Wendell Berry's 6 favorite books about environmental protection

Although I have known of Wendell Berry, a controversial though admired farmer and writer from Kentucky’s Henry County, since the 1990s, it is only today when browsing through Front Porch Republic that I discovered this list titled “Wendell Berry's 6 favorite books about environmental protection: the poet and environmental activist recommends inspiring works about how to interact with the land”.

1. Farmers of Forty Centuries: Organic Farming in China, Korea, and Japan by F. H. King
2. Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture by J. Russell Smith 
3. An Agricultural Testament by Sir Albert Howard
4. A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold
5. Home Place: Essays on Ecology by Stan Rowe
6. Nature as Measure: The Selected Essays of Wes Jackson

I find some of the choices especially revealing in a world where the free market directs agriculture to the very countries possessing the oldest, most leached, and most infertile soils alongside the scarcest and most unreliable water resources. As early as 2008 James Kenneth Galbraith in his The Predatory State hinted at the problems posed by specialising in agriculture, although without any consideration of the disadvantages specialisers in agriculture actually have relative to countries with immense comparative disadvantage in agriculture.

The first book on the list, published in 1929 before the “Green Revolution” intensified the Enriched World’s comparative disadvantage in agriculture, illustrates how it is possible to sustain agriculture in favourable climates and young soils. The second illustrates why annual crops are ill-suited outside the Enriched World except in certain Tropical World regions of unusually fertile soils that share the Enriched World’s general agricultural comparative disadvantage. The third, fifth and sixth books appear less interesting, whilst A Sand County Almanac is a familiar American environmental classic which I have never read.

All in all, these books do illustrate the way in which intensive farming was sustained in the Enriched World, which has bene the success of the localist and organic farming movements. Their failure has been to not recognise the ipso facto unsustainability of farming many regions – all of Australia and many parts of Africa, tropical Asia and non-Hispanophone South America – and to campaign for appropriate land uses in these regions. Without appropriate land use and new economies in these regions of almost universal extreme comparative advantage in agriculture, we cannot solve the global ecological crisis.