Wendell Berry says he will resume voting, though land issues he cares about have gotten worse

Wendell Berry, the author-farmer who is a leading advocate of conservation and sustainable agriculture, "struck a nerve with voters" when he wrote a letter to The Courier-Journal in July, saying that he had stayed away from the polls in Kentucky's May gubernatorial primary because he couldn't "submit again to the indignity of trying to pick the least undesirable candidate," since the only one who talked about land use and questioned mountaintop-removal strip mining for coal had dropped out of the race.

But Berry told The C-J's Peter Smith that he will vote in the Nov. 7 general election. "I'm going to vote for the Democrats, because it seems to me that the Republicans have such an abysmal record that some kind of change needs to be made," he said. "On the other hand -- and the problem with this conversation is that there's always another hand -- I'm not excited about voting for the Democrats." Berry's brother, John Berry Jr., was Democratic leader of the state Senate more than 25 years ago.

Berry, 73, told Smith that the issues he wrote about 30 years ago, in the seminal book "The Unsettling of America," such as industrialized agriculture and strip mining, "have all gotten worse." Still, Smith writes, some "compare the book with the environmental manifesto of the 1960s, Rachel Carlson's 'Silent Spring,' citing its impact on those seeking more say in where their food comes from." Norman Wirzba, a Georgetown (Ky.) College philosophy professor and editor of a collection of Berry's essays, told Smith, "He was a voice crying in the wilderness. A lot of people are listening now." (Read more) For L. Elisabeth Beattie's C-J review of "Wendell Berry: Life and Work," a collection of essays and articles about Berry, edited by Jason Peters, click here.