Teddy Macker teaching Creative Writing at UCSB (who
incorporates sustainability and care of the environment in his teaching
to students in his care), shares this live-streamed talk by Wendell
Berry. It's long, maybe too long for some, and definitely a speech,
but wonderful that this man who has inspired so many of us, is honored in
this way. He jokingly begins by saying it is rather courageous of
the NEH to allow him to speak before actually seeing or reviewing his
talk, he will speak his mind as usual....
2012 Jefferson Lecture with Wendell Berry
Watch the lecture, "It All Turns on Affection,"
online
http://www.neh.gov/news/2012-jefferson-lecture-wendell-berry
April 25, 2012 | By NEH Staff
Wendell E. Berry, noted poet, essayist, novelist, farmer,
and conservationist, delivered the 2012 Jefferson Lecture in the
Humanities on Monday, April 23, 2012 at the John F. Kennedy Center for
the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
The annual
lecture, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is
the most prestigious honor the federal government bestows for
distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.
In his lecture, entitled
“It All Turns on Affection,” Berry lamented the increasing divergence
of modern man from the environment and local communities. Invoking the
words of his mentor, the writer Wallace Stegner, Berry observed that
throughout history Americans have been divided into two kinds: the
“boomers” who “pillage and run,” and the “stickers” who “settle, and love
the life they have made and the place they have made it in.”
Inspired by a passage from E.M. Forster’s Howards End, Berry
called for for a land use ethic that is shaped by a sense of “affection”
for land and place. “And so,” he said, “I am nominating economy for an
equal standing among the arts and humanities. I mean, not economics, but
economy, the making of the human household upon the earth: the
arts of adapting kindly the many human households to the earth’s
many ecosystems and human neighborhoods.”
The full text of Wendell Berry’s lecture is available here.
Described as a “21-st century Henry David Thoreau,” Wendell Berry has
spent his career meditating on our relationship and responsibility to the
land and community. He is the author of more than forty books of poems,
essays, short stories, and novels, many of which draw on the traditional
rural values of Berry’s native Kentucky.
Read more
about Wendell Berry and the Jefferson Lecture here. Also
available is
a
biography of Wendell
Berry
,
an “appreciation” essay by New York
Times
writer Mark Bittman, and
an interview of Wendell Berry by NEH Chairman Jim Leach.
This year, for the first time, NEH live streamed the Jefferson Lecture
for those unable to attend.
Watch the archived video of the lecture
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