Mick Costigan

RIP Wendell Berry. Many people remember Berry, if they know of him at all, as something like The Lorax: a caricature of environmental conservation. But a close reading of his work reveals incredible nuance in his eloquent defense of land and context as our inescapable economic ground truth. The titular essay of Berry's 1983 collection Standing by Words offers the most savage and irrefutable critique of internal accounting I've ever read — and by extension, the performative objectivity of scientific language like that used to evaluate nuclear risk or celebrate industrial productivity gains. With greater poetry, erudition, and force than any other writer I know, he explained how the very words we use sink us ever deeper into Reality Debt, and why, sooner or later, that bill will come due. But anyone who tries to reduce his work to a thesis on our severed relationship to soil and community does him a disservice. Berry's work always pointed beyond any particular compression, into the "system of systems" that cannot be captured or made fully legible and can only be known through direct engagement. Whether you agree or disagree with where he drew the line for himself — with his insistence to write pencil on paper, his infamous refusal to use computers, his commitment to farming with horse-drawn plows — he strove for over sixty years to meet the world as intimately and honestly as possible. His work wasn't about where we might arbitrarily decide to resist the forces of abstraction and extraction but a constant and unassailable call to deeper relationality. He reminded us that wholeness is good, that the modern quest for individual transcendence is a road to ruin, that real understanding is only possible in the reunification of careers into professions, professions into disciplines, disciplines into integrated lifeways. And that ultimately, any commitment to the inescapable truth of our lives — that economy takes shape within ecology — must also accept how little we know or can know, and therefore accept that "the system of systems is enclosed within mystery...this whole, as such, cannot enter into the accounting." In one of my favorite passages from Standing by Words, he says: "And so a reliable account is personal at the beginning and religious at the end. This does not mean that a reliable account includes the whole system of systems, for no account can do that. It does mean that the account is made in precise reference to the system of systems — which is another way of saying that it is made in respect for it. Without this respect for the larger structures, the accounting shrinks into the confines of some smaller structure and becomes specialized, partial, and destructive. "It is this sort of external accounting that deals with connections and thus inevitably raises the issue of quality. Which, I take it, is always the same as the issue of propriety: how appropriate is the tool to the work, the work to the need, the need to other needs and the needs of others, and to the health of the household or community of all creatures? ... "Unlike the problems of quantity, the problems of propriety are never 'solved,' but are ceaselessly challenging and interesting. This is the antidote to the romance of big technological solutions. Life would be interesting — there would be exciting work to do — even if there were no power plants or 'agri-industries' or space adventures. The elaborations of elegance are at least as fascinating, and more various, more democratic, more healthy, more practical — though less glamorous — than elaborations of power. "Without this ultimate reference to the system of systems, and this ultimate concern for quality, any rendering of account falls into the service of a kind of tyranny: it accompanies, and in one way or another invariably enables, the taking of power, from people first and last, but also from all other created things." 1/3