Monday, Aug. 31. He was a naturalist, staunchly advocating for and supporting returning land to its natural state, and encouraged an off-grid lifestyle that would do as little harm to the natural world as possible. He was also a fierce advocate for rural places.
"Mr. Berry wrote more than 50 volumes of poetry, fiction and argument that championed small family farms, the environment, local foods and interdependent communities, and railed against chemicals, most technologies, agribusiness and distant government," reports Robert D. McFadden for The New York Times.
McFadden continues: "He never became a household name but, as his oeuvre grew over a half-century, advocates of agrarian and ecological causes embraced his work as an eloquent, if sometimes didactic, expression of their own hopes. Some critics likened his landed exhortations to those of Thoreau or Thomas Jefferson."
He studied English at the University of Kentucky, writing at Stanford and taught at New York University for two years before being called back to his Henry County, Ky., homeplace, "an old two-room cabin on the Kentucky River at Port Royal... where his ancestors had lived since 1803," McFadden writes.
"Returning to his home as a place to write for the rest of his life was a way to insure, to himself, that he would always be bound by the truth, Mr. Berry said in a phone interview in 2018 ...," McFadden writes. "The landscape was there to check me if I was wrong. I could never go away and make up stuff at cocktail parties about the backwoods of Kentucky," Berry said during the interview. "I worked with people here in all walks of life and learned from them. It’s been a very rich experience.”
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