Six Easy Steps to Become Wendell Berry

1. Move to Kentucky.
2. Buy a farm.
3. Watch Office Space to learn how to destroy technology.
4. Beat your computer, DVD Player, and TV mercilessly with baseball bats.
5. Grow Food.
6. Cut Firewood.

Your occupation is now to farm, to write, and to send letters trying to convince your friends to move to Kentucky and repeat above steps.

This post is a tongue in cheek response to Heather Goodman’s aside in her post on “Important Blogger—That’s An Oxymoron.”

Posted by on Jan 25, 2010 in Gardening, Spirituality | 2 comments

2 Comments

  1. Benj
    Feb 3, 2010

    You forgot:

    -1: Flunk out of Econ 101.

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  2. Thomas
    Feb 3, 2010

    @ Benj

    There has been some good economic work done that supports many of the economic principles of agrarianism. The Essential Agrarian Reader has a few good essays, including a Herman Daly lecture at The World Bank, that start to make distinctions between traditional macroeconomics and an agrarian distinctive (such as throughput).

    On the whole, Berry’s characterization as anti-capitalist is pretty off base. He is against globalization, not capitalism. He is about as capitalist as you get, if you’re talking about the strict sense of the word. He writes about local economies being based around capital.

    I don’t think he’d characterize our current economy as capitalism as much as creditism and multi-national corporate fascism. Ideas like micro-financing and micro-capitalism, where capital is used within close knit local and regional economic structures, are economic concepts that are close cousins to agrarian economic concepts.

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