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Five views of Guichen Bay
1. Walk the cliffs and look upon the bay. A grey-walled westerly has blown in overnight, cloud thick across the sky, horizon to horizon. Spindrift blurs the line of the white beach and the ripple of hills beyond. Off the point the island twins are sinking; sea and sky fused. The cloud shades light and dark, a page rubbed light with graphite, brushed, in no particular pattern, with no particular intent. At hand the cliffs stand clear against the grey; their seams and faces, naked, throw no shadows. The line of headlands curves to the opening of the bay; a…
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The Fractured Workplace And Its Remedies
This is an essay about the crisis of our modern workplaces and about ways to repair them. Everyone knows that our modern workplaces are in crisis. They are often run under unethical rules and practices which would not be accepted anywhere else in our society. They routinely give rise to appalling behaviour, such as workplace bullying, which is somehow regarded as legitimate–in fact essential–in the modern business environment. “Nothing personal, just business” is the justification. This is wholly immoral and inhumane. These attitudes and negative values infect every part of modern people management, such as performance metrics and performance management,…
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Wendell Berry in modern times
Wendell Berry is a native of Kentucky who has written, elegantly and powerfully, for more than four decades on themes relating to sustainable agriculture. He is, as a commentator recently said, the most passionate advocate for the family farm and homestead. The principles he developed, however, go beyond agriculture: they bear on the whole question of sustainable living and sustainable societies. In previous posts I’ve argued that an effective approach to climate change is not primarily a matter of technology, but of changing ways of thinking about life and living across all all cultures and societies. Wendell Berry has much…
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Wendell Berry in modern times (part 3)
Although Wendell Berry was writing here some decades ago, the central principles he establishes have continued to be his main themes in more or less unaltered form. At the time of writing global warming was just beginning to be spoken of in public scientific discourse. Wendell Berry seems to have had early intuitions of the dangers. He is deeply suspicious of fossil fuels because of the local pollution effects of power plants and because (more crucially for him) they power industrial agriculture and embed dependence. Global warming as such wasn’t, however, part of his critique. Even his recent New York…
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Wendell Berry in modern times (part 2)
The system of agriculture–Wendell Berry would say, pattern–proposed as the alternative to agribusiness is idiosyncratic, but persuasively argued. It is built on fundamental principles, so that the recommendations derived from them are inter-dependent and consistent. And not simply argued, but documented. Wendell Berry is at his best when he is reporting on the various agricultures he so admires: from Andean hill-farmers, to Native American farmers of the Sonoran desert, to commercial farmers re-thinking their farming practice, to the Amish of the heartland, all feeding into his own developing farming practice on 40 acres of Kentucky soil. From the interweaving of…
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Wendell Berry in modern times (part 1)
The recent article by Wendell Berry in the New York Times, written with his long-time associate Wes Jackson, on the loss of Iowa’s soil under the extreme storm events increasingly generated by climate change (see my January 14 post), sent me back to his writings, and to a rediscovered pleasure, and inspiration. There is much about Wendell Berry’s work that one can place in the unique tradition of American letters that runs from Thoreau and Emerson, to John Muir and Aldo Leopold, to Annie Dillard and Barbara Kingsolver. It has deep connections to one taproot of American culture (barely visible…
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Reflections on Flannery’s National Library lecture (final)
So where does that leave us?–‘us’ being here simply the population of the world. Flannery attempts a rallying call to the troops. Calling, rather oddly, on the nineteenth century campaign to rid the world of slavery, and on the late twentieth century campaign to rid the world of the CFC’s that deplete ozone, he argues for a positive stance. In effect one has to take a position of this kind; otherwise, why bother to give lectures and write articles at all? Yet there are critical issues largely ignored in Flannery’s lecture. That is understandable, because these issues are largely the human…
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Reflections on Flannery’s National Library lecture (part 2)
It is greatly to Flannery’s credit that, faced with daunting conclusions on this scale he habitually finds grounds for positive thinking and action. That was true of The Weather Makers which ended with a call to arms for household action, still one of the main fronts of climate strategy. In 2006, as the emerging data bean to indicate the dramatic acceleration of the warming trend, his scientific training led him to a pessimistic assessment and into advocacy of nuclear technology as a last line of defence–a not inconsiderable reversal for him, given his long-held green convictions. Even now he seems…