Wendell Berry: Farmer, Ecologist and Author

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PLOWBOY: In your writing you emphasize that the inhabitants of a region thrive on the daily interchange between old and young . . . yet many of these new communities are made up primarily of young people.

BERRY: Yes, and that's one of the worst possible kinds of segregation. This is probably the first generation not to have a history. They have their own immediate history but not one that comes from having older people around them. They're coming up to adult life without the awareness that anyone has ever gone through their experiences before, much less learned anything from them. But I know people who as children had their grandparents' memories in their memories, so that in a sense, as young people they had old minds. They had a kind of seasoning.

PLOWBOY: You certainly talk about your own childhood in that way.

BERRY: That's right, although I can't say that I've always agreed with all the older people I've grown up around. I've had the same struggles with them as most people who grow up. Nevertheless I owe a great debt to my elders and I agree with all of them on something or other. I think that my knowledge of them and my association with them has given me a sense of what is possible.

There's a sort of gift to humanity that each generation of young people renews. They feel in their bones what's desirable. "It would be great if we could be free." And the function of older people in the society is not to oppose that, but to qualify it. To say yes, it would be great to be free . . . but there are certain ways to get free that are going to surprise you and make stern demands on you. The man who is most able usually turns out to be the man who's most free, not the one who's the most reckless. The old are the ones who will put their hands on you and say, "Well, be a little steady now," or "No, you can't quit, you're not finished yet."

PLOWBOY: Have you reached that role yourself?

BERRY: Well, my own history as a teacher has had a rather dramatic change along those lines. Back when we were making speeches and holding meetings about the environment and against the Vietnam War, I was sort of looked on as a friend of the good causes. Then last year we had a long struggle in the university about academic requirements. I was holding out for the importance of learning a foreign language, for instance, and overnight I got the reputation of being an "academic fascist". But I would be a lot better off if I knew more languages, and more math and biology, too. That's the message I got from my own experience.

Here it seems to me you have a strange thing. You have young people who want world peace but don't want to learn anybody else's language. A young fellow came up to me after one of those meetings and said, "I've never had a foreign language and I want you to tell me why I should take French. I'm studying agriculture, not literature." "Well," I said, "if you don't know, I can't tell you. That's why you take French for two or three or four years, to learn why you should take it."

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