Wendell Berry: Going with, and against, the grain

He challenged us to ask what we owe the place that sustains us. That to inherit land was not simply to own it; it was to accept its care.

Some Kentuckians become so rooted in this place that it is difficult to think of one without the other. Wendell Berry was such a Kentuckian. He died Monday at age 92 at his beloved Lane’s Landing Farm in Port Royal, Ky. 

Poet, novelist, essayist, teacher, farmer, conservationist, and dissenter, he spent a lifetime asking: What do we owe to the place that sustains us?

It is an old question in Kentucky, a state blessed — and sometimes burdened — by the abundance of its earth. Limestone and timber, coal and tobacco, fertile fields and flowing rivers have brought prosperity. Yet too often we mistake possession for stewardship, taking what the land yields without asking what must be returned or preserved for those who follow.

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