Love of the Land: The American Dream

The love of the land has long characterized the American dream. “Go west young man,” the cry of a nation expanding in its first century. This reality was accompanied by growing identification not only with the land, but also with a sense of ownership and celebration nationalistic pride. Millions of acres of national parks were set aside. America became the world’s bread basket. It was a proud thing to be a farmer, a naturalist, or an outdoors man. We still celebrate Walden Pond as Thoreau captured the essence of this idyllic dream. However, post-world war, Americans have more and more become city dwellers. The family farm increasingly gives way to the big corporate farm complex. We continue to get better at producing more food per square acre, genetically modifying crops, improving pesticides and fertilizers throughout the last century. In the same way as voices like Thoreau and Teddy Roosevelt celebrated the American land dream, voices in the last half of the twentieth century like Asimov, Fuller and others have decried the environmental impacts and future risks. However, amongst those voices a unique one stands out for his socio-political views rooted in the agrarian dream of community and an urgent message of environmental stewardship.
Wendell Berry, born to a Kentucky tobacco farmer, Stanford educated and an accomplished educator has become a leading voice in the Christian environmental stewardship movement. While his relationship with academics, other environmentalists and even other Christians has often been less than smooth, the consistency of his viewpoint and quality of his message makes him stand out in the crowd. In attempting to understand and share the essence of Wendell Berry, four key elements really define him: the depth of the rooting of all of his views in a profound agrarian ethos; the translation of that ethos into a fully developed socio-political agenda; the defining theology behind it; and of course his articulation of his message as a