This collection of essays from Wendell Berry is thick and luxurious as it has taken me over a month to get through it. It is also deeply serious and passionate in a way that can be draining on one’s soul. I would almost call the tone scolding. I would say read it but give it some room to breathe in your brain.
Eaters, that is, must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.
Wendell Berry / The Pleasures of Eating (1989)
That human limitlessness is a fantasy means, obviously, that its life expectancy is limited. There is now a growing perception, and not just among a few experts, that we are entering a time of inescapable limits. We are not likely to be granted another world to plunder in compensation for our pillage of this one. Nor are we likely to believe much longer in our ability to outsmart, by means of science and technology, our economic stupidity. The hope that we can cure the ills of industrialism by the homeopathy of more technology seems at last to be losing status. We are, in short, coming under pres sure to understand ourselves as limited creatures in a limited world.
Wendell Berry / Faustian Economics (2006)