Think Little

Think Little by Wendell Berry (2019)

Wendell Berry argues that the environmental crisis must not become another brief, fashionable public cause like Civil Rights or Peace, because environmental destruction, racism, militarism, war, and economic exploitation all arise from the same mentality of greed, waste, and domination. These problems cannot be solved separately, and environmental concern is especially revealing because every person both suffers from and contributes to the damage through daily dependence on a wasteful economy. Public protest and political pressure remain necessary. Citizens must hold government officials accountable, bringing facts, arguments, persistence, and practical knowledge rather than relying on slogans or vague dissatisfaction. Yet Berry insists that institutional reform alone cannot cure a crisis rooted in private life. People have surrendered independence and responsibility to corporations, experts, agencies, merchants, and organizations. Their consumer dependence has severed meaningful contact with the earth, making them complicit in strip mining, extractive agriculture, and other abuses even when they do not directly carry them out. The condition of farmers reveals this alienation. Farmers face growing costs, long hours, destructive chemicals, haste, and pressure from corporations and machinery, while small independent farmers are forced from the land. Berry sees their replacement as a grave cultural, economic, and ecological error: farmers bound to their land by continuity and care can preserve it, whereas absentee owners and machines follow an efficiency measured only by annual output, not by the long-term life of the soil. To correct these abuses, people must rebuild the integrity of households, families, friendships, neighborhoods, and communities. Berry contrasts the national habit of “Think Big,” which produces plans and laws while problems persist, with “Think Little,” a discipline of attention to detail and personal conduct. A person who behaves as a neighbor practices peace and brotherhood; a couple who creates a good marriage and raises capable children serves the future; a farmer protecting an acre from erosion may do more than a bureaucrat discussing erosion in general. Personal reform gives substance to public demands. Those worried about trash should pick it up themselves while organizing; those concerned about pollution should use cars, fuel, electricity, and water less. Environmental responsibility requires abandoning luxuries and supposed necessities that depend on waste. Without changes in one’s own life, environmental rhetoric becomes another part of the disease. Berry presents organic gardening as a particularly meaningful response. A garden produces food, reduces dependence on grocery businesses, avoids poisons and preservatives, reuses waste, reduces trash, and creates direct participation in feeding people. A small plot can grow many vegetables for a family, suggesting wider possibilities for food production in dooryards, suburbs, rights-of-way, and marginal lands. Intensive organic methods can maintain fertility over long periods, unlike extensive, extractive agriculture that rapidly exhausts land. Gardening also restores awareness of dependence on soil and weather. By working directly and competently with the earth’s needs, people can begin to understand and change the wasteful economy that consumes not only the earth’s products but its power to produce. They can recognize that war, oppression, and pollution are one issue, and that freedom depends on the freedom of others and on humbly occupying a place within creation. This change requires humility before ecological complexity. Human life depends on interlocking forms of life, processes, and energies that people can damage but cannot fully understand or control. Berry condemns the narrow view that regards conservation only as a “no-return investment,” and contrasts it with Black Elk’s vision of life as holy: two-leggeds, four-leggeds, birds, and green things share one sacred circle, centered on a flowering tree that shelters all the children of one mother and father.

By Wendell Berry · First published 2019 · Genre: Environmental Essay, Nature Writing, Agrarian Writing · 4,562 words

First lines

FIRST THERE WAS Civil Rights, and then there was the War, and now it is the Environment. The first two of this sequence of causes have already risen to the top of the nation's consciousness and declined somewhat in a remarkably short time. I mention this in order to begin with what I believe to be a justifiable skepticism. For it seems to me that the Civil Rights Movement and the Peace Movement, as popular causes in the electronic age, have partaken far too much of the nature of fads. Not for all, certainly, but for too many they have been the fashionable politics of the moment. As causes they have been undertaken too much in ignorance; they have been too much simplified; they have been powered too much by impatience and guilt of conscience and short-term enthusiasm, and too little by an authentic social vision and long-term conviction and deliberation. For most people those causes have remained almost entirely abstract; there has been too little personal involvement, and too much involvement in organizations that were insisting that other organizations should do what was right.

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essays · environmentalism · agrarianism · sustainable agriculture · rural life · localism · conservation · ecology · food systems · farming · community · self-sufficiency

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