Since the appearance of his first novel, Nathan Coulter, in 1960, Wendell Berry’s fiction, poetry, and essays alike have spoken with increasing directness to a single theme: the relationship between man and earth. In the poem “The Old Elm Tree by the River,” he asserts that “In us the land enacts its history”; “An Anniversary” makes clear that the reverse is true as well: “What we have been becomes / The country where we are.” To Berry, a Kentucky farmer who tills the same land his family has worked for generations, man’s proper role is that of steward; yet in his view, most Americans, in this “self-exploiting, world-exploiting age,” are blind to the interdependence of man and earth, and live their lives “in the midst of a ubiquitous damned mess of which we are at once the victims and the perpetrators.” All that technology has done is to “save” us “from work that is meaningful and ennobling and comely” and to replace it with “work that is unmeaning and degrading and ugly.” Worst of all, we have lost the sense of mystical connection with others, past and present, that farm work gives; by working on the land, Berry writes in “Healing,” “we clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come after us.”

Like orthodox Christians, he believes that “life is bigger/ Than flesh.”

The unfortunate side of all this is that Berry can sound like an anti-humanist ecology