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The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural Paperback – May 1, 2009
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The essays in The Gift of Good Land are as true today as when they were first published in 1981; the problems addressed here are still true and the solutions no nearer to hand. The insistent theme of this book is the interdependence, the wholeness, the oneness of people, land, weather, animals, and family. To touch one is to tamper with them all. We live in one functioning organism whose separate parts are artificially isolated by our culture. Here, Berry develops the compelling argument that the “gift” of good land has strings attached. We have it only on loan and only for as long as we practice good stewardship.
- Print length304 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherCounterpoint
- Publication dateMay 1, 2009
- Dimensions4.9 x 0.9 x 8.01 inches
- ISBN-101582434840
- ISBN-13978-1582434841
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Product details
- Publisher : Counterpoint (May 1, 2009)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1582434840
- ISBN-13 : 978-1582434841
- Item Weight : 9.5 ounces
- Dimensions : 4.9 x 0.9 x 8.01 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #154,368 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #187 in Nature Writing & Essays
- #481 in Literary Criticism & Theory
- #521 in Essays (Books)
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About the author

Wendell E. Berry (born August 5, 1934) is an American novelist, poet, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. A prolific author, he has written many novels, short stories, poems, and essays. He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a recipient of The National Humanities Medal, and the Jefferson Lecturer for 2012. He is also a 2013 Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Berry was named the recipient of the 2013 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award. On January 28, 2015, he became the first living writer to be ushered into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Guy Mendes (Guy Mendes) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.
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All in all, these are excellent essays, but as many of them were drawn from farming journals, may find less of an audience. However, that should not stop anyone, suburbanite nor city dweller, from reading this fine, fine collection. "To see and respect what is there is the first duty of stewardship." --from "The Native Grasses and What They Mean."
The Gift of Good Land was written in tribute to the small-scale farmer because “small-scale agriculture is virtually synonymous with good agriculture”. Mr. Berry gives evidence of this principle by introducing us to about a dozen small farmers whose varied practices are intimately tied to the specific nature of their given piece of earth. The Peruvian who cultivates steep and rocky terrain on a mountainside high in the Andes uses a type of “hoe farming” that has sustained his family and their Inca forbears across centuries. The Amish continue to farm small holdings because their horse-drawn implements limit the acreage they are able to plant and harvest. And yet their farms remain abundant and profitable generation after generation.
In their small agriculture, these men and women come to know the unique habits of their land in ways that industrial farmers with their massive “acre eaters” never can. In any particular region, Berry tells us, there is a limit beyond which a farm outgrows the attention and affection of a single owner. Keenly aware of the living interplay between their own topography and the many acts of nature which condition it, the small farmers’ sense of place becomes ingrained. Because they know their land and love it, they learn to sense its needs and harvest potential acre by acre or even yard by yard. It responds to their mindful cultivation with a bounty that does not deplete the earth.
And for all that, there is virtually no public appreciation for the disciplines necessary to good farming. The good farmer, along with the bad, is “typically regarded as a drudge without learning, a hick without dignity.”
I didn’t buy this book from Amazon—I picked it up at a library bin sale. I’m taking time to write this review because I want other readers to know that, over 30 years later, the wisdom in these pages has not lost relevance and has, perhaps, gained in urgency. It would be hard to come up with a better companion piece to the Pope’s latest encyclical (the one about climate change). Wendell Berry is no Bible thumper. But that did not stop him from making his own case for the proper Christian approach to agriculture and the conservation of resources.
In the final chapter he advocates for an ethic that esteems perseverance in un-heroic tasks equally with the grand action. He wonders whether the work of real stewardship, like real prayer and real charity, must be done in secret. These are his concluding words: “To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of the Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.”
I think I need to read more Wendell Berry.
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Totally relevant; it was a real problem to put it down. I am so busy, but I set the clock for 04:45hrs to get a few sections in before the madness of the day started! It was a revelation, it made me question currently what I am doing; it has set in progress change for me and my dependents.
A manifesto that brings back sanity to farming sustainably, but also what is necessary for humanity to live sustainably on this non-renewable planet. It reminds you of the things that we have forgotten are important.
