Preserving Wildness

Preserving Wildness by Wendell Berry

“Preserving Wildness” argues that humanity’s relation to nature is distorted by two opposing errors: the belief that human good and natural good are simply identical, and the belief that nature exists only as raw material for profit, comfort, and security. The author rejects both positions, insisting that the central problem lies in the difficult middle ground. Humans live within a wilderness that sustains and endangers them; they cannot avoid using nature, but must determine locally, practically, and continually how to use it without destroying the places on which they depend. Wildness and domesticity are inseparable but different. Human bodies remain partly wild, governed by instincts and processes beyond intention. Soil, forests, crops, and domestic animals also depend on wildness: excessive human control produces weakness, failure, and destructive reactions. To oppose nature is therefore to oppose part of oneself. Yet nature does not automatically provide a moral standard. It can frustrate human purposes, permit destruction, and does not distinguish between good and evil. Human beings need culture because their exceptional power makes them capable of monstrous destruction unless formed by disciplines and virtues such as prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. A healthy culture must measure itself both by nature and by its own best moral and practical achievements. Culture and nature should exist in an ongoing dialogue, expressed in particular places, artifacts, neighborhoods, and ecosystems. When work becomes abstract and ignores natural limits, culture declines and nature retaliates. Since wildness now depends partly on human restraint, it cannot be protected merely by setting aside wilderness preserves. Preservation also requires a domestic economy that values local communities, durable goods, careful work, and responsible stewardship. The author proposes a “loving economy” that values materials through every stage of their transformation, from soil, water, air, and light to finished goods. Good forestry begins in respectful care for forests and ends in durable, well-made wooden objects; good agriculture begins with stewardship of fields and ends in good meals. By contrast, the present economy treats possessions and resources as exchangeable objects, driven by dissatisfaction and abstraction rather than genuine material or spiritual value. Spirituality and practicality must discipline one another and meet in necessary, useful work. Wilderness remains essential because humans need places where their work, plans, and ambitions have no authority, and because wild nature teaches them the limits and possibilities of life. In any place, a sound economy must ask: what is here, what will nature permit, and what will nature help humans do? These questions require knowledge of what nature would be doing without human interference. Small native wildernesses dispersed throughout the countryside are therefore as necessary as large protected tracts. The essay rejects the idea that nature alone can define goodness. Humans must act from self-interest, but recognize its limits and share the world with other people and creatures. The problem is not solved by preferring humanity over nature or nature over humanity; it demands difficult local practices. Fear or hatred of humanity is dangerous because it can justify further abuses, including treating some people as surplus. Questions of population should first concern misuse, displacement, destructive patterns of settlement, and the amplified power of technology. The greatest threat is technological heroism: the willingness to cause large effects that cannot be foreseen or controlled, often in service of careers detached from communities and places. The urgent questions concern proportion, scale, and the proper limits of human power. Industrial monocultures—whether one-crop fields or one-class housing developments—make both nature and people fragile. The alternative is a diversified, multipurpose, democratically divided landscape with many margins: lanes, streamsides, wooded fencerows, and other places where wild plants, animals, and children can live and play. Such margins limit human intention within domestic life and embody the harmony, freedom, and mutual safety that preservation requires.

By Wendell Berry · First published 2019 · Genre: Environmental Essay, Nature Writing, Ecological Philosophy · 6,000 words

First lines

THE ARGUMENT over the proper relation of humanity to nature is becoming, as the sixties used to say, polarized. And the result, as before, is bad talk on both sides. At one extreme are those who sound as if they are entirely in favor of nature; they assume that there is no necessary disjuncture or difference between the human estate and the estate of nature, that human good is in some simple way the same as natural good. They believe, at least in principle, that the biosphere is an egalitarian system, in which all creatures, including humans, are equal in value and have an equal right to live and flourish. These people tend to stand aloof from the issue of the proper human use of nature. Indeed, they have begun to use "stewardship" (meaning the responsible use of nature) as a term of denigration.

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environmentalism · nature writing · conservation · ecology · wilderness · agrarianism · sustainability · rural life · land stewardship · industrialization · localism · community

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