I've only read the first essay at the moment ("A Native Hill"), but even in the first few pages Berry has articulated something I have always felt about the family farm and my relationship with it. That sense of place and connection with a piece of land has probably shaped my more than any other single entity. I learned this from my grandfather, even though I have no concrete memory of ever talking about it with him; it was just a feeling that permeated every aspect of his life. I learned spirituality and human virtue in church, but I did not understand them until I was in the hills.
I went to school to learn about nature because I knew that connection with the land was something I couldn't sacrifice, even if I was never a farmer and was not at home. The problem is that the more you learn about nature, the more depressing it gets, even as you are better able to understand and find joy in the beauty an potential of natural processes. Aldo Leopold wrote in A Sand County Almanac that "One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. . .An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be a doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise."
There is no way to un-see the ecological suffering of the world once you begin to recognize the signs. I don't even recognize that many of them yet, but I read and I learn about local history and I am not blind to the fact that the nature I grew up in bears only a fragile suggestion of the tales of the America of the past.
Berry echoes the sentiments of Thoreau, Muir, and Leopold because the celebration of nature in America must too often also be a lament for what has been lost. He writes "We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. . .to the incalculable disadvantage of the world and every living thing in it."
This passage refers to nature, but that understanding of my own life as part of a natural community informs my understanding of my role in a human community as well. I have been very fortunate in my life, and part of that good fortune includes isolation from the symptoms of disease and failure in our society. Of course I heard about them, but they never affected me so I did not understand. I still do not understand much, but the more I learn, the more I am able to see the World of Wounds permeates society as well as nature.*
I started reading this book to escape for a moment, the turmoil of American politics as the new administration grabs for power and boldly lies to the public. The only problem is that the book is a reminder that it is not fair of me to escape. I have done nothing to earn that luxury, and I will largely not be the one to suffer the consequences of apathy. I can never stop trying to improve the condition of the human community, just as I cannot turn away from the natural community. I am not capable of that, or if I am, I refuse to be. Maybe I can distract myself for a while when my inadequacy becomes too much, but the wounds will still be there calling me back to do something, to try, even if I cannot accomplish much myself.
So I leave you with a final insight from Berry, that does more to explain why I will never be able to truly leave America or the South:
"I am forever being crept up on and newly startled by the realization that my people established themselves here by killing or driving out the original possessors, by the awareness that people were one bought and sold here by my people, by the sense of violence they have done to their own kind and to each other and to the earth, by the evidence of their persistent failure to serve either the place or their own community in it. I am forced, against my own hopes and inclinations, to regard the history of my people here as progress of the doom of what I value most in the world: the life and health of the earth,and the peacefulness of human communities and households.
And so here, in the place I love more than any other and where I have chosen among all other places to live my life, I am more painfully divided within myself than I could be in any other place."
-Madilyn
*It seems one of the tenants of Agrarianism is that the wounds in society are linked to the separation between society and the natural community. Since I'll probably be writing more about this book, I will get to that later.