Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction by Lex Williford, Michael Martone Read Free Book Online

sun. I imagine it as a place of silence, where the particles of dust stop spinning and hang motionless in deep space.
    Around my neck is the stone he brought me from Poland. I hold it out. Like this? I ask. Shards of fly wings, suspended in amber.
    Exactly , he says.

Getting Along with Nature
     
    Wendell Berry
 
    WENDELL BERRY , novelist, poet, essayist, philosopher, and farmer, is the author of fourteen books of poems, eleven novels and short story collections, and sixteen volumes of essays, including The Unsettling of America . A recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, Berry studied creative writing at Stanford University. He has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives on the family farm at Port Royal, Kentucky.
     
     
    1982
     
     
    The defenders of nature and wilderness — like their enemies the defenders of the industrial economy — sometimes sound as if the natural and the human were two separate estates, radically different and radically divided. The defenders of nature and wilderness sometimes seem to feel that they must oppose any human encroachment whatsoever, just as the industrialists often apparently feel that they must make the human encroachment absolute or, as they say, “complete the conquest of nature.” But there is danger in this opposition, and it can be best dealt with by realizing that these pure and separate categories are pure ideas and do not otherwise exist.
    Pure nature, anyhow, is not good for humans to live in, and humans do not want to live in it — or not for very long. Any exposure to the elements that lasts more than a few hours will remind us of the desirability of the basic human amenities: clothing, shelter, cooked food, the company of kinfolk and friends — perhaps even of hot baths and music and books.
    It is equally true that a condition that is purely human is not good for people to live in, and people do not want to live for very long in it. Obviously, the more artificial a human environment becomes, the more the word “natural” becomes a term of value. It can be argued, indeed, that the conservation movement, as we know it today, is largely a product of the industrial revolution. The people who want clean air, clear streams, and wild forests, prairies, and deserts are the people who no longer have them.
    People cannot live apart from nature; that is the first principle of the conservationists. And yet, people cannot live in nature Without changing it. But this is true of all creatures; they depend upon nature, and they change it. What we call nature is, in a sense, the sum of the changes made by all the various creatures and natural forces in their intricate actions and influences upon each other and upon their places. Because of the woodpeckers, nature is different from what it would be Without them. It is different also because of the borers and ants that live in tree trunks, and because of the bacteria that live in the soil under the trees. The making of these differences is the making of the world.
    Some of the changes made by wild creatures we would call beneficent: beavers are famous for making ponds that turn into fertile meadows; trees and prairie grasses build soil. But sometimes, too, we would call natural changes destructive. According to early witnesses, for instance, large areas around Kentucky salt licks were severely trampled and eroded by the great herds of hoofed animals that gathered there. The buffalo “streets” through hilly country were so hollowed out by hoof-wear and erosion that they remain visible almost two centuries after the disappearance of the buffalo. And so it can hardly be expected that humans would not change nature. Humans, like all other creatures, must make a difference; otherwise, they cannot live. But unlike other creatures, humans must make a choice as to the kind and scale of the difference they make. If they choose to make too small a difference, they diminish their humanity. If they choose to