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Thursday, October 03, 2013

'Wendell Berry's mission, in word and deed, is the defense of the earth,' Bill Moyers says in new show

Farmer-author-poet-philosopher Wendell Berry is the focus of the latest Moyers & Co. program on public television stations, starting tomorrow. Bill Moyers interviewed Berry before an audience (a rare event for Berry) during a sustainabilty conference this spring at St. Catharine College in Kentucky, where Berry and his daughter Mary have started an ecological agrarianism program to address issues of land use, agriculture and food, which Berry has been writing about for decades.

"He is one of, if not the great, writer in American letters right now," writer Bill McKibben tells Moyers. "He understood what was happening on this planet a long time before anybody else. He's, you might say, a prophet of responsibility."

Berry talks about his recent forays into environmental activism, including a sleep-in at the Kentucky governor's office to protest mountaintop-removal coal mining. "We don't have a right to ask whether we're going to succeed or not," he tells Moyers. "The only question we have a right to ask is, 'What's the right thing to do?'" Check local TV listings for stations and broadcast times. Berry's fellow Kentuckians can see the show Sunday at 11 a.m. on KET and 6 p.m. on KET2.


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