Another Turn of the Crank: Essays

by Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry proposes, and earnestly hopes, that people will learn once more to care for their local communities, and so begin a restoration that might spread over our entire nation and beyond. The renewed development of local economies would help preserve rural diversity despite the burgeoning global economy that threatens to homogenize and compromise communities all over the world.
From modern health care to the practice of forestry, from local focus to national resolve, Berry argues, there can never be a separation between global ecosystems and human communities - the two are intricately connected; the health and survival of one depends upon the other.
Another Turn of the Crank reaches to the heart of Berry's concern and vision for the future, for America and for the world.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Environment, Nature, Agriculture, Economics

109 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Wendell Berry is a conservationist, farmer, essayist, novelist, professor of English and poet. He was born August 5, 1934 in Henry County, Kentucky where he now lives on a farm. The New York Times has called Berry the "prophet of rural America."

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short book of essays helped give me some focus on how to see the world and approach my living in it. I relay needed the “pick me up” it gave me after getting so worn down every day by the evidence of the inconvenient truth of the mess we’re in and worn down by the ineffective polarization sowed by all the pundits out there. No one rises above the fray and gets you back to the basics like Wendell Berry, whom you might call an agrarian philosopher with a gift of language well honed by his writing of poetry and fiction.

I rarely read essays. Somehow my quest for truth and beauty in books is better quenched by experiencing them played out in the imagined world of a novel. But sometimes I can benefit from a straight shot of diagnosis of the world and what can be done to make it better. Here in this 1995 collection Berry points his mind at the issues of farming and food, sustainable forestry, local vs. global economies, environmental conservation, and the health care system. His messages have a common theme that rises above any label such as liberal vs. conservative: policies that support local economies have the best chance of fostering a fruitful balance of rural and urban collaboration, sustainable use of natural resources, and healthy lives of people and communities.

For Berry the loss of small farms since World War 2 is a great tragedy, driven by national policies that support large agribusiness. He sees hope in the local food movement that was already taking hold in the 90’s. Small farmers serving the market of their rural communities and nearby cities where they live have a better chance at long term use of the land and in generating local jobs than distant huge businesses serving faceless shareholders over quarterly profits in the global economy:

They are beginning to see that the social, ecological, and even the economic costs of such “cheap food” are, in fact, great. They are beginning to see that a system of food production that is dependent on massive applications of drugs and chemicals cannot, by definition produce “pure food.” And they are beginning to see that a kind of agriculture that involves unprecedented erosion and depletions of soil, unprecedented waste of water, and unprecedented destruction of the farm population cannot by any accommodation of sense or fantasy be called “sustainable.”

It may seem impossible to reverse the trend, but national policies can begin to level the playing field: “We need to make our farming practices and our food economy subject to standards set not by the industrial system but by the health of ecosystems and of human communities.”

He cites the time tested approaches of Amish farmers. In the case of sustainable forestry, he cites the century of economic productivity of the Menominee Tribe in Wisconsin, based on selective harvesting of trees with a lot of manpower rather than clearcutting with a lot of machinery. In another essay he addresses the tricky political issues around the rights of private landowners vs. that of the community at large on the uses of land and its resources. In a final piece, he captures some basic principles for how healthy local economies and sustainable stewardship of natural resources is connected to health of local communities and their residents by means of opportunities of healthy lifestyles and the benefits of rural life. His arguments against the health care industry’s dualistic attitude of treating the body as a machine is supported by the recent respect given to more holistic approaches.

These essays do not provide any form of in-depth analysis and detailed strategies for addressing our problems, but they do render a clear vision of principles to found such work on. A small investment of time in reading this could do wonders to lift the spirits of those of you in despair over where the world is heading.

[Eli · Rating 3 out of 5]

A difficult book for me. It starts amazingly, with powerful, well-considered ideas that I agree with strongly. It progresses to powerful, well-considered ideas I disagree with but still respect because of the mix of experience, emotion, and intellect that Berry employs to make his point.

The further the collection progresses, the more it descends into bully-pulpitism, as when Berry uses an essay about responsible forestry to rail against abortion, or a speech about community health to denounce the entire medical profession. I hate to think I'm becoming one of those atheists who can't read anything written by Christian writers, but ultimately, I couldn't connect to writing that paints the world as fallen and argues that the real reason we should care for the environment is to form a relationship with God.

[Kerfe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had read and heard ABOUT Berry; so when I saw this in the library, I decided to give it a try.

I'm torn between a 3 and a 4, but decided to go higher, mostly because of the content. The writing did not seem particularly inspiring to me although there are plenty of good sturdy quotable sentences and occasionally Berry's words do become poetic. His heart is, mostly, in the right place.

The theme of interconnectedness particularly resonates. Berry emphasizes that we are only part of the larger world of plants-and-animals, earth-air-fire-water, stars-and-galaxies: that we are transient caretakers both for the past and the future. When we consider only the monetary cost and not the human and ecological one...well, we all see the disfunctional result.

Consider what the author has to say about work:
"...contrary to all the unmeaning and unmeant polical talk about 'job creation', work ought not to be merely a bone thrown to the otherwise unemployed....work ought to be necessary; it ought to be good; it ought to be satisfying and dignifying to the people who do it, and genuinely useful and pleasing to the people for who it is done."

In our dreams.

He's not telling us anything we don't know: we've ceded control of our lives and our environment to multi-national corporations, to the "global economy", to making Big Bucks. Thoughtfulness and kindness are in short supply. Both political parties are too beholden to special interests to represent the ordinary citizen. The health system is oriented to profit and drugs, not healing. Humans are often reduced to expendable parts in the machine.

Berry's solutions are small and local and rural and self-sufficient. And he does have a point: when people are invested in their community, they look out for it and its citizens. Although Berry does not like cities, this is also and maybe especially true in New York City, my home. It is not the anonymous impersonal monolith he and many others envision, but an aggregate of communities, some of which are vibrant and stable and work, and some of which lack cohesiveness and human investment and don't. I agree with his wish to support local business, to enourage living and working in your community, owning a part of it, keeping neighborhoods integrated to include a cross-section of ages, income levels, beliefs, and though he does not consider this point, ethnicities.

But Berry also romanticizes the small rural town. He does not address the danger of insularity: small self-sufficient groups have a tendency to become afraid and intolerant of outsiders, of what is different. This is as true in a city community, where citizens live beside and on top of other neighborhoods, as a town miles away from the next one. There is always a need for openness to and integration with the larger world.

He also seems to see all technology as pretty much negative. Better to figure out how to use it in a positive way; I don't think it will go away.

But I'm glad Berry is out there with his ideas. Maybe we can't change the entire world, but you have to, and can, start somewhere: invest in and care for the place where you live.

[Emily]

It's been a while since I've read any of Wendell Berry's essays, and while I once again deeply enjoyed his discussions of the land, agriculture and community and his self-described "luddite" attitude that sometimes verges on grandfatherly grumpiness I became increasingly aware of the limitations of his perspective. For all he praises the fertility and abundance of the land in North America, and the community and land ethic if its indigenous peoples, and condemns the consequences of industrialism he never makes the connection between settler colonialism and many of those very same consequences. While he can praise the land management techniques of the Menominee, that praise only goes so far as to be taken as direction as how white land owners and communities should behave and relate. He doesn't even seem aware of what perspective he is writing from in this case, let alone how to address it There is also, as other reviewers noted, a very strange digression into pro-life politics. Like. Where did that come from Wendell? Stay in your lane??

[Tamara Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started reading Berry's poetry. Years after I began reading his fiction. In 2012, I started on his essays. I'm a fan all the way around. There's a certain amount of sentimentality he includes in each genre that never felt gratuitous, especially grounded in the soil of the good soil of robust language and story. Reading this book of essays, I found myself for the first time feeling like the Farmer's prophetic voice for our country signaled too little too late.

Granted, this book of essays compiled in the mid-1990's may have been right on time and I'm the one late to the conversation. Still, the social, agricultural and economic changes Berry recommends in many of these essays feel past-due. My son, Alex, and I read most of this book out loud together -- mostly because I felt like he needed some Wendell Berry thought in his repertoire before he began his undergrad political science studies. Eventually Alex admitted to me that reading the essays frustrated him more than anything else: "...I think they run the risk of being irrelevant because they're so demanding/impractical."

Still, Berry's words are full of a wisdom that add hearty nutrients for any reader. Perhaps, like the wisdom our parents and grandparents handed down, we benefit by rehearsing their words together, mining them for every amount of practical advice for our current time.

One of the passages where I thought Oh...I think someone paid attention to this warning!:

"If a safe, sustainable local food economy appeals to some of us as a goal that we would like to work for, then we must be careful to recognize not only the great power of the interests arrayed against us but also our own weakness...

...we should also understand that our predicament is not without precedent; it is approximately the same as that of the proponents of American independence at the time of the Stamp Act -- and with one difference in our favor; in order to do the work that we must do, we do not need a national organization. What we must do is simple: we must shorten the distance that our food is transported so that we are eating more and more from local supplies, more and more to the benefit of local farmers, and more and more to the satisfaction of the local consumers. This can be done by cooperation among small organizations: conservation groups, churches, neighborhood associations, consumer co-ops, local merlchants, local independent banks, and organizations of small farmers. It also can be done by cooperation between individual producers and consumers. We should not be discouraged to find that local food economies can grow only gradually; it is better that they should grow gradually. But as they grow they will bring about a significant return of power, wealth, and health to the people." (from "Farming and the Global Economy", p.6)

An example of Berry as a dooming prophet:

"This essay owes its existence to anxiety and to insomnia. I write, as I must, from the point of view of a country person, a member of a small rural community that has been dwindling rapidly since the end of World War II. Only the most fantastical optimism could ignore the possibility that my community is doomed by the overwhelming victory of industrialism over agrarianism (both North and South) in the Civil War and the history both subsequent and consequent to it...I can not see how a nation, a society or a civilization can live while its communities die." (from "Private Property and the Common Wealth", p. 47)

Words that will never be outdated:

"We know that we need to live in a world that is cared for. The ubiquitous cliches about saving the planet and walking lightly on the earth testify to this....For we not only need to think beyond our own cliches; we also need to make sure that we don't carry over into our efforts at conservation and preservation the moral assumptions and habits of thought of the culture of exploitation....

...And certainly we must preserve some places unchanged; there should be places, and times too, in which we do nothing. But we must also include ourselves as makers, as economic creatures with livings to make, who have the ability, if we will use it, to work in ways that are stewardly and kind toward all that we must use.

...We must include ourselves because whether we choose to do so or not, we are included. We who are now alive are living in this world; we are not dead, nor do we have another world to live in. There are, then, two laws that we had better take to be absolute.

The first is that as we cannot exempt ourselves from living in this world, then if we wish to live, we cannot exempt ourselves from using the world.

...If we cannot exempt ourselves from use, then we must deal with the issues raised by use. And so the second law is that if we want to continue living, we cannot exempt use from care.

...A third law...is that if we want to use the world with care, we cannot exempt ourselves from our cultural inheritance, our tradition. ...we are in it because we are born in it...But that only means that the tradition too must be used with care.

...And so I am proposing that in order to preserve the health of nature, we must preserve ourselves as human beings -- as creatures who possess humanity not just as a collection of physical attributes but also as the cultural imperative to be caretakers, good neighbors to one another and to the other creatures.

...When we include ourselves as parts or belongings of the world we are trying to preserve, then obviously we can no longer think of the world as "the environment" -- something out there around us. We can see that our relation to the world surpasses mere connection and verges on identity. And we can see that our right to live in this world, whose parts we are, is a right that is strictly conditioned. We come face to face with the law...we cannot exempt use from care. There is simply nothing in Creation that does not matter. ("The Conservation of Nature and the Preservation of Humanity")

[Jeffrey Howard · Rating 4 out of 5]

This delicate collection of short essays provides for an easy introduction into Wendell Berry's views on community and society.

While centered around rural communities—including forest commonwealths—the substance of his attention focuses on local economies. He wants to revitalize them because they are the way in which we can best conserve some very important human values: affection, conviviality, social bonds, care, mutual aid, stewardship, place, belonging, humility (limits), cooperation, harmony, and unity.

Being an advocate of such "gentle" virtues, Berry does at times show his "angry farmer" side—which is still fiercely endearing. He loves the land, people, the Sacred, and the simple pleasures that come from hard work, understanding how one fits into the local collective, and laying hold of the wisdom that comes from knowing which aspects of modernism are dehumanizing (and to be resisted).

He has an engaging style that is smart and warm. I think most will find him difficult to categorize, as he says so himself: "Nothing that I have written here should be construed as an endorsement of either of our political parties as they presently function. Republicans who read this book should beware either of approving it as 'conservative' or of dismissing it as 'liberal.' Democrats should beware of the opposite errors."

He is an agrarian at heart. At times one will see his skepticism of corporations and free-market fundamentalism. On other pages, readers will encounter his criticisms of government agencies (specifically, non-local ones) and their technocratic workings. He is pushing back against mechanistic or mechanical views of living that hollow out our spiritual and moral lives.

Wendell Berry is a communitarian thinker, focused on changing the way we relate to the earth. As social capital continues to decline and global climate change and ecological devastations further, Berry stands as a sage elder reminding us that many of the answers to our problems already reside in the tradition we inherited (in his case, the Western canon).

We need to become better stewards—of each other, ourselves, and nature. We are not masters of one another or of "the environment." Berry's focus on fraternity (or gender-neutral fellowship, if that reads more appropriately to you) and community as foundational sources of the good life are deeply moving for me.

Having spent much of adulthood obsessed with unbridled individualism as a supreme good, I find his correction healing. The question we should be asking ourselves regarding any governmental policy, technology, or production, is: does this improve the commonwealth of my community or not? Or perhaps alternatively, will embracing this enable my community to better flourish?

Some of his views may skew more socially conservative (in the religious right) sense, but his advocacy for communitarian approaches to living resonate. One genius innovation, as far as I see it in communitarian thought, is that its elevation of local communities and cultures allows for and encourages people to live according to what works best in their particular contexts. He pushes for the particular over the universal (in many ways). Rather than having a bland universalism, wherein all locales look and live the same, a focus on local community fosters a patchwork of truly diverse and thriving landscapes—human and non-human.

[Rachel Yoder · Rating 5 out of 5]

I already have a natural inclination towards building community and I've always been highly idealistic, but shoooooo! Wendell Berry always turns up the intensity in my heart towards the ideal life. I want to be Wendell Berry when I grow up.

[Ric Cheyney · Rating 5 out of 5]

EXEMPLARY ARGUMENTS

It was a pleasure to read this little collection of six essays by Mr Berry. He is probably the sanest, wisest voice in the American agrarian movement. I have been a big fan since I read The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry.

There are a few occasions when his clauses get a bit stretchy and difficult to keep track of, but most of the time he delivers beautifully crafted expressions of clear meaning and compelling argument.

In this book, as in most of his non-fiction, he is writing about land and the way it should best be used by human communities. These essays chart a path from the importance of experienced, human-scale farming, through the health issues arising from industrial-scale agriculture and the exploitation of land by people with no connection to the locality, and eventually on to issues of health in general.

I admire Mr Berry and his work enormously and am usually in agreement with his ideas and opinions, but in this book it was when I disagreed with him that I realised what a civilised and civilising approach he uses, taking all the heat out of an issue and exploring it with a calm, compassionate voice that challenges the reader to think hard and respectfully about exactly what they believe, and why. This exemplary approach is exactly what is needed if we are to find healthy ways to look after the Earth and each other.

[Austin Spence · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of his best writing comes when Wendell decides to merge the gap of people and another aspect of life (be it the economy, communities, environment, farming, etc.), which happen to be the focus of the last two essays in this book. Wendell creates a need for us to understand the inherent goodness of a place and fight for the preservation of that same goodness on the local level. Grateful for these collections, even if some essays are about the logging industry in rural Kentucky.

[Ian Hicks · Rating 4 out of 5]

An insightful collection of essays that got me thinking about aspects of agriculture, food, and local community that I've never considered before. Berry presents his arguments in such a thoughtful, soulful, and rational manner that his writing never feels tedious or pedantic. He is a pleasure to engage with—even when he argues points I vehemently disagree with (and there are a few). All in all, a great read filled with plenty of nuggets to meditate on and mull over. It definitely made an impact on the way I look at farming and food consumption (I have never wanted to join a local food co-op and/or become an avid frequenter of farmer markets more in my life).

[Kimberlee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely excellent!

[Ray Du · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like many of Wendell Berry’s collections of essays, Another Turn of the Crank is about how to live on planet Earth.
This book consists of five essays, all of which focus on agriculture and the community. Modern farming is much different from traditional farming. Here is how:
Modern farming puts its emphasis on efficiency while traditional farming sees farming as an art.
The mass deployment of farming machinery has ousted people from the farm. It is as if farmers are “specialists” who are easily replaceable by other “specialist.” But the reality is worse than that: farmers go into the labor force and live on low wages.
What should we make of that?
For the rural community, continuous losses of member would ultimately devastate the community both physically and culturally. The community would gradually diminish until it is completely eradicated. The farmers who temporarily survived, but the fate is forever put at the hands of whom Berry calls “absentee owners” who are essentially exploitative. For the urbannites, they are not secure either. The massive production of agricultural produce unequivocally leads to the bad quality of food because of added chemicals, fertilizers and drugs. Living far away from the land means they’ll know what has been done to their food.
The same things are plaguing the forest economy. Berry’s hometown does not have a large forest economy. although he does live near a forest, it saddens him that they don’t have a “forest culture“ and “forest economy” so much they have a tobacco culture and tobacco economy. Because of that, farmers tend to see trees as a kind of crop which they can harvest and make money from as quickly as possible. The consequence is ecological as much as it is financial. Such a cheap forest economy is not sustainable and the emphasis on trees that make the most money at the quickest pace brings about monoculture and soil erosion. Berry regards local forests critically to the community. An ideal forest economy “would aim to join the local human community and the local natural community or ecosystem together as conservingly and healthfully as possible.” Indeed so.
Berry also addresses the issue of private property and commonwealth. He is for private property because only if people have investment can they really be responsible. Ownership of the land can naturally make people take good care of it. But the land should also be owned by a commonwealth that is the local community. Berry associates the private land ownership with intimacy between worker and place and says “The possibility of intimacy between worker and place is virtually identical with the possibility of good work.” Agreed. But the right of private ownership does not in any way mean the right to destroy the land. Berry’s antagonism here is corporations who are granted the legal status of a person but never hold themselves responsible for the damages they do.
We have the right to use the land and nature. We should care for them. Care is from religion and it is a religion per se. Unprovable it might be, we should believe in it, or else we are reduced to believing the things that can be sensibly disapproved.
We are not healthy unless we are whole. We are only partially whole if we only have a complete body. A good personal standard of health not only includes “singular integrity,” but it also includes “communal being.” We can be healthy and whole if we are in a health community. The common misconception with regard to death views death as something to be abhorred and avoided. It is a bit ridiculous considering how painful and meaningless people’s lives are in the modern context. Not to put our own health on the back burner. But we should prize the health of our community which we've all been neglecting.

[Vel Veeter]

This is a small collection of essays arguing for environmental security, environmental policy, forestry management, and farm and community wellness.

Wendell Berry is an essayist, memoirist, novelist, and farmer from Kentucky. It’s most interesting to look at this collection of essays from the context of 1995. Because of the focus on local communities, local economies, but also the environment, it’s honestly a perfect little book arguing for sustainable lifestyle. In a lot of ways he was responding to soil erosion, NAFTA, perhaps leftover anxiety over the Ozone layer, and other mid90s issues. But there’s a kind of timelessness about these essays or more so, a kind of relevancy to today’s issues with a refocusing on climate change.

Berry’s essays are passionate, sober and sobering, and direct in their earnestness and intellectual vigor. They are deeply political, but discusses the issues with particular partisan politics. This approach to showing the flawed general politics of either Democrats (or liberals) and Republicans (or conservatives) are on display here, and most remind me of AIM founder and Native American activist Russell Means’s arguments in his essay “For the world to live, Europe must die”. The push there is that whether the exploitation of natural spaces and natural resources is given over to communist or capitalist aims matters little to the preservation of those resources.

While I clearly have a bias to the specific politics of one party, one thing I have been thinking about it is how to find common ground with people I deeply disagree with, not to be friendly, but to increase engagement. The investment in local foods, local economy, and the local environment is likely the most useful place to look, especially given how the limitations of oil in the next 100 years will likely force more locality.

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't agree with WB on everything, and this book is dated (plus there's maybe not a little nostalgia), but his ecological/social/cultural imagination is inspiring.

[J.D. Steens · Rating 2 out of 5]

In this essay collection, Berry outlines a philosophy of life. He lauds rural life. There’s a lot to be said for that, especially given its rapid disappearance and the hefty indifference it has engendered among non-rural people. The virtues of rural life are its relative simplicity (the absence of “noise”), the looking out for each other, and the working together for the (local) commonweal. Still, I’d say there’s a good amount of rural romance in this book and I don’t find his philosophy practical or appealing.

Berry is against big government and large corporations. Both, he believes, have done great harm to rural life. But he is also against the heavy-duty environmentalism, where economics are set aside to the detriment of local people. He advocates the creation of a new, locally-based, political movement that tends to local concerns, but I am a skeptic. Many environmental lands would not have been protected at all were it left to the locals who, understandably, and in alliance with corporate firms (forestry, mining, agriculture), are driven by their own economic needs (as well as their desire to use these lands as they want - in sort of a borrowed landscape way). Given that, the corrective movement often comes from the top – from federal government intervention, which is the very opposite of what Barry proposes. There is a lot to be said for locally-derived solutions in opposition to top-down management, especially if they are not of a winner-take-all approach, which is a big “if,” but much of this doesn’t work without the backdrop of federal law. Berry is confident that locals will do the right thing, but I am not.

Berry’s philosophy is infused with Biblical love. “We live in a world that was created and exists and is redeemable by love,” he writes, but then adds, “I did not mean to sentimentalize it. For this is also a fallen world. It involves error and disease, ignorance and partiality, sin and death.” Then he gets back to love and digs in. Love is divine love. It is immortal love. It is earthly love. Love rules. He contrasts this not so much with greed and other traditional non-love things, but with modern technology that leaves out the human element, which is to say for him, the things of love. Thus, in his last essay, he goes into some detail about the flaws of modern medicine and the lack of love in its practice, especially in sterile hospitals. I thought this was over the top – knocking technicians and nurses and doctors and the care they provide to their patients.

The cover design for the book – of a plucked chicken hanging from a string - leaps out. Berry talks about care for life (he’s against abortion), but then takes a good swipe at non-meat eaters. Humans, he says, are part of life, and they need to use the environment, which includes killing animals for their meat. There are alternatives to meat eating, to killing animals who want to be free as we are free, to just live and be left alone. Berry would, understandably, be horrified to see an aborted baby hanging from a string but, really, what is the ethical difference between that and a plucked chicken? To say that one is human and the other is not sets up a slippery slope. It says that care for non-human life is qualified. Human needs are paramount to environmental needs and non-human life and take precedence over them when there is conflict. In this crowded world, human breeding and life styles being what they are, there will always be conflict with the natural world which will, like this plucked chicken, end up hanging by a string.

[Sydney E · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like the way Wendell thinks. A little more Christian than I typically go for, but I can still agree with him on many points and much of his world view. Hopeful too, which is so important right now. This set of essays could have been published today, it feels current.

“…I am convinced that the death of my community is not necessary and not inevitable. I believe that such remnant communities as my own, fallen to the ground as they are, might still become the seeds of a better civilization than we now have… that is what keeps me awake, that difficult hope….more and more people seem to know that we now have to choose consciously, perhaps for the first time in history, between doom and something better.”

“…we cannot exempt use from care. There is simply nothing in creation that does not matter.”

and isn’t that beautiful?

“I am not “against technology” so much as I am for community…I believe that the community…is the smallest unit of health…”

His writing about grief and death also hit home a lot. Lovely to read and dip in and out of these last few months.

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This six essay collection felt a little repetitive at first (in relation to Berry’s other collections), but the last two essays are some of my favorites. “The Conservation of Nature and the Preservation of Humanity” emphasizes the need and difficulty to care. Caring is uncomfortable and requires great effort, but it begins with small changes. “Health is Membership” really resonated with me after 2022. The essay feels familiar- I believe I’ve read it in another collection - but I was glad to read it again. Berry discusses the need for genuine care of humans in hospitals, from real rest to good food, and how the world of love comes together with the world of efficiency (yet not able to meet) in this otherworldly place. His discussion of immortal love in the face of death is a favorite passage of mine. When love enters a hospital, “it is confident in the face of defeat because it is superior to whatever happens…” “the world of love continues and of this, grief is the proof.”

[Anthony Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

When he is writing about economics, the author knows exactly what he is talking about. He makes clear what his grief is with the present state of industry and agriculture in this country, has ideas on how to fix it, and can get you riled up to join in the effort (this book is nearly thirty years old, but sadly little has changed yet). This is a book that deftly maneuvers right past the political bullshit and addresses what it is people actually want (or should want): healthy and prosperous (not necessarily rich) local communities independent of corporate exploitation.

The last couple of essays sort of lose the thread, though, as the author ventures into other topics with just as much confidence but much less clarity. The final essay is about the medical industry, and it quickly becomes clear that the author simply knows little about it and is thereby frustrated with it. Still, the first two-thirds of this book make the whole volume worth your time.

[Syu Martirosyan · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.7

There are unanswered questions about the global economy, that Berry raises, two of which are paramount: How can any nation or region justify the destruction of a local productive capacity for the sake of foreign trade? And how can people who have demonstrated their inability to run national economies without inflation, usury, unemployment, and ecological devastation now claim they can do a better job in running a global economy?

[Paul Cloutier · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great little book on the importance of thinking and acting locally. Berry is a great example of someone I don't always agree with but his arguments are so thoughtful and well reasoned it is like debating with a close friend. I always come out smarter even if it is just thorough perfecting and refining my own opinions.

[Matthew Noe · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of few Berry collections that is rather uneven for me. Health is Membership is Berry at his best for example. The Conservation of Nature and Preservation of Humanity however is a rough read if you don't take follow his thoughts on abortion, as I do not.

[Nolan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an excellent short read. For the first couple essays, I struggled with what seemed to be Berry's vague solutions to the problems of ecology. But the last few essays on community are among the best I've ever read.

[Liliana Bettolo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aligned with 90% of the essays, had a lot of mistrust once he started talking about pro-life, but he addressed the consternation this particular essay brought on and he kept it in his works. There are some really impactful quotes that I won't ever want to forget!

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The Conservation of Nature and the Preservation of Humanity” might be Berry’s best essay?

[Neal Weaver]

Thought-provoking & inspiring

[L Cole · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was difficult to rate. Some of the essays/stories are a 5 and some are a 2/3. Berry has a way with his wording and is elegant in his writing.

[Pamela Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Berry challenges agriculture in a interesting Biblical way.

[Brian Beatty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although I can’t say that I relate to his religious side, Berry’s sense of community and such makes perfect sense to me. I like his thinking and values, and wish more felt this way.

[S · Rating 4 out of 5]

The last two essays are especially timely

[Lynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Always interesting...