In February I heard Wendell Berry speak at Samford University in Birmingham. Two preacher friends and I showed up with tickets to the VIP reception for Mr. Berry so we could meet and talk with him before the lecture. We intended to book a meeting of our clergy study group at his farm in Kentucky but we found no way to do that without being awkward. So we awkwardly inquired if he ever invited groups like ours to visit at his farm. He told us his house was rather small and our group of 9 Methodist preachers and Episcopal priests rather large, so we let the subject drop. Besides that, I stumbled trying to quote a short poem he wrote on work and prayer: "work, done in gratitude, kindly in well is prayer." He told me that was Catholic: laborare est orare, to work is to pray.
I did not know beforehand the topic of Mr. Berry's lecture so I was pleasantly surprised when he read a not yet published short story titled "Sold." I anticipated from the title itself that it would be a story about a farm foreclosure due to the get-big or get-out policy of the US Department of Agriculture. I was partially correct. There was no foreclosure because the farm he wrote about remained small and diversified. It was about Beulah and Grover Gibbs, a farming couple who started out as tenant farmers until Beulah's parents died and left them the farm and house to tend and occupy. Once Grover died, a neighbor named Coker Brand entered a sharecropping agreement with Beulah to cultivate the fields and tend the flocks and herds for her. When her health failed, however, and she decided to sell the farm at auction and move closer to the doctors, that's when the tragedy occurred. Coker Brand, was outbid by Mr. Big Rocks. Coker knew what the place was worth as a farm. Mr. Big Rocks bought the place for strip mining. He immediately began to bulldoze everything, house and barn and fences, and erased all memory of the farm with its pastures, fields, and streams. "Sold" meant violated, abused, valued not for its history of providing for families but for the natural resources that could be extracted from it unnaturally and permanently.
The Samford audience was
spellbound. Mr. Berry, my favorite
living writer, does not own a computer or a cell phone. He is a farmer who still plows with a
horse. He reads a lot but is not distracted by
mounds of cyber information. Instead, he pays
close attention to the people around him and the details of their lives. When he points out traits and expressions of ordinary
people’s lives in his writing, it rings true and connects deeply in us. He commands attention because people matter
enough to command his.
I asked the first question during the Q&A that followed his reading. I said that many sources tell us that by the year 2050 there will be 9 billion people living on earth, 2 billion more than today. At the current rate of production, we do not have arable land to grow enough food to feed the world over the next 38 years. However, representatives of biotech and chemical agricultural corporations tell us not to worry; they have ways of radically increasing productivity on the land we already have through chemical and hybridization technologies. My children and grandchildren do not like that answer. So I asked, "Mr. Berry, in light of this dilemma, what do you see as our preferred future?" He first said he could not predict the future. Then he replied, "If we can be scared enough about what may happen in 2050, a lot of people stand to make a lot of money and still not necessarily feed hungry people." He also said that he was hesitant to answer the question because he never wants to say there are too many people. "If we ever say there are too many poeple, and I've seen this in my lifetime, somone will name the excess." And yet, he said death by starvation is a terrible thing, and what I described is paramount to a national emergency. We should take the problem seriously, but not panic. If we are patient, we will not accept chemical and biotech solutions that have already created a 6,000 to 7,000 square mile dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico from agricultural runoff. Patience should lead us to find some answers to the problem of feeding the world in our not too distant past.
That not too distant past was a reference to the lifestyle of Grover and Beulah Gibbs and Coker Brand in Wendell Berry's short story. It is a lifestyle of living in harmony with the land and the natural environment, of working the land in ways that give to it and take from it in mutual sustainability. In 2010, global human migration from the country to the city reached a milestone. Over 50 percent of the world population now lives in cities, defined as municipalities with a population of 50,000 or more. That shift is synonymous with the abandonment of the lifestyle that Grover and Beulah Gibbs enjoyed--investing in the land and its animals, livestock, and crops that sustained them.
Yesterday I conducted a funeral for a man in his late eighties who was an engineer for NASA, on Dr. Verner von Braun's Apollo team. And yet, his family recalled how he grew enough vegetables in his back yard and on a small piece of land he had in the country to feed his family, and share with his neighbors, friends at work and in the church. His family survived the Great Depression by growing their own food and sharing it. He continued the practice after he moved to the city and as long as his health allowed it. This man lived the answer to the dilemma we face of feeding ourselves, eating better food and getting exercise while we do it, feeding 2 billion more people over the next 30 years, and sustaining the environment too. We who live and work in the city have arable land that Cargill and Monsanto have not considered as available for growing food. We have lawns or spaces for raised beds; or if in apartments, we have balconies for container gardening or window planters for tomatoes, peppers, or radishes. We have spaces owned by the city that could become neighborhood gardens. We can make soil in the city or the country available to grow food on some scale. When we do, we reclaim our heritage of self-sufficiency and thrift, and solve the problem of feeding the world beginning in our own back yards.
