Paul Kingsnorth:

That moral certainty is perhaps the keenest taste left by Berry’s multitudinous writings. It was never self-righteous—Berry was often self-deprecating, self-questioning, or drily funny—and neither did it pretend that “going back to the past” was any kind of easy solution to the complex mess of the present. His enemies liked to pretend that both of these things were true, but what they probably disliked most about him was that he actually practiced what he preached. Berry never bought a computer or used a smartphone; he wouldn’t use air travel; and he lived and worked in the small rural community he brought to life with his words. Unable to call him a hypocrite, his critics had to content themselves instead with calling him an unrealistic fossil, wedded to a dead past. But there was nothing simple about Wendell Berry, and he was not committed to some Romantic fantasy. He was committed to real human lives and real human work, in real, living communities. The ongoing destruction of all of these things was the fire lit under his words.