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Re: Yuri receives hypocrite of the week award (was Re: Ecological Economics and Entropy)
bg364@torfree.net (Yuri Kuchinsky) wrote:
>
> charles barber (cmbarber@cmbarber.easynet.fr) wrote:
>
> : the world problem is over consumption, not over population. consider the
> : following quote from "Preserving Wildness' by Wendell Berry, the
> : American writer, farmer, and ecologist
>
> First, I'd like to ask how long ago were these lines written by Berry?
> Was it a while ago? Perhaps the circumstances changed since then?
>
Wendell Berry is Port Royal's, Henry County, Commonwealth of Kentucky
most famous son. ( I myself, don't even place on the top 100 list)
He was born a long time ago, long enough to remember
when there was no agricultural price support system, when hard work and
good crops might mean that you starved.
Wendell has been Kentucky's poet laurate, eaten with presidents, talked
to royalty, and he has talked to his mules. Wendell farms with mules,
and lives as simple of a life as he can. Wendel believes in the future,
in generation yet born, in honest work and sweet loam.
>From Farming, a Handbook
The cities have forgot the earth,
and they will rot at heart
till they remember it again.
In the streets, abstraction
contents with outcry,
hungering for men's flesh.
In the city I measure time
by the life of no living thing,
but the running down
of engines. I grew a skin
that did not know the sun. Now
once more I have shrugged
in my city skin and slought it off
and emerged, new-waked.
The Wages of History
Men's negligenc and their
fatuous ignorance and abuse
have made a hardship of this earth.
Living on these plundared
hillsides of Kentucky is harder
for crops and for men too
than the Tuscany or Japan, where care
had had a history centuries
old. As if chance and death
and sorrow were not enough,
we must contend with stones
laid bare by the dream of
ease to be be found in money, ais if
our forefathers dug in the dark
virgin loam for gold, and found
only the bare stones and the grave's
ease. Doomed, bound and doomed
to the repari of history or to death
we must cover over the stones
with soil for tomorrows's bread
while the present eludes us.
For generations to come we will not
know the deceny and the poised ease
of living any day for that day's sake,
or be graceful here like the wild
flowers blooming in the fields,
but must live drawn out and nearly
broken between past and future
because of our history's wages,
bad work left behind us,
demanding to be done again.
>from FARMING, A HANDBOOK
poems by Wendell Berry
I was also there at the hearing for Marble Hill
nuclear plant, when Mr. Berry stood up and
said
"Gentleman, all of what you say may be true,
but when this place is built, how many of you
will live in the shadow of your construction.
You will go back to were you came, and leave me and
my future generations to contend with what you have
done"
If you call yourself an environmentalist, than you better
read some Mr. Berry. There are fewer men that I have greater
respect for.
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