An Essential Writer for Strong Towns Advocates
Editor’s Note: This week, we are publishing several articles on the essential role food and the food economy play in building stronger and more financially resilient communities. Make sure to follow along with all the articles from Strong Towns Food Week!
“I will have to share the fate of this place. Whatever happens to Port William happens to me.”
Longtime readers of Strong Towns will notice the writers whose names are frequently mentioned because of the extent to which their ideas have powerfully shaped our own. I’m thinking of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the “patron saint of Strong Towns thinking,” the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, the Czech economist Tomas Sedlacek, the writer/photographer Chris Arnade, and more. When I started working for the organization almost exactly a year ago—after following along as a reader for five—I brought my own favorite authors with me. Foremost among them was Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer, essayist, novelist, and poet who turned 86 last week.
I have been reading Berry more or less continuously for a dozen years, ever since my wife and I co-owned—and my talented wife ran—a restaurant in downtown Chico, California specializing in local and organic fare. A new acquaintance through the restaurant urged me to start reading Berry. I started with the essay collection Another Turn of the Crank for no other reason than it happened to be on the shelf right next to me.
Only twice in my life have there been authors whose work I loved so much that I wanted to read not only everything they wrote but also everything written by the people they considered to be friends, mentors, and influences. C.S Lewis was the first. Lewis, his Inkling friends, and his favorite medieval writers dominated my reading lists in my late teens and most of my twenties. Wendell Berry is the other. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, as well as his published letters and interviews, have profoundly changed my thinking over the last 12 or 13 years. They’re changing how I live too, if slowly. (What’s been interesting has been to go back to C.S. Lewis now and notice, in retrospect, the parallels between the two writers.)
No doubt you’ve had the experience of reading something that put into words concepts or experiences you struggled to articulate yourself. This is what happened to me with Another Turn of the Crank...and then with subsequent books I read by Berry. Not only was he giving me the language I needed, he was challenging my long-held assumptions about economics, food and agriculture, community, politics, and more.
He even planted seeds of the concepts I would later encounter daily at Strong Towns.
For example, I recently re-read—or, rather, had the actor Nick Offerman read to me—the essay, “A Native Hill.” In one section, Berry writes about Kentucky’s 18th-century road-builders:
My interest is not in the question of whether or not they needed the road, but in the fact that the road was then, and is now, the most characteristic form of their relation to the country.
The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape. It is not destructive. It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around. A road, on the other hand, even the most primitive road, embodies a resistance against the landscape. Its reason is not simply the necessity for movement, but haste. Its wish is to avoid contact with the landscape; it seeks so far as possible to go over the country, rather than through it; its aspirations, as we see clearly in the example of our modern freeways, is to be a bridge; its tendency is to translate place into space in order to traverse it with the least effort. It is destructive, seeking to remove or destroy all obstacles in its way. The primitive road advanced by the destruction of the forest; modern roads advance by the destruction of topography.
I couldn’t help but connect this passage with the work Strong Towns members and readers are doing around North America, trying to stop the building of roads we don’t need and can’t afford. The auto-centric development pattern in place since at least World War II has made our communities economically and socially fragile. And yet the cry to build more roads, more infrastructure is about the only thing Republicans and Democrats seem to agree on anymore. (We call it the Infrastructure Cult.)
Berry (like many Strong Towns readers I expect) can’t be easily put into a partisan box. I like that—I even aspire to it—and think often about this passage from his poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”:
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Even if you don’t consider yourself a poetry reader, I encourage you to read this accessible, provocative poem. (It’s available in full here.)
Again and again, I delight at the convergence of Wendell Berry’s writing with the Strong Towns mission of building stronger and more financially resilient cities. I’m reminded of Bo Wright’s reflections last year on the essay “Solving for Pattern,” in which Berry argues for solutions that accept given limits, are properly scaled, have “wide margins” of failure, and are made by people with skin in the game. “Good solutions exist only in proof,” Berry says, “and are not to be expected from some absentee owners or absentee experts. Problems must be solved in work and in place, with particular knowledge, fidelity, and care, by people who will suffer the consequences of their mistakes.”
I’m also thinking of the article we recommended recently by Gracy Olmstead, about re-reading Berry’s classic “Health is Membership” in light of the pandemic.
If anything, Berry’s work came to mind even more often this week, as we ran a series of articles exploring the importance of developing healthier and more resilient food economies. I thought, for example, of his 1991 essay “Conservation and Local Economy.” There, Berry describes how rural communities and rural places have been devastated by an extractive economy often controlled by people and forces in remote cities. The way forward—and I believe this applies not just to our small towns, but for people working to build strength and resilience everywhere—starts at the local level and from the bottom-up. It’s a long passage, but worth quoting in full:
[We] need to bring local economies into harmony with local ecosystems so that we can live and work with pleasure in the same places indefinitely; we need to substitute ourselves, our neighborhoods, our local resources, for expensive imported goods and services; we need to increase cooperation among all local economic entities: households, farms, factories, banks, consumers, and suppliers. If we are serious about reducing government and the burdens of government, then we need to do so by returning economic self-determination to the people. And we must not do this by inviting destructive industries to provide “jobs” in the community; we must do it by fostering economic democracy. For example, as much as possible of the food that is consumed locally ought to be locally produced on small farms, and then processed in small, non-polluting plants that are locally owned. We must do everything possible to provide to ordinary citizens the opportunity to own a small, usable share of the country. In that way, we will put local capital to work locally, not to exploit and destroy the land but to use it well. This is not work just for the privileged, the well-positioned, the wealthy, and the powerful. It is work for everybody.
I acknowledge that to advocate such reforms is to advocate a kind of secession—not a secession of armed violence but a quiet secession by which people find the practical means and the strength of spirit to remove themselves from an economy that is exploiting them and destroying their homeland.
One of the most exciting things about working for Strong Towns is that I’ve been able to meet people from around North America who doing the slow, good work of building strength and lasting prosperity for their towns and cities. The conventional development pattern squanders precious financial, natural, and even cultural resources. Yet there’s a movement of change afoot. It’s a movement that manifests itself in the growing presence of farmers markets and community gardens; in the planting of street trees; in the entrepreneurs starting local businesses; in the passionate advocates taking a stand at city council meetings; in the creative ways people are making our streets safer; and in a thousand other (often invisible ways) that neighbors doing the next right thing to help a struggling neighbor.
People engaged in this work will find in Berry a voice of clarity and sanity.
Immokalee, FL, sits 30 miles from glitzy Naples, yet it’s one of the most rent-burdened places in the state. Local nonprofits are teaming up to change that by planning a new community for Immokalee’s agricultural workers.