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The American farmer, novelist and poet Wendell Berry, died on August 31 2026, aged 92. Berry farmed in Port Royal, in his native Kentucky, for over 40 years. Through his writing and his farming, Berry emphasised the importance of both community and care for the planet, advocating for small-scale agriculture as key for both.
He criticised modern consumer culture, suggesting, in his poem Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front, that instead of buying into the rat race, people should: “Love the world. Work for nothing […] / Say that your main crop is the forests / that you did not plant / that you will not live to harvest.”
His prolific output included The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (1977), Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer (1987) and The Mad Farmer Poems (2008).
Caring for the planet, Berry believed, means recognising your own place in it. Not as the centre, but as part of a wider community of interconnected life. In doing so, Berry’s writing highlights an important new theme in environmental humanities: a growing interest in “georgic” writing as an environmental genre.
The georgic is a classical genre that gets its name from Virgil’s Georgics – a long, four-book poem offering farming advice on ploughing, animal husbandry, fruit growing and beekeeping that was written around 29BC.
While for centuries the georgic was as popular as other classical modes like the pastoral or the epic, by the late 18th-century the form in English had all but disappeared, as the developing science of agriculture became more suited to prose treatises than long, complex poems.
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Farming and environmentalism have long been pitched against each other. Over the 20th century, the worst excesses of industrial farming have decimated insect life in the US, as attested to by Rachel Carson’s environmental science book Silent Spring, as well as declining bird life in the UK.
Intensive agriculture has cleared vast swathes of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil and has been linked with the spread of diseases between animals, as well as contributing to antimicrobial resistance and greenhouse gas emissions.
However, since the 1980s, interest has been growing in agroecology and regenerative farming – practices which balance human and environmental needs. Often small-scale and community-led, these practices offer an alternative way of engaging in food production, with projects flourishing from Berry’s native US to Brazil, Spain, Australia and beyond.
In the UK, farmers are increasingly being encouraged to “farm for nature”, with grants available such as the Landscape Recovery scheme, the Sustainable Farming Incentive and the Countryside Stewardship scheme.
The georgic resurgence
This growing interest in balancing agriculture and the natural world is reflected in contemporary books and culture. In the last five years, there has been a growing academic interest in the ways that contemporary georgic writing might respond to environmental concerns.
The resurgence of georgic is in part due to a reimagining of what the form might be. It’s no longer just long, instructional poems that can be thought of as georgic.
Alongside farming novels such as Addlands by Tom Bullough (2017), or The Long Dry (2014) by Cyan Jones, poet Terry Gifford has identified three types of contemporary georgic non-fiction. These include “traditional instructional georgic”, like gardening manuals or the TV programme Countryfile, as well as memoirs, such as The Cow Book: A Story of Life on an Irish Family Farm by John Connell (2019). Finally, there is the genre of rewilding books, such as Wilding by Isabella Tree (2018), which Gifford terms as “radically future-oriented georgic”.
Environmental humanities scholar Pippa Marland, meanwhile, has identified the “new georgic” – a genre in which farmers are engaged in producing nature itself. She cites English Pastoral by James Rebanks (2021) as a prime example.
While the term “eco-georgic” was only coined in 2011, Wendell Berry’s lifelong commitment to farming for nature and communities and to sharing his ethos and experience through writing, make him a fundamentally eco-georgic figure.
Berry’s legacy
Georgic is a didactic genre: it teaches readers things. Berry can be thought of as a georgic writer not because he wrote how-to manuals on ploughing, beekeeping or fruit-grafting (although he was a contributing editor at both New Farm Magazine and Organic Gardening and Farming), but because there is a fundamental quality about his work that seeks to teach readers how to coexist with nature and care for our planet, while feeding our communities.
In his poem Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front (1973), Berry asks readers to imagine our true crop as the trees that came before us and will outlive us. He urges us to think across the longer span of centuries. In doing so, he asks us to reorient our relationship with the earth. We should not see it simply as something to exploit and profit from. Instead, we should treasure it, even as we enjoy the crops and fruits that sustain us. Every reader, farmers and non-farmers alike, can learn from his broader ethics of care, attention and negotiation with the natural world.
Berry’s legacy, then, reflects a growing interest in agroecology over the past decades. But alongside his environmentally conscious farming, his writing touched many, feeding an appetite for ideas about how to live alongside nature, as much as for the food that farming produces.
The flourishing of the eco-georgic genre over the past decade testifies to a continuing and growing interest from readers and writers in a way of farming and living that cares for both nature and communities. Communicating these ideas is as vital as putting them into practice: making the pen is as mighty as the plough.
This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something, The Conversation UK may earn a commission.
The climate crisis has a communications problem. How do we tell stories that move people – not just to fear the future, but to imagine and build a better one? This article is part of Climate Storytelling, a series exploring how arts and science can join forces to spark understanding, hope and action.
Author
Hannah GreenPhD Candidate in English Literature and Environmental Humanities, University of Bristol
Disclosure statement
Hannah Green does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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University of Bristol provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation UK.
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DOI
https://doi.org/10.64628/AB.y55xygu3d
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