Let’s heed the wisdom of Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry died “suddenly and peacefully” at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky, where he had lived with his wife, Tanya Berry, for more than six decades. He was 92.

Berry wrote more than 50 books of essays, poetry and fiction. Across that work, he championed an agrarian economy rooted in place and community, while opposing corporatism and heedless consumption.

He continued working until the end of his life, returning repeatedly to the arguments that had defined his writing. His most famous book, “The Unsettling of America,” appeared in 1977 as a forceful call to resist the decline of rural areas and the damage caused by an overriding commitment to extraction.

A 50th-anniversary edition was reissued less than a month before Berry’s death, only days after his 92nd birthday. It included a new foreword in which he again reflected on the trends he had criticized since the mid-1970s.

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suddenly and peacefully