Wendell Berry: Farmer, Ecologist and Author

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PLOWBOY: Airport opponents?

BERRY: The Jefferson County Air Board wants to build a jetport on 22,000 acres of good farmland in Henry and Shelby Counties. We've been watching those airport people for a couple of years now, seeing what they were up to and getting ready to move when the site plans were announced. We've already had some meetings.

This airport fight is the largest direct action on the part of the people in these counties for years. And as long as the project lasts I think there'll be people to fight ii, because we all have a stake in what's going on. There are a lot of people here who would do a great deal to defend the soil under their feet in Henry and Shelby Counties. It seems to me that this supports my belief that a lot depends on a stable community.

PLOWBOY: How would you define a stable community

BERRY: You've got to have people who talk to each other a lot and who have experiences in common. In a settled farming community old friends get together to work and one thing they do is tell each other again the stories they already know. This is a complex community function. They celebrate their old acquaintance in that way, they celebrate themselves. They alert each other to the realities of their lives and their history. And the effect that it has on story-telling is that it improves the stories.

But the stories in the media today cater to the wish people have for everything to be new. That's very much the emphasis in our arts today, for example. That's not different at all from the Madison Avenue ideal that thrives on the establishment and immediate wearing out of fashions and fads. Any culture building itself on this kind of novelty is bound to run thin.

PLOWBOY: In the face of that kind of cultural pressure, it takes a conscious effort to reinstate the ceremony and ritual in our lives. Many intentional communities are trying to generate this kind of awareness and stability . . . .

BERRY: But I'm much more interested in the results of accidental communities that have formed by fate and fortune and circumstance. The intentional community seems to me a rather escapist idea, sort of a new version of the white citizen's council. I thought that's what we were trying to get away from. I think the idea that you can have an intentional community is about as misleading as saying you can have an intentional life. If you're going to have a decent and stable community, you've got to produce the cultural and social forms by which to deal with the unexpected and the undesirable. The intentional community idea assumes that when you say love your neighbor as yourself you have some kind of right to go out and pick your neighbor. I think that the ideal of loving your neighbor has to take on the possibility that he may be somebody you're going to have great difficulty loving or liking or even tolerating.

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