Wendell Berry spent his life farming, writing. His legacy is an ethic of care for the natural world

The American farmer, novelist and poet Wendell Berry, died on August 31, aged 92. Berry farmed in Port Royal, in his native Kentucky, for over 40 years. Through his writing and his farming, Berry emphasised the importance of both community and care for the planet, advocating for small-scale agriculture as key to both.

He criticised modern consumer culture, suggesting, in his poem Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front, that instead of buying into the rat race, people should: “Love the world. Work for nothing […] / Say that your main crop is the forests / that you did not plant / that you will not live to harvest.”

His prolific output included The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (1977), Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer (1987) and The Mad Farmer Poems (2008).

Caring for the planet, Berry believed, means recognising your own place in it. Not as the centre, but as part of a wider community of interconnected life. In doing so, Berry’s writing highlights an important new theme in environmental humanities: a growing interest in “georgic” writing as an environmental genre.

The georgic is a classical genre that gets its name from Virgil’s Georgics – a long, four-book poem offering farming advice on ploughing, animal husbandry, fruit growing and beekeeping that...

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