A tribute by Matt Kneece, CFSA Policy Director. Published September 2, 2026.
We all remember the first piece of writing that stirred or captured our connection to the land.
For some, it was naturalists like Aldo Leopold or Henry David Thoreau. For others, it was poets like Mary Oliver or bell hooks.
For me, it was Wendell Berry, who passed away on August 31, 2026.
From his Port Royal, Kentucky farm of more than 60 years, Wendell Berry authored more than 50 works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and essays. For Berry, values like sustainable agriculture, healthy rural communities, connection to place and the interconnectedness of life were not archaic and idealistic notions, but actionable values that should anchor our lives.
Famously never even owning a computer, Berry wrote for decades about the culture of life on small farms and in farming towns, polemics about how such places were vital to a sustainable future and why they were rapidly disappearing from a landscape increasingly afflicted with topsoil erosion, polluted water and unchecked development.
Berry saw the world not made up of individual parts or fragments in isolation, but rather a holistic network of interdependencies within which we all find ourselves. When we neglect our physical connections to the land, Berry warns, our psychological, spiritual and emotional connections to the land and each other soon follow.
Beyond his writing, Berry walked the walk as an agrarian activist, taking part in nonviolent civil disobedience against mountaintop removal mining, coal ash pollution and farmland loss.
“Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory and a sterner sense of justice than we do.” – Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry was not asking everyone to become a farmer. Instead, he asked us to put things in their proper place: in doing so, we encourage values like stewardship and community. What we see in Berry’s work are images of a responsible person who stands tall on their land and doorstep, cares for their neighbors, and recognizes their role in the community of nature.
Whether you’ve never read a word of his or own every word he’s ever written (as I do), remember him by going into the peace of wild things and being free.
“Why do farmers farm, given their economic adversities on top of the many frustrations and difficulties normal to farming? And always the answer is: ‘Love. They must do it for love.’” – Wendell Berry
Guy Mendes, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
