Let's call this a public service announcement:
Wendell Berry will be visiting the University of Virginia in early December. He is the first in a series of four speakers for U.Va.'s Brown College Visiting Environmental Writer and Scholars (ViEWS) Lecture Series, 2009-2010. (As it happens, Rebecca Solnit, the subject here, is the third speaker in the series, next February; not to mention poet and philosopher Gary Snyder, next Spring.)
Berry will be giving a public reading at 5:30 PM on Thursday, December 3rd in the Small/Harrison Special Collections Library on campus. I'm told a reception will follow. Here is a map. The library is #19 on it.
Students of Berry know that his essays, philosophy, and poetry have for decades provided a grounding for advocates of sustainable agricultural practices. With a quote that is widely reprinted (in my book too), Berry long ago sought to make clear that "eating is an agricultural act." It's a simple phrase, and it is part of a far more complex system of thought. But at its root is the basic notion that breaking our daily bread connects us to a wider agricultural world which, to gently rephrase it, ties us always to our non-human environment. It's a premise on which research into sustainable agricultural systems operates, working to articulate how agro-food systems are environmental, energy, health, economic, and cultural issues all the way down.
Want more?
Here is notice of an op-ed Berry wrote earlier this year in the Times with Wes Jackson.
Here is a poem recently published in the New Yorker, "A Speech to the Garden Club of America."
And here is Berry speaking in the CBC's "How to Think About Science" series.
Environment
Education
