Wendell Berry has written extensively on the moral significance of local work and how it builds community. Poet, essayist, farmer, and novelist Wendell Berry was born on August 5, 1934, in Newcastle, Kentucky. He attended the University of Kentucky at Lexington where he received a B.A. in English in 1956 and an M.A. in 1957. Berry is the author of more than thirty books of poetry, essays, and novels. Some of his more influential works include "Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community" (1994), "The Unsettling of America : Culture & Agriculture" (1996), "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer" (1987), "What Are People For?" (1990) and "Home Economics".
In his writings, Berry describes means by which people can 'get back to their roots', and stresses the importance of effectively run agricultural communities in which the needs of all people are considered and cared for by the community. At the same time he analyses concisely why our culture is moving in a different direction, “We have made a social ideal of minimal involvement in the growing and cooking of food.” The community unit is considered by Berry to be the base level of economic organization; "A community economy is not an economy in which well-placed persons can make a 'killing'. It is an economy whose aim is generosity and a well-distributed and safeguarded abundance".
Links:
Wendell Berry
The Berry Centre
Wendell Berry, Poet & Prophet
2012 Jefferson Lecture with Wendell Berry
