E is for Ecological

The British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) once quipped that the whole history of European philosophy could be characterized as a "series of footnotes to Plato." Something similar could be said about any and all writing about integrity food in the twenty-first century:  it's all just footnotes to Wendell Berry.

Essentially, everything that needs to be said about the right relationship to food – and, by extension, right relationships among people in society – has already been said, and better, by Wendell Berry (b. August 5, 1934).  The Kentucky farmer, poet, novelist, and essayist has been writing about food integrity – or the loss thereof – for well over six decades at the time of this writing.  Often referred to as a latter-day Jeremiah, Berry has been calling, with the prophet's clarity and doggedness, for his fellow Americans to recognize their blindness and repent from our destructive habits, chiefly our modern ways of producing food and obtaining other raw materials, which will ultimately, if continued, destroy our ability to produce food and access life-enhancing materials.  Often accused of being a Luddite, the author of The Unsettling of America (1977) and dozens of other books, has actually proven to be a veritable visionary, quite ahead of his time in terms of understanding what is necessary for a society, for communities and families, to truly flourish.

And just what is that?  At bottom, although he prefers the term "agrarian," Berry's vision is ecological, in the broadest and most fundamental sense of that word.  The prefix "eco-" derives from the Greek word oikos meaning "home" or "household".  And when coupled with the suffix "-logical" – logos in Greek signifying the deeply embedded (and, by connotation, divinely ordained) reason, nature, or plan for something – the word ecological literally means "the nature of home."  To study ecology, then, is nothing more than to study the internal logic of home, to endeavor to understand, and to live by, the Creator's templates for the only home we humans have been given: Earth.  What Wendell Berry has been calling us to do, in other words, is simply to get our house in order. 

Have we listened?  Barely, if at all.  Over the decades Berry's writing has spanned, we have only continued to do more damage to our home, not less.  We have continued as a species – led by those of us in the techno-industrial West – to foul our nest at breathtaking speed and with staggering "success."  We have continued, with what can only be characterized as willful blindness, to reject the core insight of ecology: that everything is related to everything else, that everything is connected to everything, that "to be," as the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh gently insists, "is to interbe."  We – and perhaps still only some of us – are only now, at this late hour, with our own destruction encroaching upon us, beginning to come to grips with the hard truth: that to harm our home is to harm ourselves. 

But the flipside of that hard truth is a beautiful one, and it is the very truth that Wendell Berry has sought, with seemingly quixotic persistence, to keep in front of our eyes these many years: that to care for our home is to care for ourselves.  This is the essence of ecology.

May we heed the prophet's call to repentance.  May we take up the work of repairing and restoring our home.  May we, as Shannon Boyd, director of the Wendell Berry Farming Program at Sterling College, has said, "practice radical homecoming."