What Are People For?

Wendell Berry, a Kentucky farmer, essayist, and poet, organizes this 1990 collection of 22 essays into three parts that move from personal meditation to literary criticism to broad cultural argument. Across the collection, Berry builds an interconnected case against the industrial economy's destruction of land, community, and culture, and for a way of life rooted in local knowledge, affection for place, and harmony with nature.

Part I consists of two short, meditative essays establishing the book's foundational concerns. In "Damage," Berry recounts hiring a man with a bulldozer to dig a pond on a steep, wooded hillside of his farm. When wet weather causes the earthwork to slump and the woods floor to slide, Berry identifies the cause as too much power paired with too little knowledge. He argues that because he lives in his subject, damage to his place is damage to his art, and that a man with a machine and inadequate culture is "a pestilence" (8). The companion essay, "Healing," offers aphoristic meditations on grace, creativity, and community, arguing that the health of creatures can only be held in common and that the made order must always seek the given order: "The field must remember the forest, the town must remember the field" (12).

Part II contains eight essays on writers and literary works through which Berry develops arguments about language, regionalism, and the moral responsibilities of the artist. In "A Remarkable Man," he reviews Theodore Rosengarten's All God's Dangers, the autobiography of "Nate Shaw," the pseudonym of a Black Alabama farmer born in 1885 who prospered through hard work, joined the Sharecroppers Union, served 12 years in prison after a confrontation with sheriff's deputies, and returned to farming. Berry argues Shaw is remarkable because the life of his body and mind were one, and his speech, rooted in experience rather than abstraction, could never serve propagandists. "Harry Caudill in the Cumberlands" reviews Harry Caudill's The Mountain, the Miner, and the Lord, describing the devastation of strip mining in eastern Kentucky under the "broad form deed," a legal instrument that allowed mineral-rights holders to strip mine without the surface owner's consent. Berry argues that Caudill's decades of advocacy were sustained by deep belonging to his native place, where knowledge fused with feeling.

In "A Few Words in Favor of Edward Abbey," Berry defends Abbey as not an environmentalist but a traditionalist and autobiographer whose self-defense is also the defense of human nature and culture, drawing a parallel to Henry David Thoreau. "Wallace Stegner and the Great Community" traces Berry's relationship with Stegner from a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford in 1958, praising Stegner as an exemplary regional writer who understood himself as part of his region and produced work that is both excellent and indispensable. "A Poem of Difficult Hope" analyzes Hayden Carruth's antiwar poem, arguing that a person who speaks of despair still remembers hope, while "The Responsibility of the Poet" contends that poetry is communal and filial, existing only as common ground between poets and other people. In "Style and Grace," Berry compares Ernest Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River" with Norman Maclean's "A River Runs Through It," arguing that Hemingway's purifying style is reductive, while Maclean's story, vulnerable to tragedy and mystery, is open to grace. The longest literary essay, "Writer and Region," traces regionalism from Huckleberry Finn, whose failure in its final chapters to imagine responsible adult community life reflects what Berry sees as a flaw in American national character: the preference for escape over the coming to responsibility that is the meaning of growing up. He identifies Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs as a rare American book about a beloved community with a sustaining common culture.

Part III contains 12 essays developing Berry's central cultural, economic, and ecological arguments. "God and Country" contends that organized Christianity has divorced itself from economic issues, becoming dependent on the very practices its truth forbids. Berry argues that the common reading of Genesis 1:28 as permission to exploit nature is contradicted by virtually all the rest of the Bible, and invokes the concepts of stewardship and usufruct, the right of temporary use without causing damage, as scripture's actual economic teaching. "A Practical Harmony" traces the idea that agriculture must learn from nature through a lineage from the Book of Job and Virgil's Georgics to twentieth-century figures such as Sir Albert Howard, who called nature "the supreme farmer," and Wes Jackson of the Land Institute, whose goal is to create grain fields that mimic native prairie ecosystems.

"An Argument for Diversity" proposes a diversified local economy for Berry's home county in Kentucky, critiquing both the sciences and the humanities in universities for failing to serve the care of particular places. "What Are People For?" challenges the postwar doctrine that there are too many farmers, warning that agricultural productivity is based on the ruin of its sources, with topsoil losses exceeding grain harvested by factors of five to 20. "Waste" extends this argument to the manufactured trash choking the countryside, contending that waste is a symptom of the deeper destruction of household and community economies. "Economy and Pleasure" critiques competition as the sovereign principle of economics and, drawing on John Ruskin, proposes affection as the proper standard, illustrated through Henry Besuden, a Kentucky sheep breeder who judged his pastures by their visible delectability. "The Pleasures of Eating" argues that eating is an agricultural act and offers practical suggestions for reconnecting with the sources of food, from growing one's own to dealing directly with local producers.

"The Work of Local Culture" opens with the image of an old bucket on a fence post slowly filling with leaves and decay to produce black humus, an emblem of how communities must build culture as the earth builds soil. Berry traces generational succession through the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare, and William Wordsworth, arguing that the modern norm of children leaving and never returning has produced a vast amnesia. He recounts a friend's memory of neighbors visiting in the evenings, telling stories they had all heard before: "They had everything but money" (159).

"Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer" and its companion, "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine," provoked intense public response. Berry explains his refusal to adopt a computer, sets out nine standards for technological innovation, and defends the productive household as an economy against critics who accused him of exploiting his wife. He argues that the deeper problem is not the exploitation of women by men but the consent of both to an economy that exploits everyone. The technological revolution's greatest danger, he contends, is the degradation of the body, and writing by hand preserves an intimacy between body and language that the computer screen destroys. "Word and Flesh" insists that environmental problems are not planetary but local, and that only love, never abstract, can accomplish the care of actual places.

The collection closes with "Nature as Measure," in which Berry describes the decline of farming from the diversified landscape of the 1940s to eroding soil, decaying buildings, and disappearing farmers. He proposes replacing the single standard of productivity with the standard of nature, arguing that industrial agriculture behaves like a monologist imposing demands, while agriculture guided by nature would proceed like a conversationalist, attending carefully to what a place permits. This standard requires what Berry calls a necessary democracy: Farming by the nature of particular places demands local knowledge and love that no centralized authority can supply.