The World-Ending Fire

"If you care about food, farming and the environment then you really have to read and understand this book and Wendell Berry’s work. His brilliance was to see, before most other people, what modern agriculture did to rural communities and farming cultures and what terrible havoc it would wreak. He was a prophet, calling it in the 1960s and 1970s, and it’s all a little sad, because when I met and became friends with him, he felt he had lost, that it had all happened as if he’d never written a word. He’s also a very, very good writer of essays as shown in this collection. I am an agrarian radical. Proud to be one. I don’t think it is about harping back to a simpler life per se , but a life that would be genuinely meaningful and sustainable. If the modern industrial-consumerist world was a viable project, then he’d be seen as a daydreamer, but it isn’t, and he’s one of its clearest-eyed critics. I think agrarian radicals are some of the most powerful critics of modernity, and offer some of the most convincing answers to the chaos and destruction of our age. Rebuilding local communities of work and production, with a deep reverence for place, and for humble things like the nature around us, and for how nature works. The future we are being force fed isn’t inevitable, we have agency and we can choose something different. No. I’d never heard of him when I wrote The Shepherd’s Life , I had my own influences. But, when that book was published, I met him and he joked he was sick of people sending him it, as he had nine copies now. He asked me questions at an event in his local public library and I thought that was absurd, because he had done vital things for decades and I was very green. My second book, English Pastoral , nodded to him because it had to, he had done similar things for a long time and his articulation of the issues was so good I could only doff my cap and salute him. I think Wendell Berry would love Anna, the hero of my new book. She is someone that found meaning and happiness in the old-fashioned work of the outer islands of an archipelago caring for wild eider ducks. She is an agrarian radical hero, because she rebuilt a tradition that modernity tried to destroy and devoted her life to trying to rebuild an ecosystem and lived in it, and from it, sustainably. And she was ‘heroic’ because she inspired lots of other people to rebuild their historic connection with place to try and make it thrive again. She didn’t magically make everything OK, because their world is broken, like everyone else’s, but they made it better, and opted out of the exploitative values and systems that are killing us."