Look and See: Wendell Berry's Kentucky

PBS is airing an amazing film on Wendell Berry and the Environment which premiered on April 23 and is available through May 7 HERE. It is also available for those who have Netflix.

Berry, an essayist, and poet is also a farmer in rural Kentucky. The hour-long film is well done, combining a number of stories at once within Berry’s life framework of activism, writing, raising children, and farming.

Probably its most significant aspect is demonstrating the social breakdown – the fruit of industrialization and modernization – on human souls and community that turning farming and farmers into a cog in a wheel has caused. Berry gets at the spiritual and social consequences in a way that is not moralistic but is somewhat irrefutable. And it doesn’t hurt that he and his wife have been a living testaments to an enduring way of life that flies in the face of such depersonalization. Her contributions to the film as fascinating as his.

Excerpts from a 1975 panel discussion show Berry unmasking the United States policies as being equal to Communist military annexations of lands – just by other means. His down-home brilliance is as staggering as it has always been. The film ends with a poem of such immense beauty, it will leave you in tears.