Getting Along with Nature

Getting Along with Nature by Wendell Berry

“Getting Along with Nature” argues that nature and human life are not separate realms but interdependent conditions of survival. Pure wilderness cannot sustain humans for long, yet wholly artificial environments also impoverish and endanger them. Like all creatures, humans must alter their surroundings, but unlike other creatures they can choose the kind and scale of their alterations. Too little change diminishes humanity; too much diminishes nature and ultimately destroys human possibilities. Nature is both source and limit, enforcing an “indifferent” justice. Just as lynxes starve when they exhaust their rabbit prey, humans will suffer if they exhaust soil and other necessities of their habitat. The proper aim is not victory over nature but a stable balance. Traditional opposition between people and forests, predators, insects, weeds, or wilderness is inadequate because human welfare depends on the same ecological health that supports wild creatures. The apparent conflict between coyotes and sheep illustrates the need for compromise rather than total victory. Sheep provide food and wool, while coyotes belong to the larger health of the natural world on which people and livestock depend. Agriculture itself requires wilderness in the soil: worms, bacteria, and other organisms make humus, store water, and maintain fertility. At the same time, wildness cannot survive without human culture. Public wilderness protection is necessary, but farmland, cities, and daily habits must also be preserved and improved, since destructive attitudes toward soil or human places eventually destroy wilderness everywhere. The essay presents two desert oases to show that human care can enrich wild habitats. A’al Waipia declines after the Papago Indians are removed and irrigation ditches fill with silt; trees die, seed plants vanish, and birds disappear. Ki: towak thrives because a Papago village remains, with Luis Nolia tending springs, ditches, crops, and trees. The farmed oasis supports more bird species because people’s work creates food and habitat. A personal encounter with a young red-tailed hawk while mowing a small pasture with horses further demonstrates the value of a diversified, properly scaled farm. The hawk is drawn by the border of pasture and woods, a biologically rich “edge,” and perhaps by the familiar presence of horses. The pasture, horses, hawk, and farmer all benefit: the horses live from and maintain the pasture, the mowing creates hunting ground, and the hawk controls mice. Such encounters become impossible when farming grows too large, mechanized, and obtrusive. The author calls for a consciously chosen partnership with nature, guided by restraint, practical knowledge, inherited culture, and a sense of when to stop. Humans are especially dangerous because mental appetites can exceed bodily needs, producing hoarding, waste, and destruction. Industrial progress and economic growth often ignore limits, creating enterprises whose scale exceeds their natural sources. Agriculture can be both too large technologically and too small in the number of people available to care for the land. Proper scale permits other creatures to live and other sounds to be heard. It values technological elegance over speed, power, labor-saving, and worker replacement. New methods should be judged by affordability, fitness to real needs, beauty, health, and suitability for future generations. Conservation must preserve both natural and cultural inheritances. Wilderness remains essential, including not only large public areas but small private or semiprivate places on farms, factory grounds, and city lots where nature is left free and humans enter as guests. Such places restore, instruct, humble, and help people judge the health of their own communities. They should not serve as escapes from a damaged human economy, however; instead, wilderness and domestic life must be joined through fitting transitions from forest and woodlot to pasture, fields, gardens, households, villages, and cities. The essay criticizes dependence on distant money, materials, corporations, banks, petroleum, costly machinery, and excessively delicate crop or animal breeds. Healthy farming requires hardy animals and productive plants that can thrive with less expense and intervention. Farmers prosper not merely by increasing production but by keeping income greater than costs. Nature can maintain fertility, improve soil, and protect health when respected; when disregarded, she withdraws those protections. The author concludes that nature and cultural tradition warn against the industrial claim that intelligence, information, energy, and money can replace moral restraint.

By Wendell Berry · First published 2019 · Genre: Environmental Essay, Nature Writing, Ecological Nonfiction · 6,064 words

First lines

THE DEFENDERS of nature and wilderness-like their enemies the defenders of the industrial economy-sometimes sound as if the natural and the human were two separate estates, radically different and radically divided. The defenders of nature and wilderness sometimes seem to feel that they must oppose any human encroachment whatsoever, just as the industrialists often apparently feel that they must make the human encroachment absolute or, as they say, "complete the conquest of nature. " But there is danger in this opposition, and it can be best dealt with by realizing that these pure and separate categories are pure ideas and do not otherwise exist.

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nature writing · environmentalism · ecology · conservation · sustainability · agrarianism · rural life · farming · land stewardship · human-nature relationships · place-based writing · essays

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