Summary: A collection of essays representing a cross-section on Berry’s critique of America’s consumptive culture as well as his ideas on good agriculture.

I suspect I am not the only one who thinks that all of Wendell Berry’s essays are just variations on a theme. But two things make “variations on a theme” either banale or briliant–the beauty of the theme and the skill of the composer. In the case of Berry, the theme is the utterly essential theme of living well in our place–our own patch of land, our community, our country, our planet. The variations include the disciplines that have shaped how we live in our place, the need to think little and local, the illusions of our industrial dreams, and the value of literacy and the importance of the language that we use.

The main entrée of the collection is an eleven part extended essay titled “Discipline and Hope.” Berry considers the various expressions of the industrial, exploitive disciplines of our technology–our focus on efficiency, consumption, the ways we abstract from the practical realities of the land. He contrasts our linear vision of progress with the cycles of birth, growth, fruit, decline, and death by which the earth is renewed each year. He calls for us to embrace at-one-ment.

He lays the basis for this in his opening essay, “A Secular Pilgrimage,” observing the seeming hatred of the creation by those professing belief in the Creator of all things, contrasting it with the testimony of “secular” nature poets who viewed the world with awe. This is followed by the appetizer of “Absence and Return,” in which he describes returning home from the West Coast and the renewed awareness as he walks his land that “everything is supposedly named and numbered and priced, are unlikely to know what lies out of sight of the paved roads.” Then we have a “sweet” essay paying tribute to another of those nature poets, William Carlos Williams, whose work he describes as “a sustained and intricate act of patriotism in the largest sense of that word.”

The final two appetizers offer complementary tastes, perhaps salad dishes, around the idea of thinking local in “The Regional Motive” and “Think Little.” The latter essay first appeared in The Last Whole Earth Catalog and challenges the slogan to “Think Big.” He contends that while we are organizing trash cleanups, we need to pick some up ourselves, turn off lights, lower the thermostat, and refuse to buy the latest electric gadget, and grow some of your own food. “The Regional Motive” challenges our nomadic drive with one that stays home and lives in a way that preserves land for those who follow us.

Following the main essay, Berry offers two desserts that leave the taste of the whole meal with us. One, “In Defense of Literacy” argues for the practicality of literacy and the awareness of the importance of the words we use to describe what Charles Taylor calls our “social imaginary.” The other, “Mayhem in the Industrial Paradise” illustrates with the strip mining of Kentucky the philosophy playing out throughout the country of narrow measures of efficiency and profit that do not account for the people displaced, the soil polluted, the rivers ruined that cost as much or more to restore as the profits of the companies who inflicted these losses without requiring them to repay.

What is served up here is a wholesome country meal of Wendell Berry essays. Admittedly, some of the cultural references are dated, but people have turned up their noses to the hearty meal, preferring industrial fast food, as it were, to the wholesome messages in these essays. So, while the cultural references are dated, the underlying truths are not, and if anything, more desperately needed today. Everyone is still looking for technological fixes to our climate crisis that will allow us to preserve our consumptive lives. We have not heard Wendell Berry’s message calling us to a different way of living in our world, to a wholesome feast that is in “continuious harmony” with the life of our world. ( )