I recently looked back at my posts from my environmental studies intro class. My very first post, titled Limitlessness, connects our foundational Limits to Growth and IPAT readings to Wendell Berry’s Faustian Economics and his essay “Staying Put” from his book The Unsettling of America.
I first read Berry when I was a junior in high school. We were studying rhetorical analysis in my American literature class and The College Board had excerpted “Staying Put” for a writing prompt on a previous AP exam. I remember loving his geographical arguments, but this was all before I knew what a geographical claim would look like because I didn’t know geography was a legitimate field. While completing the timed write, I was caught up in the content of “Staying Put” rather than just focusing on the structure in the way that AP teaches.
So I was sold. Wendell Berry, judging by the short paragraphs on a standardized test, was the perfect environmental writer. Berry, at his best, describes the American landscape. This is a topic to which I remain partial.
Last week in Environmental Theory, we read Berry’s article “Life is a Miracle.” In the context of the science wars of the 1990s, Berry argues against scientific reductionism because it leads to abstraction and inhibits connection and empathy between beings. He explains how science “speaks properly a language of abstraction and abstract categories” (Berry 2000), but in order to foster affection necessary for proper care, whether it be for medicine or conservation, we must break out of these abstractions. The second half of his article describes the view out of his window to a river framed by melting snow and scattered with wildlife. Berry argues for a sort of “counting beyond two” ethic when dealing with the miracle of life, claiming “For things cannot survive as categories but only as individual creatures living uniquely where they live.” This holds resonances with our discussions of moving through essentialism and replacing nature with place. However, in doing so, Berry sets up a binary, as Roan discusses in his post, between science and his integrated view of life’s miracles. He counts only to two, and doesn’t offer (at least in this excerpt) other ways of thinking.
Somewhere between my junior year of high school and my junior year of college, Wendell Berry lost his luster. His integrated view of life’s communities and artistic language falls short of the academic rigor and theoretical nuance I’ve come to appreciate and expect from writers of the environment broadly. His art has an agenda that engages in hand-selected topics, but somehow this does not inspire me in the same way it used to. I’m not saying that environmental writing shouldn’t have an agenda, but only that I am more moved by citations and histories than adjective-heavy description of landscape.