Thoughts on Berry (Autobiographical and Otherwise)

I

Wendell Berry—Kentuckian, farmer, poet, novelist, environmentalist, pacifist, patriot, Christian, agrarian, and to my mind most importantly, essayistic thinker about all of the above—passed away at the age of 92 on August 31. Writing about those thinkers who have influenced me upon their passing is a long-standing (and long-winded) blog tradition of mine, but when it comes to Berry, I cannot reflect solely upon what learned from his thoughts; rather, I have to reflect upon how his writing of those thoughts came, over the decades, to be inscribed in important ways upon not only my own thinking, but my own sense of self. So this reflection is not simply about Berry, but about my reading of him, and where that reading led me, and how I carried it with me when I was being led otherwise.

II

During the 57 years when my life on earth overlapped with his, I had the opportunity to actually talk with Berry only once, at a Front Porch Conference in Louisville, KY, in 2019. I stood in line, while Berry—then 85 years old—graciously sat and waited on us all, wanting to grant to as many as possible the opportunity to look into his eyes, shake his hand, thank him for his inspiring writings and his prophetic example, and perhaps engage him in some idea or question. The photo of my meeting with Berry suggests that I was attempting the latter, but if I did, I have no memory of what I asked or what he said in reply. But in at least one crucial sense, the content of our brief exchange really doesn’t matter.

As I would hope any open-minded reader of Berry’s careful and weighty words would realize, for him the proper end of any relationship among or communication between people ought to be wholeness. Our work, our associations, our lives ought to serve to critique, and help create conditions wherein as many as possible may overcome, the competitive divisions which surround and hurt us: as he described them at the end of his magisterial The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture, “industrial uniformity” schools us to believe that “competition invariably results in the triumph of the best,” with the result that “body and soul, man and woman, producer and consumer, nature and technology, city and country are thrown into competition with each other,” a divisiveness which can only end with “the exhaustion of both.” The key to any such critique and overcoming of this imposed competition is, very simply, affection: to attend to, to learn from and listen to, to care for, the other; to “look and see” (as the poetic documentary of Berry’s life is titled) all that which is around us, in all its particularity and locality. Thus to simply be in the presence of one another, to treat them as part of one’s whole, is at least as important, and far more comforting, than whatever it is we may tangibly present to one another while sharing that presence. (And that “one another” is not restricted solely to the human, of course.)

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

(“The Peace of Wild Things,” 1968)

III

I think I first became aware of Wendell Berry thanks to Phillip Lopate’s 1994 collection The Art of the Personal Essay, which I still have an original copy of sitting on our bookshelves at home, and in which Lopate included Berry’s essay, “An Entrance of the Woods.” At that time in my life—newly married, newly graduated from Brigham Young University, partly shaking off and partly re-constituting the political and religious conservatism which I’d been raised within and which the Utah Mormon culture of BYU made mostly normative, all while working at a newspaper and a Sears call center and trying to decide between journalism or academia as a career—I loved nothing more than personal essays. I’d tried my hand at that form a few times in student publications; my voice was a pretentious one, but I hoped if I read more and wrote more, I’d improve. (That hope has probably not been entirely fulfilled.)

I especially loved essays that presented writers encountering nature—though the red rocks and desert canyons of the Colorado Plateau and the La Sal mountain range never moved me as they did other famed regional writers like Edward Abbey (whose Desert Solitaire I was ambivalent about) or Terry Tempest Williams (whose then-new book Refuge I admittedly adored). The previous summer I had interned in Washington DC, and while driving out there, after visiting my fiancé and her family in Michigan, I had passed through some hilly farmland in south-central Pennsylvania, with red barns nestled among wooded hills and small streams, and I thought I’d never seen anything so beautiful. I don’t think I made the agrarian connection then—I’d grown up surrounded by wheat and alfalfa fields in Spokane, Washington, hauling hay bales and milking cows by hand, but it would be another decade, more or less, before I began to intellectually reconnect with that learning. Still, I know that Berry’s simple description of a weekend he spent in the Kentucky woods, sometime around 1970, passing under beech and poplar trees and through thickets of ferns and rhododendron, listening to the hoots of nuthatches and the buzzing of insects, planted a seed in my mind which never left.

Lopate, in his introduction to the essay, called Berry’s writing “upright,” “Puritanical,” and “Biblical”; “he rarely shows humor,” he added, “or even irony; but then, saints are rarely funny, and Wendell Berry, in his lifelong efforts to protect the earth’s ecological balance, is something of a saint.” I think I always was, and still am, too doubtful to manage much sternness myself. But perhaps that is one reason why Berry’s words stuck fast.

[I]t has seemed to me for years now that the doings of men no longer occur within nature, but that the natural places which the human economy has so far spared now survive almost accidentally within the doings of men. This wilderness of the Red River now carries on its ancient processes within the human climate of war and waste and confusion. And I know that the distant roar of engines, though it may seem only to be passing through this wilderness, is really bearing down upon it….No. Even here where the economy of life is really an economy—where the creation is yet fully alive and continuous and self-enriching, where whatever dies enters directly into the life of the living—even here one cannot fully escape the sense of an impending human catastrophe.

(“An Entrance to the Woods,” 1971)

IV

In the years that immediately followed that first exposure to Bery, I read fewer essays by him. Actually, I just read fewer personal essays in general; I had chosen the academic route, and so was mostly reading those scholars that my discipline (political philosophy) had canonized, writers and thinkers whose primary goal was to try to understand and express the insights of their research and the research of others—the texts, the surveys, the data both anecdotal and analytic. Whereas the essayist, on the other hand, is trying to understand and express themselves, and only through their own thinking struggle with the world around them. A graduate education in the social sciences and the humanities forms one to be always conscious of the interpretability, the unfolding character, of research; no one, by definition, can have an entirely definitive take on any given argument or idea. Hence there is a suspicion—or at least there was in the teaching I internalized during those years—of the essayist, of the first-person voice, of any attempt to overcome specialization with a sweeping conclusion, whether humbly or sternly expressed.

So it perhaps was predictable that it wasn’t until I was finished with my PhD and was leading my family on a difficult sojourn through different universities—a journey that in our case took us entirely to various small towns and cities, one year in northern Mississippi, three years in northeastern Arkansas, another year in west-central Illinois, always with the looming fear that I’d made a poor choice and that years of higher education would lead to endless wandering rather than a place where we could put down roots, raise our children, and be part of a community (and those words themselves reveal how much I was already disposed towards Berry’s most fundamental concerns)—that I started reading Berry’s introspective, searching essays again, this time with somewhat different eyes. My education in political ideas—the philosophical communitarianism of the ancient Confucians, the German romantics, and Charles Taylor; the democratic republicanism of the Anti-Federalists, the American Populists, and Sheldon Wolin; the Christian egalitarianism of the radical Reformation, Catholic social justice teaching, and John Milbank—took on a different hue as I would walk or ride my bike to campus (financially, we always had to be, and remain today, a one-car family), past cheap suburban developments, past stands of loblolly pines or sugar maples, past fields of rice or soybeans, all while thinking about Berry’s words, and their unflashy, relentless insistence upon humble, local, ecological, agrarian truths. My professional and personal sense of my own vocation and person shifted, and then shifted again, during these years; Berry’s writings were hardly alone in shaping me during the early to mid-2000s, but his influence on my development at that time was far from the least consequential factor.

The collection of Berry’s essays that I have probably gone back to the most in the two decades since that time of re-engagement is almost certainly Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community. I probably first picked it up in 2002 or 2003. Berry’s introspective—but never solipsistic—application of a Christian and agrarian localism in this volume to hard questions about urbanism, sexual mores, international trade, pacifism, environmental policy, and Biblical interpretation makes it, I think, one of the most influential statements of his overall worldview. Interestingly though, I have to say that the essay from this volume that arrested me most when I first read it was on a topic which nominally had the least of any of them to do with any personal or professional thinking I was doing at the time, or have since: “The Problem of Tobacco.”

I’ve never smoked and have no real sense of smoking’s appeal. This is primarily a result of my religious commitments as a Mormon, but it’s not only that; I’ve never drank coffee either, yet as long as I can remember I’ve found the aroma of coffee quite pleasant, so it’s not as though I’m incapable of recognizing the value of something I’m outside of. (One of my fondest memories from the summer of 1999 when my wife and I and our oldest daughter, then just three years old, were living in Germany while I worked on my dissertation was a sunny day spent wandering in the city of Mainz, during which we came upon a biergarten in a park, one filled with jovial Saturday imbibers, and decided to order some apple juice and settle in; I knew full well that a teetotaler like myself could never fully partake of their social camaraderie, but I could enjoy and appreciate its virtues all the same.) Still, for a religiously committed opponent of tobacco to find insight in an elegiac argument over the necessary passing of the productive—if poisonous—world of tobacco farming that was central to Berry’s whole history was, if nothing else, strange.

Yet I found insight aplenty in the essay nonetheless. Through his imagined dialogue between himself—a tobacco farmer who has given up smoking and was looking to eliminate that indefensibly addictive and unhealthy crop from his livelihood while still holding on to policies and practices which would enable traditionally tobacco-dependent Kentucky farming communities to survive on their own terms—and an opponent of the crop—one who, like most of those (myself definitely included) that routinely fall into fierce opposition to (or, sometimes, enthusiastic embrace of) any number of scientific or social phenomena without any tactile knowledge of the local world which that phenomena impacts or within which it is nestled, had given no thought whatsoever as to what is to become of tobacco farmers—Berry modeled for me not only how one should engage with those whose actions seem morally appalling, but also spelled out practical examples of what trying to bring localist and agrarian sensibilities into contemporary disputes ought to involve (collective decision-making, fierce market resistance, small-scale democracy, ecological humility, economic and social justice, and more). The fact that, as I later realized, the essay also anticipated the self-destructive political anger of its author’s own people 30 years before it came to irrational fruition was simply icing on the cake:

“I see you are still clinging to the idea of an agricultural economy of diversified small farms that produce for local markets and local consumers.”

“Yes, I’m still clinging to it. I want people to eat. I want them to have, as dependably as possible, a local supply of good food. I want their food budget to support a thriving population of local farmers. That way, the land will thrive.”

“And you see the tobacco farmers as necessary to that?”

“I see all farmers—all that are left and, I hope, some more—as necessary to that. Tobacco farmers are farmers and among the best of them; their know-how is a great public asset, if the public only recognized it. They are farming some very good land. They should be growing food for the people of their region, the people of neighboring cities—or they should have a viable choice of doing so. The people who so eagerly condemn them for growing tobacco should be just as eager to help them find alternative crops. It is wrong to condemn people for doing a thing and then offer no alternative but failure. A person could get mad about that.”

(“The Problem of Tobacco,” 1991)

V

In 2006, through some combination of perseverance and God’s grace and random luck, we found ourselves a home at last—Friends University, a small Christian liberal arts college in Wichita, Kansas, where we’ve lived ever since. Save for one visit to Friends’s surprisingly (to me) wooded campus just west of the city’s downtown for an interview, I had no personal knowledge of Kansas before moving here; I’d only ever driven across it on I-70. My assumption upon arrival was more formed by Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie (a book and series worth revisiting, I later decided) than any actual data; I assumed the majority of my students would be arriving with rural backgrounds, or at least from agriculturally connected families and communities. That assumption was, it turned out, wrong more often than not.

While there were (and still sometimes are) notable exceptions, the Friends University student body was, and has become more so over the two decades I’ve taught here, every bit as disconnected from and specialized away from the communal and agrarian aspects of American life as that of any other group of 21^st-century suburban Americans. So within a few years of my arrival, I began to strive to make more whole what I was teaching, what I was reading, the life I and my family were living, and the environment we were part of—specifically the city of Wichita, a surprisingly (again, to me) diverse mittelpolitan region of middle-size, a slow- (or barely) growing city that stands unconnected as the regional center of south-central Kansas, dependent upon industries that it has very little financial ability to prevent being taken advantage by, and surrounded by fields of sunflowers and grain sorghum, by nestled gullies crowded with Osage orange and black locust, and by long, flat, bike-friendly horizons of, as John Denver sang, windy wheatfields of gold under blue summer skies. With all this in mind, I started to innovate beyond the courses in American government, comparative politics, and constitutional law I’d been hired to teach.

I assigned students chapters from Berry’s The Unsettling of America and Citizenship Papers as part of inquiries into the history of government policies regarding conservation, nutrition, and health; I started taking students on trips to visit with farmers, ranchers, butchers, gardeners, and anyone else attempting to nudge our food system towards greater sustainability; I picked up and developed untaught courses on social justice and Christian environmentalism, aiming to explore with students what the Bible can teach us about the stewardship, redistribution, and communal importance of land. Most importantly, I discovered The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, a little over an hour north of Wichita, and began to make yearly visits there with my students. We listened to presentations on agricultural policy, climate change, and the history of Black farmers in America; we visited TLI’s labs and experimental farm plots to learn about the development of kernza and other perennial crops; we were able to meet such famed authors as Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, and Eric Schlosser—and on a couple of occasions, we heard from Berry himself. In weaving his ideas into my classes I found myself, for the first time, reading more of his fiction, understanding more about how Berry’s ideas, outside the strict form of the essay, reveal a flexibility and adaptability, especially in regards to intimate questions of identity, sexuality, and spiritual belief, something that far more of my students found central to their young lives than they did Berry’s insistence upon local or agrarian knowledge. Through all this time, I was still learning from the man.

Of all the perspectives my engagement with Berry’s writings have opened up to me, I think none are as important as helping me see the terrible mistake of confusing the vital, and virtuous, role that natural limits play in our lives, with what he condemned in his collection The Art of Loading Brush as the “doctrine of inevitability,” a notion that he (I think rightly) labeled just “a poor excuse for…economic and technological determinism.” To seek that wholeness which hopefully characterizes a life lived in settled and sustainable integration with one’s local community and environment, will obviously involve an acceptance of limits—such a resolution requires seeking some contentment with, to quote Berry’s friend and founder of The Land Institute Wes Jackson, the “genius of the place.” But that seeking does not mean, and must not mean, accepting as natural those progressive expectations (embrace the carbon economy and the corporate rat race!) and those competitive presumptions (because, as Margaret Thatcher famously insisted, there is no alternative!) which go by the guise of “realism,” but functionally are just positional tools that serve to establish what Berry sneeringly called, in perhaps his angriest poetic passage (which is also, perversely, part of one of his Sabbath poems), “the objective.”

Even while I dreamed I prayed that what I saw was only fear and no foretelling,
for I saw the last known landscape destroyed for the sake
of the objective, the soil bludgeoned, the rock blasted.
Those who had wanted to go home would never get there now.

I visited the offices where for the sake of the objective the planners planned
at blank desks set in rows. I visited the loud factories
where the machines were made that would drive ever forward
toward the objective. I saw the forest reduced to stumps and gullies; I saw
the poisoned river, the mountain cast into the valley;
I came to the city that nobody recognized because it looked like every other city.
I saw the passages worn by the unnumbered
footfalls of those whose eyes were fixed upon the objective.

Their passing had obliterated the graves and the monuments
of those who had died in pursuit of the objective
and who had long ago forever been forgotten, according
to the inevitable rule that those who have forgotten forget
that they have forgotten. Men, women, and children now pursued the objective
as if nobody ever had pursued it before.

The races and the sexes now intermingled perfectly in pursuit of the objective.
The once-enslaved, the once-oppressed were now free
to sell themselves to the highest bidder
and to enter the best paying prisons
in pursuit of the objective, which was the destruction of all enemies,
which was the destruction of all obstacles, which was the destruction of all objects,
which was to clear the way to victory, which was to clear the way to promotion, to salvation, to progress,
to the completed sale, to the signature
on the contract, which was to clear the way
to self-realization, to self-creation, from which nobody who ever wanted to go home
would ever get there now, for every remembered place
had been displaced; the signposts had been bent to the ground and covered over.

Every place had been displaced, every love
unloved, every vow unsworn, every word unmeant
to make way for the passage of the crowd
of the individuated, the autonomous, the self-actuated, the homeless
with their many eyes opened toward the objective
which they did not yet perceive in the far distance,
having never known where they were going,
having never known where they came from.

(From “Sabbath Poem II,” 1997)

VI

For a man whose intellectual and artistic and personal focus was so concentrated, Wendell Berry’s writings contained multitudes. This was, I think, as I review the monument of words he built over so many decades, the most Christian thing about his legacy. In the same way that believers like myself take seriously the words attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of John—“Jesus then said to the Jews who had believed in him, ‘If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free’” (John 8:31-32, Revised Standard Version)—this reader of Berry, at least, sees in the discipline he elaborated upon and exemplified an invitation to an anarchic (which is different from an individualistic) freedom. To identify with and embrace that which is local to oneself obviously limits one’s choices, but it also potentially frees one, even if only partly, from the burden of the exploitative systems modernity has placed upon us and the world’s resources, and opens up paths of affective connection that, too often, the competitive expectations and divisions of modernity interfere with.

To conclude with an argument from my own training, the perspective which Berry’s writings help us see is an example of the second of Michael Walzer’s two types of communitarian argument: “The liberal ideology of separatism cannot take personhood and bondedness away from us,” but “does take away the sense of our personhood and bondedness,” with political and economic systems built upon the presumption of, even a celebration of, that deprivation. Berry’s whole life’s work was, very simply, to do the opposite: to help us see that which is present to us, and to enlist us in a struggle against all that makes difficult, or disdains the possibility of, connecting with, and breaking bread with, and dwelling alongside, and being entirely open to, whatever is locally our own. What, in the end, could be more holistic than that?

 

The 10 Best Books I Read in 2025

Phil Christman, Why Christians Should be Leftists

A wonderful, short--and yes, somewhat rambling, but only in the way the best kind of earnest testimonies ramble--affirmation of the undisputable truth (or at least so I think) that Christianity, at its core, is a universal, egalitarian, socialist--that is, a leftist--message. It's not so much an argument (though there are good arguments within it) as an altar call, but that altar it calls its readers to is one I fully embrace. More here, if you're so inclined.

Tobias Cremer, The Godless Crusade

There are a lot of books that have been written over the past decade trying to make sense of the rise of right-wing populism as a genuinely powerful electoral reality in Europe and America (and elsewhere, though this book only refers to polities outside of North America and Western Europe very briefly); this is the best one I've read yet. A serious work of scholarship, based on both survey data and sociological analysis, Cremer doesn't so much break new ground as provide a clarifying language to understand the world of Brexit, Donald Trump, and the rest. His detailed case for seeing the heart of this movement, across national borders, as an ersatz religion, a political religious identity without any spiritual substance, is undeniable, I think.

David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

I listened to this book with Melissa during a long drive, and I was absolutely capitvated; this was one case where the audio experience of hearing read aloud a thrilling historical tale of shipwrecks, mutiny, and survival--and all the personalities and conflicts which came before it, and all the political fallout that came afterwards--was a perfect match.

Ian Leslie, John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs

I'm a sucker of everything (or nearly everything, I guess) Beatles related, and this book was no exception. This is a delightful and insightful addition to the Beatles canon, a look at the John and Paul relationship and songwriting partnership organized around and viewed through their songs--an approach which is sometimes a little forced, but more often than not kind of revelatory. As I explained here, this book forced me to do what I should have one years ago: really give John's musical ouevre a thorough listen, which took up much of my year. I'm glad I did it.

Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, All-Star Superman

This one was another audio listen during another long drive, but this time the script was acted out as a radio play, and it was delightful. I'd read parts of this comic collection before, but after listening to it all, I had to track it down and give it a read myself, all in one sitting. This all happened during the summer, as part of a family gathering in Wisconsin, before we all went to see the new Superman movie--and considering the 2025's Superman not only ended up being one of my favorite movies of the year, but also inspired some serious commentary on my part, the presentation of the character in All-Star Superman (widely regarded as one of the best ever, as well as an inspiration for the movie) stands in my mind as one of my favorite narrative experiences of the year.

Jonathan Rauch, Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy

Rauch's book wasn't one of my favorite reads this year, but it was a book that made me think, and then rethink, my own understanding of the place my own faith community has within the history, the politics, and the ideas which characterize the American society that Rauch and I both value (however differently). My thoughts about the book are somewhat critical, but I also have to give it some respect: it's argument about the contributions with Mormonism can made to American pluralism and democracy are definitely reductive, and in some ways wrong, but are valuable and challenging as well, all the same.

Martha Wells, Fugitive Telemetry

Why this book? I'm not really sure--the whole Murderbot series,which my wife has been raving about for a couple of years now, is a tremendous delight; I had not greater pure reading joy this year than the weeks during which I tore through all six of these books. Wells has created a host of awesome science-fiction characters with great, funny, and even sometimes deeply engaging backgrounds and narrative voices; following their adventures is an absolute hoot, and occasionally even moving as well. I suppose I chose this one because it is the most recently published, and also because it is a superb, self-contained story: Murderbot investigating a murder, using his brains and his slightly lessening misanthropy to solve the case. Great stuff.

Norman Wirzba, The Paradise of God and Agrarian Spirit

Wirzba is an author that I've been familiar with for a while; his essays on Christianity, ecology, and sustainability have often informed my thinking and teaching over the years. But this year I taught, for the first time, a religion course at Friends University, and the topic was "Christian Resources for the Care of Creation"--and these two books by Wirzba became essential contributors to my lectures and discussion topics for the class. Paradise of God is better if you're looking for an explicitly environmentalist interpretation of key Biblical texts, particularly the Book of Genesis; but Agrarian Spirit is better if you're looking for something more pastoral, more political, and less grounded in Biblical theology. Both are wonderful, essential books for helping people to construct a Christian environmental ethic.

Daniel Wortel-London, The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865-1981

This is not a work of political theory; it's a history of urban development, of finance capitalism and its critics over nearly 150 years of New York City's growth and transformation. And yet, in covering this ideas and arguments, Wortel-London has written the best work of urban and political reflection that I've read in a long time. See more here, if you're interested (and yes, you absolutely should be!).

Planning and "The Politics of Beauty": Reflections on Stewart Udall

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic] 

John de Graaf, an author, filmmaker, and friend of Front Porch Republic, has recently completed a documentary tribute to a hero of his: Stewart Udall, the pioneering conservationist who in many ways defined (almost entirely for better, though perhaps, in a small way, partly for worse) the environmental agenda of the U.S. government and, more specifically, the Democratic party for the past 60 years. “Stewart Udall: The “Politics of Beauty” is a gorgeously shot and highly informative short movie, a wonderful introduction to a fairly unique and entirely admirable figure from 20^th-century American history: a crew-cutted WWII veteran and New Frontier liberal whose passion for the natural world literally changed the landscape of this country--but also an open-minded thinker, a lover of poetry, family, and community, whose conservationist passions led him to be ever more conscious, as the decades went by, of the complications inherent to the liberal statism through which he did his greatest work (even if he never did turn against it entirely). In an essay last year, de Graaf called Udall a “true conservative,” someone who “really wanted to conserve things: land, air, water, beauty, the arts and graces, gentle human relations, the best of tradition, democratic ideals,” and this movie reflects that aspect of Udall’s life very well.

Udall’s early history—his birth into the Udall family in 1920 (which was already by then an expanding political clan), his life as a young Mormon in Saint Johns, Arizona, and the poverty, the conflicts, and the fellowship which existed in that arid farming community—is by no means the focus of de Graff’s film, but I was entranced by those opening shots and the story it told, complete with comments from Udall’s surviving siblings. It put me in mind of my own maternal grandfather, Joseph Arben Jolley, who was born just four years before Udall in Tropic, Utah, a similarly remote and tiny Mormon hamlet on the Colorado Plateau (though 300 miles, a couple of mountain ranges, and several Native reservations separate the two towns). Like my grandfather, Udall’s early years were without electricity or running water, something which FDR’s New Deal (specifically the Rural Electrification Act) changed, with radical consequences for the Udall family—among other things, they became Democrats, convinced that government action really can improve human lives.

It was that conviction, tied to his passion for racial and, especially, environmental justice, which shaped his public career, first as an elected representative, and then as Secretary of the Interior under both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. During those years, Udall orchestrated the establishment of more national parks, historical monuments, wildlife refuges, and recreational areas than any other Interior Secretary either before or since; if you’ve ever visited Canyonlands National Park, or hiked the Appalachian Trail, or spent time at over a hundred other similar locations across America’s beautiful and diverse ecosystems and geography, it’s likely that you have Stewart Udall at least partly to thank. His years of government service were not restricted to what he did to strengthen and expand the conservationist mentality in Washington D.C.; de Graaf’s documentary does an excellent job highlighting Udall’s broad engagement with cultural issues, as well the tensions and frustrations he faced as a leading government official during the heights of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and all the protests both unleashed. But still, it is the lessons he leaned in Saint Johns, the way he applied those lessons, the things he learned from his struggles over them, and how his own take on those lessons thus evolved over the decades, which strike me as most valuable to America today.

In 1963, Udall published his first book, The Quiet Crisis. An idiosyncratic and unsystematic but still deeply insightful history of conservation attitudes and efforts throughout American history, its perspective on the role of government in protecting wilderness, particularly in the American West, was in some ways superseded by later books of his. But the original remains something of lost classic, regularly rediscovered and praised by those trying to understand the development of American society’s relationship to the land. Reading it in conjunction with watching de Graaf’s film both complicates and deepens our understanding of this indefatigable public servant.

In these pages, there are a fair number of embarrassing paeans to the presumed virtue and wisdom of American planners and policy-makers. Among others, the book begins with Udall presenting the national government’s Indian Claims Commission, which is generally accepted to have utterly failed in its task to treat Native land claims justly, “as a singular gesture of atonement, which no civilized country has ever matched,” and then towards the conclusion includes some glowing praise for Robert Moses, the devastating over-builder of American cities, highlighting his efforts to “overcome earlier failures to plan” and bring to American urban areas “asphalt for beach parking lots, for playgrounds, and for roads” (pp. 11, 163-164). But between such missteps, there much worth admiring and pondering.

In The Quiet Crisis, Udall provides thoughtful portraits—and critiques—of influential naturalists, conservationists, and geographers like George Perkins Marsh, Gifford Pinchot, John Wesley Powell, John Muir, and Frederick Law Olmstead. He off-handedly introduces the idea of global warning decades before scientific debates over such crashed into the public consciousness ("What are the long-range results of man's modification of the environment? When men clear a forest in order to make space for agriculture, how does this clearing affect the climate, the rate of erosion of soil, and the populations of birds and other wild animals?"--p. 81). Predictably, the book includes vicious condemnations of what he various refers to as the “Big Raid,” the “Great Giveaway,” and the “Myth of Superabundance,” the guiding ideology of many American business interests and monopolists which, facing only occasional resistance, exploited and denuded American forests, ecosystems, watersheds, species, grasslands, resources, and more throughout the 19^th century and the first part of the 20^th. Perhaps just as predictably, he lavishly praises those who took executive action on behalf of environmental interests, particularly Presidents Theodore and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. According to Udall, TR “regarded himself as the trustee of the lands owned by the people” and “dared to use his pen,” aggressively expanding the application of the Reclamation Act and the Antiquities Act so as to more than quadruple the size of protected natural lands in the United States (though whether TR’s actions really “dealt a decisive blow to the Myth of Superabundance” in America is doubtful--pp. 131, 136). And in Udall’s view, FDR’s New Deal aimed to reverse effects of “the Big Raids…[during which] much of the nation's resource capital had been borrowed and used up to advance the personal fortunes of a few”; through the creation of the REA, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Soil Conservation Service, and more, the government aimed to “to invest in land-rebuilding programs that would assure adequate resources for tomorrow….[with] the needs of the community and of the next generation…given first priority" (p. 144).

Udall’s reference there to “the needs of the community” may give one pause here, and it should. Because as the aforementioned tendency in The Quiet Crisis to occasionally see national planning as an obvious solution to any environmental or historical or urban problem demonstrates, Udall’s passion for the American landscape and wildlife was not always entirely cognizant of the local people who actually live in those landscapes and with that wildlife. It’s an attitude he clearly struggled with; in “The Politics of Beauty,” de Graaf shows an excerpt from a 2003 interview with Udall, in which he reflects that “there has always been local opposition, regional opposition, state opposition to the creation of new national parks….because people…wanted to control [the land around them] and do it the way they wanted to do it.” But even 40 years earlier, Udall was, I think, conscious of the ambiguity here. On my reading, the heart of that ambiguity resides with Henry David Thoreau, whom Udall calls “one of our first preservationists” and “a naturalist’s naturalist,” and whom, I believe, haunts his thinking. Consider his criticism of the man’s oeuvre:

Thoreau was alarmed by the Raider spirit, but he failed to realize that the land spoilers were already in command, and were committed to a course of action that would destroy the land values he prized the most. With his negative feelings about government and politics, he failed to perceive that it would take government action to stop the destruction. There were other contradictions:  although he abhorred the very thought of social action, land conservation could not begin until men organized for action; he was anti-reformer, but it would take the crusading zeal of reform-minded men to save the woods and wildlife; he was, moreover, the most thoroughgoing nonconformist alive, though the dangerous drift of the time pointed to the need for conformity to minimum rules of resource management. In short, government action was necessary to curb the exploitation of resources and allow the land to renew itself, but Henry David Thoreau was constitutionally and unalterably antiprogram and antigovernment (p. 52).

To Udall, the results of this disposition was obvious: no national parks, no resistance to those would abuse the natural world for their own profit. And yet, consider also Udall’s concluding remarks, in which he looks out the suburbanizing, postwar America he was partly responsible for leading:

We are now a nomadic people, and our new-found mobility had deprived us of a sense of belonging to a particular place. Millions of Americans have no tie to the 'natural habitat' that is their home....A land ethic for tomorrow should be as honest as Thoreau's Walden....Henry David Thoreau would scoff at the notion that the Gross National Product should be the chief index to the state of the nation, or that automobile sales of figures on consumer consumption reveal anything significant about the authentic art of living. He would surely assert that a clean landscape is as important as a freeway, he would deplore every planless conquest of the countryside, and he would remind his countrymen that a glimpse of a grouse can be more inspiring than a Hollywood spectacular or color television. To those who complain of the complexity of modern life, he might reply, 'If you want inner peace find it in solitude, not speed, and if you would find yourself, look to the land from which you came and to which you go (pp. 189-190).

This ambivalence—leavening what is otherwise a learned and vigorous defense of what Udall clearly understood as a progressive and beneficial fight by experts to tame American individualism and protect America’s natural bounty, most especially in the arid ecosystems of the American West—shouldn’t surprise anyone who sees in Udall the mature wisdom which de Graaf’s movie so ably demonstrates. Udall was a person capable of changing his mind—about the postwar passion for dam-building, most prominently—and of growing and rethinking as the years went by. That growth helped him come to see the foolishness of his support for Cold War policies which have paved the way for American militarism, and to regret his support for energy and highway development projects which have only led to greater urban centralization and pollution. His deep, almost religious commitment to principles of frugality, family, and justice (my sole complaint with de Graaf’s wonderful documentary is that its brief references to Udall’s Mormonism don’t capture the complicated reality of his membership in his and my shared tribe) may have expressed themselves in different ways over the decades, but they surely only grew stronger with time.

It would be too much to say that the work he committed himself to in the decades following his later years—among other things, a long legal struggle to get the national government to acknowledge the harms of the radiation it had exposed thousands to through nuclear testing in the American southwest through the 1950s and 1960s—was something he took on as a penance. On the contrary, it’s unlikely he ever regretted his role in using the power of the national government to accomplish ends which provided great benefits to the broader public, to say nothing of the benefits to the ecosystems which his push for conservation and protecting wilderness areas made possible. But I do think that over the years the ambivalence I sense in his writing--an ambivalence which reflected a frustration with Thoreau's rejection of collective action, but also an admiration for Thoreau's committed locality--put him on a somewhat different trajectory. He's not alone in finding himself struggling over the best balance between the local and the national, or between engaging individual ecological tending and establishing collective ecological boundaries. As I noted years ago, in connection with other contentious acts of national conservation--the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, specifically--Udall's trajectory has been shared by other Interior Secretaries as well. In an essay for Front Porch Republic, Nathan Nielson once spelled out this dynamic well: reflecting upon the protective routinization which the National Park Service provides to America’s beautiful places, Nielson observed that while “local governments have a better sense of what the land means…the federal route is the only viable option when the clamor for nature reaches critical mass.” Indeed.

In a letter Udall wrote to his grandchildren in 2005, Udall had a lot of advice, some of it still quite programmatic and planning oriented, and perhaps defensibly so. But he also brought his mature, reflective perspective to bear on his own part in the ambitious planning of his generation:

Operating on the assumption that energy would be both cheap and superabundant, I admit, led my generation to make misjudgments that have come back and now haunt and perplex your generation. We designed cities, buildings, and a national system of transportation that were inefficient and extravagant. Now, the paramount task of your generation will be to correct those mistakes with an efficient infrastructure that respects the limitations of our environment to keep up with damages we are causing.

Not a fully Thoreau-esque statement, to be sure, but one that is perhaps animated at least in part by his non-comformist, place-loving spirit nonetheless. Sharon Francis, Udall’s longtime aid who knew his work as well as anyone, was extensively interviewed by de Graaf; she called Udall “the Henry David Thoreau of his generation.” Ignoring all the circumstantial ways that comparison doesn't quite work (to say nothing of the fact that, two generations on from the high point of Udall's impact sixty years ago, perhaps environmentalism needs less Udallian confidence and more Wes-Jackson-style apocalyptism), and focusing instead on the shared, fundamental passions which make it essentially true, one can’t help but wonder: what better tribute could a true “conservative”—that is, a conserver of the land and the resources which provide human communities and indeed the whole human race with life and joy—possibly receive than that? "The Politics of Beauty" reminds us of this romantic, poetic, but also practical conservation-minded Udall, and that alone is reason to watch it again and again.