Wednesday
Because the dangers of climate change should never be far from our thoughts, here’s Wendell Berry’s “Speech to the Garden Club of America,” written ten years ago. Rather than burn up our world, he tells us, we should be planting gardens, which “burn no hotter than the summer day.” Unlike the “anti-life of radiance and fume,” which “burns as power and remains as doom,” a garden “delves no deeper than its roots/ And lifts no higher than its leaves and fruits.”
The poem proceeds through a series of rhyming, iambic pentameter couplets, which suggests a longing for the order of a decorous garden. But forces are at work to disrupt that order, which Berry captures by turning many of the rhymes into half-rhymes and by making certain lines hard to scan. Order and chaos wrestle for ascendency.
So even as Berry longs for Candide’s concluding vision that each of us should cultivate his or her own garden, he acknowledges that, by flying to the conference, he was carried by “a sustained explosion through the air,” adding to carbon emissions. There are many ways that all of us falsify the land and falsify “the body’s health and pleasure.” We must change, at a foundational level, the way we think.
“Burning the world to live in it is wrong,” is as succinct a condemnation of fossil fuels as one will find.
Thank you. I’m glad to know we’re friends, of course;
There are so many outcomes that are worse.
But I must add I’m sorry for getting here
By a sustained explosion through the air,
Burning the world in fact to rise much higher
Than we should go. The world may end in fire
As prophesied—our world! We speak of it
As “fuel” while we burn it in our fit
Of temporary progress, digging up
An antique dark-held luster to corrupt
The present light with smokes and smudges, poison
To outlast time and shatter comprehension.
Burning the world to live in it is wrong,
As wrong as to make war to get along
And be at peace, to falsify the land
By sciences of greed, or by demand
For food that’s fast or cheap to falsify
The body’s health and pleasure—don’t ask why.
But why not play it cool? Why not survive
By Nature’s laws that still keep us alive?
Let us enlighten, then, our earthly burdens
By going back to school, this time in gardens
That burn no hotter than the summer day.
By birth and growth, ripeness, death and decay,
By goods that bind us to all living things,
Life of our life, the garden lives and sings.
The Wheel of Life, delight, the fact of wonder,
Contemporary light, work, sweat, and hunger
Bring food to table, food to cellar shelves.
A creature of the surface, like ourselves,
The garden lives by the immortal Wheel
That turns in place, year after year, to heal
It whole. Unlike our economic pyre
That draws from ancient rock a fossil fire,
An anti-life of radiance and fume
That burns as power and remains as doom,
The garden delves no deeper than its roots
And lifts no higher than its leaves and fruits.