The Gift of Good Land

I have been a fan of Wendell Berry for several years now, but with a writer so prolific it is difficult to even scratch the surface of his catalog. Today, I dug a little bit deeper and read his 1979 essay "The Gift of Good Land." It is a marvelous vision of biblical stewardship, centered on mankind acting with propriety in a wonderfully mysterious world that resists the hubris of control.

After a couple days immersed in the minutia of politics, it was worth stepping back to see from a wider angle. Berry paints a big picture made up of many local pictures. While politics is important and who makes decisions in the White House is of great consequence, doing the ordinary well is consequential too.

Application is the most important work, but also the most modest, complex, difficult, and long---and so it goes against the grain of industrial heroism. It destroys forever the notions that the world can be thought of (by humans) as a whole and that humans can "save" it as a whole---notions we can well do without, for they prevent us from understanding our problems and from growing up.