A Word from the Faculty — David McKeith

     “Green” and “greening” are words heard fairly often these days with the coming of the new Administration in Washington, and their meaning as a component of the promised change is surely understood.  The over-arching concept of responsibility, however, is not new.  In the turbulent nineteen-sixties, it was the youthful and vocal Green earth Movement that stood out along with civil rights, women’s rights, and anti-war in Southeast Asia.  By the late seventies and into the eighties, the Green Earth Movement matured into what became and continues to be known by the all-encompassing word, Environmentalism.

     This speaks to how humankind relates to and treats the natural world about us.  Actually one can trace writings on this theme well back to the Bible.  In this country following earlier thinkers, 19th-century Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Jay Audubon (the later also a remarkable writer with deep intuitions and a strong knowledge base), and John Muir left profuse writings on the subject.  From the 20th-century I think of Robert Marshall, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, and Barry Commoner, among others.  Among many others.

     One of these is Wendell Berry, born in 1934, who has worked a farm in Henry County, Kentucky, since 1965.  Retired professor of English at the University of Kentucky, he has been a fellow of both the Guggenheim and the Rockefeller Foundations.  The New York Review of Books considers him “the greatest moral essayist of our day.”  The Christian Science Monitor speaks of him as having “a prophetic voice.”

     Berry has written of himself, “My work has been motivated by a desire to make myself responsibly at home in this world and in my native and chosen place.”

     When I recall those of his writings that made the greatest impact on me when I was teaching this subject, what come to mind are A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural (1971), The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (1978), and The Gift of Good Land; Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural (1981).  He continues to write and his list of publications is extensive.

     My purpose in writing this is to invite our readers to consider this from his poetry.  Away from legislative chambers and halls of justice, what Berry speaks of is another dimension of what is meant by the “greening of America” ~~ the slow but hopefully eventual alteration in patterns of individual thinking about the human relationship to the natural world.  Change, that is, in what we each come to value and the connectedness we feel. Berry writes this:

“The Peace of Wild Things”
(from the1970s)

When despair for the world grows in me
And I wake in the night at the least sound
In fear of what my life and my children’s
lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
Rests in his beauty on the water,
And the green heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
Who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.  I come into the presence of
still water,
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
Waiting with their light.  For a time
I rest in the grace of the world,
And I am free.