Jeff Fearnside Interviews Wendell Berry: For more than forty years, Wendell Berry has worked his family farm in Kentucky the old-fashioned way, using horses as much as possible and producing much of his own food. And he has published more than forty books, writing by hand in the daylight to reduce his reliance on electricity derived from strip-mined coal. Berry has been called a “prophet” by the New York Times, and his Jeffersonian values are so old they can appear startlingly new. His strong pro-environment position has made him something of a cult hero on the Left, as have his antiwar sentiments, which have grown sharper over the years. His 1987 essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” published in Harper’s, led some to accuse him of being antitechnology, a Luddite. For his part, Berry has criticized environmentalists for not working to protect farms as well as wilderness. His stout self-reliance and unabashed use of moral and religious language in his writing have endeared him to a number of conservatives, even as his stance against corporate globalization has drawn criticism from others. But these apparent contradictions don’t seem to bother Berry one whit. …

Berry taught for more than two decades at Stanford University, New York University, and the University of Kentucky, but he has now quit teaching. Since 1965 he has lived and worked on the 125-acre Lanes Landing Farm in the county of his birth. It was there that my wife and I visited him one Sunday afternoon. He was exactly what I would expect a gentleman farmer to be: tall, rangy in both body and mind, sagacious, and gracious. He and Tanya, his wife of fifty years, were impeccable hosts, making sure that we were seated comfortably on the porch and that our glasses of lemonade remained full. Earlier in the week, I had heard Berry speak to the Sierra Club in Louisville. Despite his busy schedule, he answered my questions in a thoughtful and deliberate manner reminiscent of his prose. The conversation touched on all the primary themes in his tremendous body of work: the importance of place, sustainability, and — above all — community. (07/14/08)
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James Howard Kunstler writes: There’s a particular moment known to all Baby Boomers when Wile E. Coyote, in a
rapture of over-reaching, has run past the edge of the
mesa and, still licking his chops and rubbing his front paws in
anticipation of fricasseed roadrunner, discovers that he is suspended
in thin air by nothing more than momentum. Grin becomes chagrin. He
turns a nauseating shade of green, and drops, whistling, back to earth
thousands of feet below, with a distant, dismal, barely audible thud at
the end of his journey. We are Wile E. Coyote Nation.

Is there anyone in the known universe who thinks that the US financial system is not fifty feet beyond the edge of the mesa of credibility?

With the death of the IndyMac Bank last week, and the GSEs Fannie
Mae and Freddie Mac laying side-by-side in the EMT van on IV drips,
headed for the Federal Reserve’s ever more crowded intensive care unit,
there was a sense of the American Dream having passed through the event
horizon that denotes the opening of a black hole.

What would happen if the US Government acted to bail out these
feckless enterprises (and what if they don’t)? Either way, it’s not a
pretty picture. If Mr. Bernanke does start shoveling loans into the GSE
black hole, he’ll further undermine the soundness of his own outfit and
do nothing, really, to repair Fannie and Freddie’s structural problem
of having securitized too many loans that will never be paid back. If
instead Fannie and Freddie are flat-out taken over entirely by the US
government (and remember the Federal Reserve is not the government), then the national debt will roughly double overnight — which will pound the US dollar down a rat-hole.

Meanwhile, the foreign holders of those decrepitating dollars
might not rush to the redemption window, but they certainly would use
them to buy up every oil futures contract on God’s not-so-green Earth
as fast as possible — they’d be dumb not to — which would leave
American Happy Motorists with gasoline prices north of $5 a gallon, and
possibly north of $10. (In that case, say goodbye to the airlines. In
fact, say goodbye to what passes for the rest of the US economy,
including especially the vaunted retail sector that supposedly counts for 70 percent of the action.) (07/14/08)
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