Except the care that the planet now requires is emergency treatment, its wounds deep and increasingly resistant to healing, its health compromised to the point of requiring oxygen. Rachel Carson warned us about The Silent Spring. E F Schumacher tried to convince us Small is Beautiful. In No Logo, Naomi Klein alerted us to the banal and baleful power of the logo, the consumer dreams and the resulting economic and ecological nightmare - her more recent book This Changes Everything. Climate vs Capitalism, polarises the issues, but does so because current trajectories suggest we are entering a zero-sum game with climate, ecology and the future of humanity and our planetary home at stake.
His own agrarian practices, his getting his hands dirty approach to the land and its birds and animals, domestic and wild, his awareness of the crucial role of trees, forests and rivers - all of these are major themes in his writing, and primary values of his way of life. He tries to tell it as it is. His critique is not mere condemnation but persuasion to change.
It's with an amazed sadness that we are reading below, 35 years after it was written, a poem that speaks with mature precision to our current 2023 condition. Our self-destructive drives, our rapacious milking of the earth for all its worth, the long, slow and inexorable strangling of the world's breathing systems - it's madness. In our greed to live as we please, we plot our own death.
Berry is a careful poet, and a gentle man. He doesn't use exaggeration for rhetorical effect. When he uses a word like 'wantonly', he means it, and as exactly as its dictionary definition. Such definitions as "unprovoked and gratuitous malice", "unrestrained excess"; these are exactly and precisely what he means about human activity devoted to profit, growth, wealth, resource exploitation and all the other terminologies of markets, money and "growing an economy" on a global scale, and to hell with the consequences.
"1988 Sabbath Poem II."
It is the destruction of the world
In our own lives that drives us
Half insane, and more than half.
To destroy that which we were given
In trust: how will we bear it?
It is our own bodies that we give
To be broken, our bodies
Existing before and after us
In clod and cloud, worm and tree,
That we, driving or driv'n, despise
In our greed to live, our haste
To die. To have lost, wantonly,
The ancient forest, the vast grasslands
Is our madness, the presence
In our very bodies of our grief.
(Wendell Berry)
The prophet Wendell Berry is no friend of religion in its more conservative Christian guises. One of his earliest and now a classic essay, 'A Native Hill', he explains why; and he has American Evangelical individualism clearly in his sights.
“I am uneasy with the term,” he writes, “for such religion as has been openly practiced in this part of the world has promoted and fed upon a destructive schism between body and soul, Heaven and earth... And so people who might have been expected to care most selflessly for the world have had their minds turned elsewhere - to a pursuit of 'salvation' that was really only another form of gluttony and self-love, the desire to perpetuate their lives beyond the life of the world. The Heaven-bent have abused the earth thoughtlessly, by inattention, and their negligence has permitted and encouraged others to abuse it deliberately. Once the creator was removed from the creation, divinity became only a remote abstraction, a social weapon in the hands of the religious institutions.”
God as a power weapon, theology as justification for the violation of nature. And all this under the guise of a doctrine that reads Genesis as a seven day creation, and an interpretation of "rule the earth and subdue it" as a licence for human rule as domination and exploitation rather than 
stewardship and conservation. Such a destructive mindset, underpinned by religious zeal and a belief in the nation as exceptional, and chosen as blessed, is for Berry the aviation fuel that jet propels the lust to possess, unlimited extraction, mass production, ruthless pursuit of profit, wealth creation, and mega-industries in whose eyes the planet is both raw material up for grabs and 24/7 factory.
But Berry has never given up hope, never surrendered to the plundering of the world as either inevitable or invincible. Deeply resistant to self-concerned piety and material greed as the two primary drivers corporate business endeavour, he is still familiar with the mystery of grace, the gift that is life, and the precious trust the Creator has placed in humans to "not to destroy that which we were given in trust."
So I finish with an extract from another of his poems, in which grace is both gift and demand, a covenant mutual obligation between humanity, nature and God. This is the true human vocation - "we must be stirring to keep this gift dwelling among us, eternally alive in time."
"Sabbath Poem 2005 XVII."
...In the lengthening shadow he has climbed
again to the ridgetop and across
to the westward slope to see the ripe
light of autumn in the turning trees,
the twilight he must go by now
that only grace can give. Thus far
he keeps the old sectarian piety:
By grace we live. But he can go
no further. Having known the grace
that for so long has kept this world,
haggard as it is, as we have made it,
we cannot rest, we must be stirring
to keep this gift dwelling among us,
eternally alive in time. This
is the great work, no other, none harder,
none nearer rest, or more beautiful.
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