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‘‘In Search of a More Human Nature’’ Wendell Berry’s Revision of Thoreau’s Experiment t e d o l s o n  The first published work to investigate the literary kinship of Henry David Thoreau and Wendell Berry was scholar Herman Nibbelink’s 1985 essay ‘‘Thoreau and Wendell Berry: Bachelor and Husband of Nature.’’ Asserting that Berry was an intellectual and spiritual disciple of Thoreau , Nibbelink’s essay identified several similarities between the two authors — belief in the restorative powers of nature, commitment to living deliberately, valuing of simplicity, and disdain for materialism — mentioning only one major difference: ‘‘the place of agriculture in the relationship of nature and culture.’’1 This difference, Nibbelink conjectured, resulted from Thoreau’s belief that farming and husbandry robbed a person of individual freedom, while Berry held that ‘‘in agriculture . . . nature and culture are married’’ (151). As illuminating as it might have seemed when first published, Nibbelink ’s essay is outmoded today, since the scholar focused his exploration of this particular literary kinship on just two texts: Thoreau’s bean field chapter from Walden and Berry’s poetry collection Clearing. However, Berry’s worldview, as well as his attitude toward Thoreau, changed markedly after the publication of that 1977 volume. Berry’s writings of the 1960s and early 1970s — particularly in the genres of nonfiction and poetry — tended to be ecocentric in outlook. That is, Berry — whether evoking the natural world, celebrating spiritual values in nature, or safeguarding natural places through political action — tended to privilege nature over culture. His writing since the mid-1970s has grown steadily anthropocentric, however, displaying increasing confidence in the power of human culture, if based on an ecologically sound way of life, to bind people and nature together in a constructive — not destructive — inter61 relationship. Nibbelink did not address the fact that Clearing was a transitional work in Berry’s oeuvre; some of the poems in that volume were ecocentric in outlook, and others were anthropocentric. The former perspective was the central motivation of the poem ‘‘History,’’ in which Berry decried European settlers’ treatment of the land on which he was now living, while the latter perspective infused ‘‘The Clearing,’’ in which Berry imagined himself a new kind of pioneer, one who, chastened by the mistakes of previous settlers, has discovered a way to live on the earth without hurting the natural world or himself. Clearing marked Berry’s realization that, though unscrupulous humans have despoiled the earth, a more enlightened culture, through reclaiming a sense of place, would instill in people a deeper respect toward the land and thus repair at least some of the accrued environmental damage. That poetry volume,though, does not — and, given the date of its composition, cannot — reveal the extent to which Berry in his later writings would commit to finding cultural solutions to environmental problems. Just as Clearing cannot represent Berry’s current thinking regarding the interrelationship between people and nature, Nibbelink’s essay cannot account for Berry’s present-day attitude toward Thoreau. In this essay I intend to explore Berry’s changing attitude toward his literary predecessor , as I sense that such a study will elucidate some of the reasons for Berry’s shift from an ecocentric to an anthropocentric perspective. The anthropocentric bent of Berry’s later work, it should be noted, was not a result of diminishing interest in environmental issues on his part; Berry has remained a tireless proponent of people being in ‘‘a continuous harmony’’ (to borrow one of his more memorable phrases) with other living things. Nevertheless, by the mid-1970s, Berry had become convinced that most environmentalists, exhibiting a penchant for fervent ecocentrism, overrelied on politics when addressing environmental problems. Although he continued to demonstrate against environmental threats (participating, for instance, in protests against a proposed nuclear power plant near his north-central Kentucky home), Berry by the mid1970s was rejecting politics as the most effective means by which to confront our environmental crisis, insisting instead upon cultural reform. ‘‘Our environmental problems . . . are not, at root, political; they are cultural,’’ he observed in 1985. ‘‘Our country is not being destroyed by bad politics; it is being destroyed by a bad way of life. Bad politics is merely another result. To see that the problem is far more than political is to return to reality.’’2 From the mid-1970s onward, recognizing that culturally created prob62 r e l at i n g t o p l a c e lems...

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