Response to Wendell Berry's essay

I have just spent an hour and a half reading Wendell Berry’s essay. I feel like I just got back from a long, exhausting walk through the fluffy cliché forest. While I was on my walk, I was accompanied by an annoying, self-righteous madman who violated my patience repeatedly. He began by saying that any discussion about the use of energy is a discussion about religion. Unfortunately he lost me there, I am a godless heathen savage who has no concept of such things. So like taking candy from a baby he went on to educate my simple mind about how he was right and the rest of the world was wrong.

Well nice try Wendell Berry, because you really just made me angry and convinced me that you are totally out of your mind. My biggest regret is that I had to sit here and subject myself to your essay, but you wont have to read my response to it.

In this essay he rants about how we are destroying nature with our machines, and how we cannot restrain ourselves, and we ought to be more like nature with its “life cycles.” Well first of all, it is awfully condescending toward the nature you revere to consider yourself above it. As though we are the gods of this world, and the helpless earth is at our mercy. And second, those life cycles that he referred too are not quite as tender and fair as he might think. Because, outside of the flowery fluffy forest that Mr. Berry lives in there is the real forest, where the laws of nature reign supreme, and where the weak moose gets ripped apart by wolves while it is still breathing. I make no distinction between the “natural” and “unnatural” world. Humans were created by nature, we need it, and always have needed it, to exist. The natural world is totally uncompromising; it is as insensitive and overly practical as the machines Mr. Berry hates so much. These are the things which nature rewards: efficiency, adaptability, and strength. And sometimes, the winner may not be the most intelligent, as evidenced by the success of the cockroach. There doesn’t need to be any reason for it, it just has to work. In his essay Mr. Berry gives us this pearl of wisdom “If people are regarded as machines, they must be regarded as replaceable by other machines. They are regarded, in other words, as dispensable. Their place on the farm is safe only as long as they are mechanically necessary.” Right, as opposed to nature which is forgiving and appreciates the fine arts over efficiency. I could write a book about all of the things I see as unfair and ridiculous about this essay, but I don’t want to get carried away. So I am just going to make one last point. In the ongoing grind of mans existence through time, our “nature” has been defined by our environment. While we may not have to compete rigorously with other animals (at least not anymore) we do have to compete with one another for finite space and resources. If we were all to become Amish in America, someone more industrial would kill us and take our things. Or even worse, they would put us on ships and take us somewhere to be slaves. The Amish utopia described by Wendell Berry is only allowed to exist, and he is only allowed to write about it, because of our technological excellence. Our people can be fed much more efficiently, and using much less land and energy, by high tech agriculture than by the primitive lifestyle he describes. And I for one am thankful for that, because now I can go to school and strive to do more than plant tomatoes and argue with mules all day.