Wendell Berry - In Memoriam

This week, we remember the life of writer, poet, farmer, and environmentalist Wendell Berry, by listening back to a 2010 conversation with fellow writer and activist Michael Pollan.

Berry was of America’s most influential voices on agriculture and the environment, and he wrote with a calm and compelling vision about our relationship with the land, our work, and our communities. Among his best-known books: The Unsettling of America, What Are People For?, and The Peace of Wild Things.

After studying at the University of Kentucky and Stanford, and teaching at New York University, Berry returned to his native Henry County, Kentucky in the 1960s. There, he and his wife, Tanya, began farming. Berry spent the rest of his life in Kentucky, farming and writing poems, novels, and essays about tending the land, about community, and the costs of an increasingly industrialized society.

Berry was also an activist, protesting the Vietnam War, mountaintop-removal coal mining, and nuclear power, and he inspired generations of environmentalists, farmers, food activists, and writers.

Berry died on August 31, 2026, at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky. He was 92.