Wednesday – Earth Day, 50th Anniversary
I remember well my first Earth Day. Fifty years ago, as a freshman at Carleton College, I wrote the Carletonian article on the outdoor workshops that faculty and students conducted for area school kids. I still remember a naturalist asking the children how there could be teeth marks so high on the trees. The answer: the animals would have been elevated by several feet of snow.
With the Trump administration’s all-out assault on the environment, Earth Day is more important than ever. Wendell Berry’s “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” (1973) is written very much in the spirit of the 1960s resistance movements. Berry calls for us to think beyond “quick profit” and to work towards a future beyond ourselves. Deliberately using the language of the stock market, he advises, “Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.”
When he wrote the poem, Berry could not have imagined the extent to which people would one day be able to predict the motions of our minds. Nevertheless, he sees the trend line and calls for independent thinking. “As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it,” he tells us, and then, “Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction.”
As for his advice to “practice resurrection”? If we connect with the earth, we will become one with its cycles. Spring will follow winter.
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
By Wendell Berry
Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay.
Want more of everything ready-made.
Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery anymore.
Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something they will call you.
When they want you to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute.
Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace the flag.
Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot understand.
Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium.
Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion–put your ear close,
and hear the faint chattering of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world.
Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable.
Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields. Lie easy in the shade.
Rest your head in her lap.
Swear allegiance to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions
of your mind, lose it.
Leave it as a sign to mark a false trail, the way you didn’t go.
Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.