To Live and Love with a Dying World
I n the summer of 2019, the climate activist Tim DeChristopher sat down with Wendell Berry. Berry is a poet and activist, author of over forty books, a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, a 2013 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a celebrated advocate for localism, ecological health, and small-scale farming. DeChristopher, as Bidder 70, disrupted a Bureau of Land Management oil and gas auction in 2008 by outbidding oil companies for parcels around Arches and Canyonlands National Parks in Utah. Imprisoned for twenty-one months for his actions, he has used his platform to spread the urgency of the climate crisis and the need for bold, confrontational action to create a just and healthy world.
TD: OK, now we’re recording.
WB: Have we got a limit on this thing?
TD: Eventually.
WB: You mean it’ll wear out eventually?
TD: It’s a big limit.
WB: So now it’s about to be revealed what you’ve got on your mind.
TD: I’ve now been in a position of having a public voice for a little over a decade. That might not seem like a long time, but it’s enough time that it’s caused me to look back over the words and the effort and the actions that I’ve put out there into the public realm, and look at their effect or lack of effect. So I’d love to hear about what that process is like for you—having a much bigger history of putting your voice out there in the public sphere.
WB: In 1965, my friend Gurney Norman gave me my first look at a strip-mining operation. That’s nearly fifty-five years ago, isn’t it? So there I stood on the mountain behind Hardburly, Kentucky, and I saw the bulldozer go in on a wooded mountainside, and throw loose the whole surface of the world. I found that hard to bear. That brought me to something like defeat. How could a human being do that? How could anybody take a machine and destroy the world with it?
As often in my life, I got a book just when I needed it. A friend sent me Georges Bernanos’s Last Essays from the years just after World War II. What disturbed him was not the military humiliation of his country, of France. And he was not appeased or heartened by the Allied victory. What most impressed him, and deeply, deeply disturbed him, was the emergence out of that war of what he called “machine civilization.” He anticipated that the machine would make humankind over in its image.
TD: This is what Bill [McKibben]’s talking about in Falter — we have reached a new level of that.
WB: We’re always at a new level of that. Hitler and Hiroshima reached a new level of that. If humankind can make a weapon, a machine that can destroy not only all the other machines, but us too—I don’t see how climate change can ante up any higher than that.
: The level of machine control of human beings now is not bigger than that, it’s not a bigger, more catastrophic, explosive end, but it’s more insidious in so many ways. We’re
