ABSTRACT
Wendell Berry (1934–) is a Kentucky farmer, poet, novelist, essayist, and conservationist. A longtime champion of the family farm and sustainable agriculture, Berry offers an eloquent defense of the “garden” view against advocates of the “wilderness” vision. Human beings are not a species set apart from nature and from nonhuman animals. They are natural creatures whose “nature” is to cultivate the earth. Such intervention does, of course, affect nature, but it need not always or necessarily do so for the worse. To cultivate the earth in ways that respect and protect its fertility and diversity is not contrary to nature but is to “get along with nature.”
