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Articles by Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry farms in Port Royal, Ky., with his family. He is the author of more than 30 books of fiction, essays, and poetry, including Citizenship Papers, The Unsettling of America, Another Turn of the Crank, That Distant Land, and A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997. His latest novel, Hannah Coulter, is published by Shoemaker & Hoard.

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There are moments in a nation’s — and a planet’s — history when it may be necessary for some to break the law in order to bear witness to an evil, bring it to wider attention, and push for its correction. We think such a time has arrived, and we are writing to say that we hope some of you will join us in Washington, D.C. on Monday, March 2, in order to take part in a civil act of civil disobedience outside a coal-fired power plant near Capitol Hill.

We will be there to make several points:

Coal-fired power is driving climate change. Our foremost climatologist, NASA’s James Hansen, has demonstrated that our only hope of getting our atmosphere back to a safe level — below 350 parts per million CO2 — lies in stopping the use of coal to generate electricity.

Even if climate change were not the urgent crisis that it is, we would still be burning our fossil fuels too fast, wasting too much energy, and releasing too much poison into the air and water. We would still need to slow down, and to restore thrift to its old place as an economic virtue.

Coal is filthy at its source. Much of the coal used i... Read more

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  • Environmentalists have given up too much by not being radical enough

    Photo: © 2000 David-Lorne Photographic We are destroying our country — I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no […]

  • A post-Sept. 11 manifesto for environmentalists

    I. The time will soon come when we will not be able to remember the horrors of Sept. 11 without remembering also the unquestioning technological and economic optimism that ended on that day. II. This optimism rested on the proposition that we were living in a “new world order” and a “new economy” that would […]