Fixing What's Ruined

The Gift of Good Land has been resting on my living room coffee table for more than a year now, waiting patiently for my occasional bursts of reading and my even more occasional writing.

Nearing its end now, I have scant recollection of the early essays and themes. But I was struck a week ago upon realizing that the book's last quarter is most decidedly not about the gift of good land. It's about something more common and more rare. And more necessary for us to apprehend.

What's common is story after story of ruined land, degraded land, exhausted land. What's rare are the people resuscitating what others have wasted.

These tellings are why Wendells' accounts are more relevant today than when he toured these farms and wrote these essays in the late 1970s.

We moderns have shown ourselves fundamentally incapable of appreciating gifts. In the run-up to the digital age we ruined a lot of good land and waterways. We're now hellbent on ruining the planet itself and everything that lives on it.

For a couple hundred years the United States had an imperfect but sturdy democracy that we're slowly but surely squandering.

The social movements of the last 80 years endowed women, Black people, and queer people with actual freedoms and human rights, just as veterans did who fought under our flag in some American wars—gifts from freedom fighters to everyone behind the frontlines and not yet born. These are being rolled back too and I can't help but wonder if some amount of complacency is partially to blame.

That's what happening at the largest scale, through systems. But Wendell has always taught that we can't do our work at that scale, no matter how grave the threat or corrupt the system. That is partly what distinguishes Berryism from other kinds of ideologies of change. Most would have us turn spades against the systems; Wendell believes it's better to sink them into the soil underfoot.

The work that needs doing, he would say, is the work you can reach.

And there's so much of it to do.

In "A Rescued Farm," Wendell introduces us to Wally Aiken, a foundry grinder living with his mother outside East Palestine, Ohio. Wally worked the second shift at the foundry so he could spend mornings to work on his farm on an abandoned strip mine. Wendell went to visit. "I had often wondered what sort of human intention might finally turn toward these wasted places."

Here's what Wendell found:

What he had was a "farm" with a surface like ripples on a pond -- the ripples being six to twelve feet high and covered with trees, bushes, briars and vines. To walk across it would have been no casual undertaking. Nevertheless, it somehow got to be a farm in Wally's mind.

It took about 170 hours to backfill and grade a single acre of this place and when Wendell visited, the project was in its sixth year. Here and there, progress could be seen, but Wendell had his doubts until he reached the early acres of reclamation. "The ground was covered everywhere by a dense, thriving stand of pasture plants comparable to the best you would see anywhere. Topsoil was building again."

Why would a man take on such a hard, uneconomic, impractical undertaking -- turning the spoils of a mine into a farm? Wally told Wendell "It's nice to have something to devote oneself to, to care about and be a part of." Wendell's version is at once more poetic and more profound:

He has done it out of a devotion to a possibility once almost destroyed in his place, and now almost recovered. His work has mended both the ruined land and (in himself at least) the human greed and folly that ruined it.

Tom and Ginny Marsh show up in the next essay, "An Excellent Homestead," as the locally famous potters and professors at the University of Louisville. Wendell paid a visit to their little corner of heaven in Indiana where they had joined work and life into an exemplary subsistence farm, pottery studio and household. "A place that loving attention has been paid to. Everywhere you look you see the signs of care."

When the Marshes started work here in 1970, the place was disused and neglected. The flat land where their buildings and garden now stand was just a sort of gravel bed with the creek wandering over it, and all grown up in briars.

The Marshes reclaimed it, project by project, year by year -- every building and feature placed exactly where it should be, made no larger than it must be. "The human life of the place," Wendell writes, "and the life of its soil and plants and animals revolve together." Sitting down at the Marshes' dining room table, Wendell describes a feeling of completion and satisfaction made possible only through his hosts' depth of care, kinship, and proportion.

Eating you feel the cycle turn, completing itself yet again. The cow eats, the hogs eat, the chickens eat, the people eat. The life of the place comes in as food, returns as fertility, comes in as energy, returns as care.

Next in the line is "A Talent for Necessity" starring Henry Besuden, a fellow Kentuckian and the nation's premier breeder of Southdown sheep. I recognize him from other Wendell essays, but knew nothing of his inherited 600 acres of steeply sloping, thin-soiled land, "corned to death" and covered with debt and gullies deep enough to hide a man. Says Henry: "I had to go into the sheep business because sheep were the only animals that could have lived off the farm."

Henry was a generation ahead of Wendell. By 1950, 23 years after his inheritance, the land scars were grassed over and the best flocks of Southdown sheep in the United States were grazing. But the damage wasn't undone. "T'aint in good shape yet" he told an interviewer in 1978. Bringing his farm back to health took Henry Besudan's entire lifetime.

This was a man Wendell admired deeply -- one of several elders who exemplified how vigilant and attentive farming enacted a careful kind of thinking, embodying a life truly capable of caretaking God's creation. So Wendell's study of Henry Besuden was equally careful. And in this case like all the others, the character of the fixer proved to be the answer to Wendell's original question about how wasted places and bad ideas are finally corrected.

The talent for what Henry "had to do" was in large measure the ability to bear the good outcome in mind: to envision, in spite of rocks and gullies, the good health of the fields: to foresee in the pregnant ewes and the advancing season a good crop of lambs. And it was the ability to carry in his head for nearly half a century the ideal character and pattern of the Southdown, and to measure his animals relentlessly against it...

I think you see what I'm trying to get at here.

Good land, good order, good health, good friends, good food, good air -- these are truly gifts. Not one of us can conjure a single one of these on our own. They are ours to enjoy only when nature, humanity, and the divine come into brief, mysterious harmony. These conditions do not last. We shouldn't expect them to. That is why they are gifts.

But we are not here on this limited planet, with our limited time, just to enjoy gifts. Only the super-rich live like that -- luxuriating in the largesse of nature and the labors of others, wreaking a path of misery and ruination in their wake.

That is not our calling.

Instead, we must set about repairing what others have ruined. It can be done -- not by focusing on systems change alone, but by taking the worst of the conditions right around us and doing the patient, uncelebrated work of making them right again.