no credibility in trying to influence the policies of rising economies such as China and India. Nonetheless, current U.S. legislation ensures that coal burning will continue largely unchecked for decades to come.

In West Virginia, concerns about coal’s impact on the atmosphere have intersected with a local environmental atrocity known as mountaintop-removal mining, a practice that Senators John McCain and Barack Obama both claimed to oppose in the presidential campaign, but which continues today. This has made Appalachia the heart of direct action on the climate-change issue in the U.S. — or, as a blog tracking area protests puts it, “Climate Ground Zero.”

“You stand at the edge of one of these mountaintop removal sites and you’ll never feel the same way again,” says Mat Louis-Rosenberg, a staffer at Coal River Mountain Watch in southern West Virginia. The practice turns rolling mountains and valleys into flat, desolate moonscapes. Locals regularly hear the blasts of surface mines from their homes and then drink the resulting contaminants in their well water. When newly created lakes of toxic coal waste give way — as happened last December as a billion gallons of sludge flooded 300 acres of land near Harriman, Tennessee — they are the ones whose homes stand immediately downstream.

These dangers have given organizers a chance to create campaigns that connect the abstractions of climate change to specific sites of environmental ruin. “You can get a visceral and immediate sense of how bad this is,” says Louis-Rosenberg. “It’s not an invisible gas and a bunch of science that most people don’t understand.”

This year, in a series of escalating initiatives, environmentalists in the area have chained themselves to rock trucks, obstructed coal roads, and climbed up a huge crane-line mining machine to halt its work. A delegation of concerned citizens, including Hansen, crossed a police line onto the property of Massey Energy, a company responsible for mountaintop removals. Louis-Rosenberg places such direct action alongside a raft of other activities: community organizing, research for environmental impact statements, and gathering co-sponsors for a Congressional ban on filling valleys with mining waste. “Ultimately, things will have to see their resolution in some sort of federal regulation or legislation,” he says. “But at this point there is not the political will to deal with the crisis. I see it as my role as an activist to create that political will.”

The Next “Seattle Moment”?

When the Kingsnorth decision was announced, an E.On representative said the company was “worried that this ruling will encourage other protestors to engage in similar actions at power plants across the country.” The worry was justified.

The diverse local protests taking place internationally are starting to feel like part of something larger, especially since they are already beginning to have an impact. Of the 214 new coal plants proposed in the United States since the year 2000, more than half have been cancelled, abandoned, or put on hold. The website Coal Moratorium Now, which tracks public campaigns, shows that citizen dissent played a critical role in many of the cancellations or delays. Other results have been less obvious but no less real. Facing greater resistance, and the prospect of costly public relations battles, power companies are simply proposing to build fewer coal plants than was once the case.

Environmental organizers are planning for still larger mobilizations. In March, hundreds of people, including Hansen and 350.org campaign organizer Bill McKibben, joined in human chains to block the entrances to a target of enticing symbolic importance: Washington, D.C.’s Capitol Power Plant, a coal-burning facility built in 1910 that provides steam and refrigeration power to Capitol Hill. Police avoided making arrests, which could have easily exceeded highs for any previous act of civil disobedience around climate issues in American history. Nonetheless, the gathering produced a desired effect: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sent a letter to Acting Architect of the Capitol Stephen Ayers requesting that the plant switch to natural gas.

On a global level, activists are starting to envision an international day of action that might launch disparate local campaigns into the mainstream spotlight and create a more unified global movement. A buzz of expectation and organizing now surrounds a December U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, where environmental ministers and other officials will gather to create a new treaty to replace the Kyoto protocol. The conference is taking place almost exactly 10 years after the 1999 Seattle protests which overwhelmed the ministerial meetings of the World Trade Organization and altered the shape of globalization debates for years after.

Hopes for recreating an event of that magnitude are based on more than just a coincidental anniversary year. Before Seattle, localized activity by global justice advocates had similarly swelled — with a wave of student anti-sweatshop drives, environmental boot camps, organic food gatherings, corporate ad spoofs, indigenous rights battles, and cross-border labor campaigns already simmering. Seattle united these into a recognized “movement of movements” more potent than the sum of its parts.

Organizers have suggested that as many as 100,000 people might take to the streets in Copenhagen. Among those planning around the Denmark conference, there is currently a debate about whether to converge on the conference itself or to target a heavily polluting company somewhere nearby as an example of bad climate-change behavior.

Likewise, in the United States, where events will be timed to take place in solidarity with the demonstrations in Copenhagen, there is a debate about whether to try to work with the Obama administration or turn up the heat on it. In the end, a range of tactics will no doubt be deployed in Copenhagen and in other cities around the world. A coalition of groups, including the normally satiric Yes Men, is managing a site called BeyondTalk.net, which allows people to sign a pledge expressing their willingness to join in nonviolent civil disobedience as the conference date nears.

As of this writing, 3,210 people have signed on. Compared with the numbers of people who will ultimately have to be persuaded of the need to act in order to force meaningful solutions to climate change, that remains a modest tally. In terms of the growing levels of dedication and personal sacrifice it represents, its significance is far greater. After all, that’s more than 3,000 people willing to take the chance that a determined action, even a botched one, might ultimately reverberate far and wide. It’s more than 3,000 people who may just be willing to climb for hours through a huge radiator in order to stop the planet from becoming one in all too short a time.

Wendell Berry, right at home.

Wendell Berry, 70 years old today, has established himself as many things in his lifetime: a veteran sage of sustainable agriculture; a progressive defender of virtue and tradition; one of our most famous farmers to renounce the tractor; and one of our most acclaimed authors to shun the computer.

To appreciate Berry, you must first understand that he has staked his life on a gamble of faith — “the faith being,” he says, “that if you make a commitment, and hang on until death, there are rewards.” His own commitment, most of all, is to place: to finding a home and staying there.

While keeping himself put, Berry has constructed a politics that has changed little over his 45-year literary career, yet remains iconoclastic. In the 1970s, he made new-guard environmentalism look aged by marrying it with traditional agrarian sentiment. Then he made “conservatives” look like reckless futurists by pointing to the threat that unchecked market growth and technological expansion pose to both community values and ecological well-being. In a nation ostensibly locked into a well-defined political divide, he represents an American voice that avoids easy classification.

In the early 1960s, Wendell Berry was on his way to a bright career in the literary world. The envy of many other young, cosmopolitan authors, he had published a book of poems and a novel. He finished a fellowship at Stanford and accepted a coveted teaching position at New York University.

Then, in 1964, Berry decided to abandon the city and return to his rural roots. Attempting to dissuade him, elder faculty members warned, “Young man, you can’t go home again.” Yet Berry did just that. He moved to Henry County, Kentucky — where his forebears had worked the land for more than 150 years — to tend his family farm and to teach. There he has remained, producing more than 40 books of poetry, fiction, and essays.

When Wendell Berry was born on Aug. 5, 1934, there were some 6.8 million family farms in the U.S. By 1975, the number had fallen by more than 60 percent, to 2.5 million. The size of individual farms had skyrocketed. And the use of petrochemical inputs, rarities before World War II, had soared. These changes were less the product of technological inevitability than of design. Through subsequent administrations, the Department of Agriculture told farmers to “get big or get out.” Earl Butz, secretary of agriculture under Richard Nixon, proclaimed that farming “is now a big business” and that the family farm “just like the modern business enterprise … must adapt or die.”

The Unsettling of America

By the 1970s, there was widespread discontent among farmers about the impact of agribusiness methods: the monocultures and pesticides, the expansion and debt. Wendell Berry crystallized and sharpened small farmers’ inchoate despair. In his 1977 The Unsettling of America, he produced the most withering critique of industrial agriculture to spring from a nascent movement for sustainable farming.

“Without regret,” Berry wrote, “with less and less interest in the disciplines of thrift and conservation … our present agriculture wastes topsoil, water, fossil fuel, and human energy. … We are eating thoughtlessly, as no other entire society ever has been able to do.”

City dwellers could ill-afford to ignore these trends, he argued. “[N]o matter how urban our life, our bodies live by farming; we come from the Earth and return to it, and so we live in agriculture as we live in flesh.” Elsewhere in the book he concluded, “To live at the expense of the source of life is obviously suicidal.”

In the two and a half decades since he wrote those words, Berry has continued to voice the same concern. As he put it in 1999, “Our farm policy, like our energy policy, is simply to use up all we can.” Opposing this mindset, he has emerged, through his essays and literary works, as a key spokesperson for agrarianism, a philosophy that celebrates the small farmer’s careful stewardship of the land. Like agrarians before him, Berry invokes Jeffersonian ideals: “Cultivators of the Earth are the most valuable citizens,” the founding father wrote. “They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bands.”

As the mention of a powdered-wigged president suggests, agrarianism has been around for a long time. It has often been populist, but rarely ecologically minded. Scholar Kimberly Smith writes, “If Berry’s ecological agrarianism doesn’t look particularly innovative to us, it is because he makes the marriage of agrarian and environmental thought seem so natural that we assume agrarianism always implied ecological sensitivity — or that ecological sensitivity always implied support for family farming.” In fact, before Berry, the gulf between farmers and environmentalists was nearly as deep as that between loggers and tree-sitters.

The family farm — where
environmentalism becomes
old again.

Berry established himself as a key figure in bridging a gap filled with mutual suspicion. He was born among older farmers and had returned to their fold. But he had also spent time surrounded by the emerging New Left and had campaigned against the wanton destructiveness of strip mining. He was at once a native and a “back-to-the-lander.” He represented the new face of organic farming, and its old face as well.

Smaller, Slower, Better

“Like almost everybody else, I am hooked to the energy corporations, which I do not admire. I hope to become less hooked to them. In my work, I try to be as little hooked to them as possible. As a farmer, I do almost all of my work with horses. As a writer, I work with pencil or a pen and a piece of paper.”

Thus began the essay that, perhaps more than any other, has generated controversy and criticism for Wendell Berry: his 1987 work, “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer.” As far back as The Unsettling of America, some supporters had suggested that Berry’s unabashed admiration of the Amish gave his detractors too easy a target. But it was the writer’s rejection of Windows and Mac that really hit a nerve. The essay, which was published in Harper’s, prompted a spray of derisive letters.

Berry was undeterred. Then as now, when branded a Luddite, Berry rises to the group’s defense. “These were people who dared to assert that there were needs and values that justly took precedence over industrialization,” he writes; “they were people who rejected the determinism of technological innovation and economic exploitation.”

We would do well to maintain such skepticism today, Berry contends. He does not reject new inventions out of hand. He flies in airplanes, drives a car, and cuts wood with a chainsaw. But he is not willing to accept technological “advances” for their own sake. He challenges us to ask “what higher aim” each new innovation serves, and what its likely impact on our communities will be.

In a society that steadfastly equates technology with progress, such questioning is heresy. It would condemn Berry to the outhouse of public opinion — except that, with his impeccably logical prose, he makes his position seem so close to common sense. Instead of rolling our eyes, we wonder why we didn’t think of it first.

Take his view of the computer: “[A] computer, I am told … will help you write faster, easier, and more. … Do I, then, want to write faster, easier, and more?” he asks. “No. My standards are not speed, ease, and quantity. I have already left behind too much evidence that … I have written too fast, too easily, and too much.” He writes elsewhere: “Going off to the woods I take a pencil and some paper … and I am as well equipped for my work as the president of IBM.”

Quoting Edward Abbey, Berry charges that the global economy operates on “the ideology of the cancer cell.” That is, it must grow to survive. “The aims of … limitless growth, limitless wealth, limitless power, limitless mechanization and automation,” Berry writes, “can enrich and empower the few (for a while), but they will sooner or later ruin us all.”

This is the larger point of his technological criticism. You may not agree with Berry about where to draw the line, but if we are to survive, surely the line must be drawn.

Freedom, in Berry’s view, is not about unconstrained individual autonomy, but rather about choosing which constraints we will abide by and which communities we will be responsible to. It is about making active choices in an age of passive consumption. In a highly mobile era, when many people are involuntarily pushed about by the global economy, his choice to root himself in a single county is less a throwback than the exercise of a very modern and privileged freedom. Likewise, in a time marked by unthinking adulation of all things electronic, careful consideration of technology is less antiquated than avant-garde: “If the use of a computer is a new idea,” Berry writes in a sly moment, “then a newer idea is not to use one.”

Left, Right, Left, Right

Berry is unconcerned with people labeling his personal acts of resistance “insignificant.” “Thoreau gave the definitive reply to the folly of ‘significant numbers’ a long time ago: Why should anybody wait to do what is right until everybody does it? It is not ‘significant’ to love your own children or eat your own dinner, either. But normal humans will not wait to love or eat until it is mandated by an act of Congress.”

This attitude of personal responsibility defines Berry’s politics. It also infused several of his early poems, which looked critically upon the Vietnam War. In “February 2, 1968,” he writes:

In the dark of the moon, in the flying snow, in the dead of winter,
war spreading, families dying, the world in danger,
I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.

The poem offers an eloquent personal response to the ravages of war. At the same time, it pointedly avoids embracing the protest movement that so troubled Lyndon Johnson.

Indeed, Berry’s political orientation has been notoriously difficult to label. If his anti-war sentiment, his environmentalism, and his distaste for the market economy have suggested that he is a leftist, other characteristics have made some wonder if Berry isn’t, at heart, a conservative.

In an environmental movement more accustomed to New Age mystics and bioscience agnostics, Berry’s devout Christianity stands out. His stalwart adherence to a Biblical framework has endeared him to many more-conservative churchgoers and has produced metaphors uncommon in mainstream environmental literature. (Topsoil “is very Christ-like,” he writes in his 1968 essay “A Native Hill.”)

Berry’s praise for the Amish and his lectures on marital fidelity suggest that he favors a stern social order. And, whether he is speaking of bad behavior (“foolishness,” “pride,” “sin,” “error,” “carelessness”) or good (“character,” “virtue,” “moral law,” “fidelity,” “reverence”), his language is moralistic, which risks making him sound like an agrarian Dr. Laura.

Several factors, however, indicate that Berry has succeeded in making progressive ideas appear conservative, and not vice versa.

Having undertaken a serious reckoning of his own faith and having grounded himself in the Christian tradition, he shows no trace of zealotry. He acknowledges a deep debt to Buddhism and proposes, in the wake of 9/11, that “[o]ur schools should begin to teach the histories, cultures, arts, and languages of the Islamic nations.” His willingness to struggle openly with religion ends up enhancing his moral authority. Combining his care for the earth with his articulate spirituality, he is able to propose that a properly Christian economy (like a properly Buddhist one) is unlikely to permit strip mines. Finally, Berry avoids self-righteousness by implicating himself in the evils he criticizes. He, too, is hooked to the energy corporations, and he won’t hesitate to remind you of it.

A friend once said to me of Berry, “If he were a movement, I would oppose him.” But he is not a movement, and he would not care to be one. Rather, he is a moral voice. He means not to be emulated so much as carefully considered.

That he has no interest in disciples is fortunate, for his many admirers could hardly fit in Henry County. At 70 years old, Wendell Berry is reaping the rewards of having found his place in the world. He admonishes his readers to do the same.

Berry writes in his poem, “Stay Home”:

I will wait here in the fields
to see how well the rain
brings on the grass.
In the labor of the fields
longer than a man’s life
I am at home. Don’t come with me.
You stay home too.