'A writer, not a talker'

 

“Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.” – Wendell Berry

 

Born in Louisville, KY in August of 1934, Berry died this past Monday after an extraordinary life as an environmental activist, cultural critic and farmer who also just happened to be one of America’s most prolific authors.  Through his essays, short stories, poems and books (both fiction and nonfiction), his writing served as an extended conversation about the pastoral life he valued and lived in his native Kentucky.

 

The “good life,” Berry said, included sustainable agriculture, appropriate technologies, healthy rural communities, connection to place, and the pleasures of good food.   “All people should be interested in farming,” he said, “because eating is an agricultural act.” A longtime leader for Earth Day (which brought the two of us together at an event in Northfield, Minn. back in the mid-1980s), Berry wrote one of the key texts of the environmental movement, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture.  

 

Berry received both the National Humanities Medal and the prestigious Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement.   He was the first living writer (in 2015) to be inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.  Active until the end, his last book was 2025’s Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story, the ninth novel in his Port William series.  He wrote more than 50 books and hundreds of essays, poems and short stories.

 

“Well,” he said, “I’m a writer more than I am a talker.”