The Rustless Axe of Wendell Berry

[J Fowler]

I love Wendell Berry's writings. His work has helped reshape my worldview, so distorted by the strong current of accepted cultural norms. Wendell Berry is a philosopher-farmer-writer-poet-environmentalist-Christian who isn't afraid to spit in the face of deeply entrenched systems of corruption. He speaks of such deep corruption though, that often his poetic prophet's finger is pointing at us all; and nobody likes to hear that old call to "Repent!" But repent we must. And his rustless axe lays waiting at the roots.

Reading Wendell Berry's writings is like being baptized by John in the Jordan river. He's no Messiah, but there is no clearer Elijah of our times than a man who calls modern America a wilderness in need of cultural and spiritual renewal (from the ground up). With a sharp tongue he cuts us all down to the bone and invites us to a new way of living. One where we care for each other and the world in mutual responsibility. His is a cultural critique that holds modern America's embedded values to the fire of a Biblical worldview. I often find some part of myself to have caught fire as I digest his words. Talk about 'heart-burn'!

As an introduction to his writings I wanted to share this environmental manifesto that is really a prophetic call to us all. Beyond ecology, this is a spiritual wake up call to our cultural senses. Though written in 2001, I find that this is now more relevant than ever: (Source: Grist.org)



Thoughts in the Presence of Fear A post-Sept. 11 manifesto for environmentalists by Wendell Berry

I. The time will soon come when we will not be able to remember the horrors of Sept. 11 without remembering also the unquestioning technological and economic optimism that ended on that day.

II. This optimism rested on the proposition that we were living in a "new world order" and a "new economy" that would "grow" on and on, bringing a prosperity of which every new increment would be "unprecedented."

III. The dominant politicians, corporate officers, and investors who believed this proposition did not acknowledge that the prosperity was limited to a tiny percent of the world's people, and to an ever smaller number of people even in the United States; that it was founded upon the oppressive labor of poor people all over the world; and that its ecological costs increasingly threatened all life, including the lives of the supposedly prosperous.

IV. The "developed" nations had given to the "free market" the status of a god, and were sacrificing to it their farmers, farmlands, and communities, their forests, wetlands, and prairies, their ecosystems and watersheds. They had accepted universal pollution and global warming as normal costs of doing business.

V. There was, as a consequence, a growing worldwide effort on behalf of economic decentralization, economic justice, and ecological responsibility. We must recognize that the events of Sept. 11 make this effort more necessary than ever. We citizens of the industrial countries must continue the labor of self-criticism and self-correction. We must recognize our mistakes.

VI. The paramount doctrine of the economic and technological euphoria of recent decades has been that everything depends on innovation. It was understood as desirable, and even necessary, that we should go on and on from one technological innovation to the next, which would cause the economy to "grow" and make everything better and better. This of course implied at every point a hatred of the past, of all things inherited and free. All things superceded in our progress of innovations, whatever their value might have been, were discounted as of no value at all.

VII. We did not anticipate anything like what has now happened. We did not foresee that all our sequence of innovations might be at once overridden by a greater one: the invention of a new kind of war that would turn our previous innovations against us, discovering and exploiting the debits and the dangers that we had ignored. We never considered the possibility that we might be trapped in the webwork of communication and transport that was supposed to make us free.

VIII. Nor did we foresee that the weaponry and the war science that we marketed and taught to the world would become available, not just to recognized national governments, which possess so uncannily the power to legitimate large-scale violence, but also to "rogue nations," dissident or fanatical groups and individuals -- whose violence, though never worse than that of nations, is judged by the nations to be illegitimate.

IX. We had accepted uncritically the belief that technology is only good; that it cannot serve evil as well as good; that it cannot serve our enemies as well as ourselves; that it cannot be used to destroy what is good, including our homelands and our lives.

X. We had accepted, too, the corollary belief that an economy (either as a money economy or as a life-support system) that is global in extent, technologically complex, and centralized is invulnerable to terrorism, sabotage, or war, and that it is protectable by "national defense."

XI. We now have a clear, inescapable choice that we must make. We can continue to promote a global economic system of unlimited "free trade" among corporations, held together by long and highly vulnerable lines of communication and supply, but now recognizing that such a system will have to be protected by a hugely expensive police force that will be worldwide, whether maintained by one nation or several or all, and that such a police force will be effective precisely to the extent that it oversways the freedom and privacy of the citizens of every nation.

(Read the rest of this manifesto over at Sustainable Traditions: continue reading)