Wendell Berry: Farmer, Ecologist and Author

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If the ideals and aims of young people have lost energy it's because they haven't the stability of a commitment to one place and one community. I think they're disposed to drift around until they find a suitable community. But no community is suitable. There's plenty wrong with them all. I could construct an airtight argument for not settling in my own community. The fact is that I'm spending my life constructing an argument for being here.

PLOWBOY: In the sense that you don't plan to ever move away from Port Royal, Kentucky?

BERRY: Yes, and we had something happen here not too long ago that kind of served as a test of that decision. We'd been here since 1964 and in that period of time we'd sort of solved a whole set of problems that faced us when we started. We'd become almost self-sufficient as far as food was concerned, and had begun to understand the significance of this place in our lives and in the life of modern America. Suddenly the farm next door to us was sold to a developer. He brought in bulldozers and dumped tons of gravel onto the land to make it, some kind of ideal landscape for a trailer court. The machines were roaring and real estate speculators were coming around talking about a hundred lots for house trailers and vacation cabins. We could see the smoke from our neighbor's fire, so to speak; we could see the dust from his bulldozer and we could see his signs.

One of our first thoughts was that we would leave, we wouldn't put up with it, we'd get out of here and go someplace where it was quieter and where we could live the way we wanted to. We'd go west, as they used to say. And then we realized that that impulse went against the current of our lives up to that point.

A farmer, who's a neighbor of mine and probably the oldest friend I've got in the world, had told me, "They'll never do worth a damn as long as they've got two choices." That's the most important thing that's been said to me in the last couple of years. It illuminates the meaning of marriage. When you believe in a thing enough so that you eliminate the second choice, forsake all others, then you're married to it. So we decided that this place would have to be our fate and that we'd stay here no matter what happened as long as life was possible. That decision changed us and became a kind of metaphor of our own marriage. Since then, life on this place has had a much different and fuller meaning for us. (EDITOR'S NOTE: Soon after this interview the Berrys were able to buy the threatened land next door to their farm and are now doing what they can to repair the damage done to it.)

PLOWBOY: I like that concept of marriage . . . commitment to a place as well as to a person.

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