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Berry's primary targets are not institutions, but individuals, including himself. He once wrote, "My work has been motivated by a desire to make myself responsibly at home in this world and in my native and chosen place."

In his revolutionary 1977 book, The Unsettling of America, Berry describes how several leading environmental organizations "owned stock in the very corporations and industries that have been notorious for their destructiveness and for their indifference to the concerns of conservationists." When discovered, the organizations quickly changed their investment policies and were deeply embarrassed by the oversight. But for Berry, the deeper scandal was that "although the investments were absurd, they were not aberrant." The conservation groups "were only doing as organizations what many of their members were, and are, doing as individuals. They were making convenience of enterprises that they knew to be morally, and even practically, indefensible."

For Berry, proxies. As Berry reminds us, there is nothing inherently wrong with proxies. The problem comes when we do not recognize our proxies and thus abdicate our responsibility for them. A common example for Berry is food production. If we are not able to grow, hunt, or gather our own food, then someone else must do it for us by proxy. In most urban places and increasingly in rural ones as well, food eaters have become "mere consumers—passive, uncritical, and dependent."

They have forgotten that "eating is an agricultural act" and that food is tied to the land, ecology, and work of a particular place. Whether that work is good or bad, healthy or destructive, it is beyond the vision of most industrial food eaters. They simply buy what is given to them.

"Eaters … must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used." Berry suggests how to take responsibility for our food proxies: "participate in food production to the extent that you can"; "prepare your own food"; "learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is produced closest to your home"; "whenever possible, deal directly with a local farmer"; "learn, in self-defense, as much as you can of the economy and technology of industrial food production"; and "learn what is involved in the best farming and gardening."

Berry takes responsibility for his proxies. He has electricity, but the lights remain off because, though it is dim on this overcast day, we can see fine. Berry heats his house using a wood-burning stove with dead wood he has collected from his own forest (a task that becomes more difficult as he moves into his 70s). Behind his house is his garden, where Berry and his wife of nearly 50 years, Tanya, grow much of their own food. Berry's farm is very much a "home economy." It is here that care or destruction begins.

The difficulty, for Berry, is that fewer and fewer of us have a household with the constancy of place and community required for creating a good home economy. We are a transient, moving people who do not stay in places long enough to know local problems. How many of us know how far our watershed extends? Or where our garbage goes? We must be able to readily answer these questions if we are to live with care and responsibility within creation, according to Berry. For Berry, we put down roots in a local place and community. Both of Berry's parents have at least five generations of farming roots here in Henry County near the Kentucky River.

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November 2006, Vol. 50, No. 11