I don’t have a lot to say about Wendell Berry, the poet and essayist who died this past week. I was aware of him, and I even have one of his books: LIFE IS A MIRACLE, subtitled “An Essay Against Modern Superstition,” published in 2000, a screed against E.O. Wilson’s 1998 CONSILIENCE (reviewed here), which I gather from the dust jacket, casts science as a bully and supporter of industry and commerce. (There’s no index, and I haven’t sat down to read the whole thing.) As far as I can tell, this book made no impression on Wilson and his later thinking, nor on anyone else. There is no Wikipedia entry for it.
We can get some idea of Berry’s other thinking from the various tributes this week.
LA Times, 3 Sept 2026: Wendell Berry, celebrated author and fierce defender of agrarian life, dies at 92
Wendell Berry, a Kentucky farmer and writer whose work advocated fiercely for working landscapes and working people, died “suddenly and peacefully” on Monday at his home in Port Royal, Ky., according to his family. He was 92.
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Berry championed sustainable farming and rural community preservation and railed against industrial agriculture and corporate agribusiness.
He received a 2010 National Humanities Medal, presented by Barack Obama. He continued to write into old age.
He continued later that the two discussed how industrialism “grows only by consuming, once and for all, the living world.”
Mary said she wanted people to know that, yes, her father was worried and wouldn’t have written so much if he weren’t terribly concerned about the future of rural America, but she wants people to understand that he was a man of great hope.
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Well, OK conservatives: how do you keep your population growing and expect to live forever on rural family farms? The math doesn’t work. Oh but wait —
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The Atlantic, Joe Fassler, 5 Sep 2026: Why Wendell Berry Didn’t Worry About the Future, subtitled “His life as a writer and farmer was informed by a simple, clarifying idea: Forget tomorrow, and work toward what is good today.”
Justified by reading Matthew (!).
This is the essence of the conservative problem. Think for today, never mind the future. Not even as existential threats to the survival of humanity rear their heads.
Fassler writes:
I was surprised, at first, that Berry felt so drawn to this specific moment from the Bible. Jesus’s instruction to not worry about the future seemed at odds with much of what Berry had written. Many of the social and environmental problems that Berry railed against were really problems of short-term thinking, including the pursuit of quick profit, the extractive poisoning of the land, and the love of cheap thrills over deeper, more hard-won pleasures. “Think not of tomorrow” seemed to better describe the ethos of Berry’s longtime nemeses: coal-industry strip miners, big agribusiness, the global financial system.
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And here’s a remembrance by Barbara Kingsolver [shared NYT link]
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And this goes with that.
Salon, Troy Farah, today: Samuel Alito is complicit in climate disaster, subtitled “The Supreme Court justice has made millions from companies that profit from our planet’s destruction”
Do conservatives really feel no responsibility for the future? The world their grandkids will live in? Anecdotally, I saw a YouTube video from some MAGA guy who said outright that he didn’t care if his big truck belching smoke into the air was making climate change worse, because, to paraphrase, he wouldn’t be around to experience the damage.
Short-term, selfish, thinkers.
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Quick links.
- 41% of Canadians now consider the US an enemy
- Christians broke the rules at Burning Man, and claim victimization for being thrown out
- The moral panics of conservatives, about transgender surgeries supposed happening in school, which is nonsense.
