Wendell Berry — Transition Voice

Seeing Berry’s Wilderness again

By Chris Chaney February 8, 2012

In the early '90s I made the conscious decision to drop out of college. I distinctly remember the day I withdrew from classes and made the call to my parents. I remember thinking: "Now I'm a statistic." College dropout. I watched as the debt grew and my confidence in finding a suitable career faded. I made the decision to drop out based on the reality that I could avoid debt and simply work. I resolved to be satisfied with less. I broke my social contract outright. Believe it or not, I had … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Books, Reviews Tagged With: environmentalism, peak oil, Transition, Wendell Berry

Twitter will set you free to Occupy

By Erik Curren January 9, 2012

I'm pretty conflicted about computers and the Internet these days. On the one hand, I run an internet magazine, build websites for small businesses and local good causes alike and even get paid to help people use Facebook and Twitter. It's fun too, since we all know that the web is the ultimate instant gratifier. Where else can you write an article or make a change to a visual design and, within minutes, hear back about it from somebody halfway around the world? It's all too easy, it's all … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: Arab Spring, civil rights movement, John Michael Greer, Malcolm Gladwell, Occupy Wall Street, Paul Mason, social media, Twitter, Wendell Berry

As farms go, so go the cities

By Erik Curren December 30, 2011

Wendell Berry is like Howard Stern -- you either love him or you have no use for him. There doesn't seem to be much middle ground. Those who love Berry, from homesteaders and Greenhorns (that's new farmers to you and me) to community gardeners, find inspiration in the plainspoken moral indignation of this latter-day Jeffersonian who won't be budged from his conviction that the real America is farms and rural towns, not big cities and suburbs. By contrast, eco-minded folks from New York to … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: Occupy Wall Street, plutocracy, Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry’s weapons of mass destruction

By Erik Curren September 20, 2011

I'm pretty sure that in his now-famous press briefing of Feb. 12, 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wasn't trying to write poetry in the vein of William Carlos Williams. Yet, how beautifully he captured the conundrum at the center of all human attempts to make sense of reality, helpfully set to verse by Slate: The Unknown As we know, There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know There are known unknowns. That is to say We know there are some things We do … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: Donald Rumsfeld, epistemology, philosophy, poetry, torture, TS Eliot, Wendell Berry, William Carlos Williams

Readers and authors talk

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Ed Johnson on Roundup of distressing climate news » Thank you all for your comments and commitments. I too sense this with out all the research backgrou...
Lee Samelson on The climate change mountaintop » It seems like the stages occur in reverse order for climate hawks Climate hawks or climate activists...
Steve on For sale, habitable planet, too late » Doug, I am in a similar place to you, I think. I have probably never really faced up to the reality ...