Wendell
Berry is a farmer, poet, novelist, essayist, and philosopher who has been called
"the prophet of rural America." His works assert that humans must learn
to live in harmony with nature or we will all perish. Of the more than 30 books
of fiction, nonfiction and poetry that he has written, his most well known is,
The Unsettling of America, which critiques agribusiness -- industrial agriculture
-- and describes how it is destroying the fabric of American communities. Instead,
he advocates a return to agrarian communities. As Berry sees it, the traditional
community is a model of interdependency -- "A community is the mental and spiritual
condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the
place define and limit the possibilities of each other's lives."
