Wendell Berry just passed at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky. He was 92. I never met him, though I wish I had.
The tributes and memorials to Berry are just beginning to come out, and his legacy will be felt and chronicled for years to come. So here I want to simply and briefly reflect on how much I appreciate Berry and his impact on my thinking and writing, as well as on how I see and experience the world.
I first encountered Berry in graduate school, when I was trying to make sense of our spatial, physical world. I loved political science, and the field gave me tools for thinking about institutions and behavior, but something always seemed to be missing. My dissertation explicitly brought in geography, and it was Berry who taught me how to read a landscape and recognize that the built environment was making a statement about values and priorities.
Berry made me look at roads, buildings, parks, and the way places shape memory, obligation, and belonging. Once I became a professor, I felt an obligation to share this work, and I regularly assign Berry and borrow his ideas far more often than I have acknowledged.
When I wrote about taking my son to Philadelphia, for example, and talked about wearing Flyers gear, stopping at Wawa for pretzels and hoagies, and the idea that citizenship begins with belonging somewhere specific, I was working with an argument Berry had made for decades. A town or city is not just a collection of homes and amenities that one can trade for better ones elsewhere; they carry memory and create expectations about how people should treat one another.
That is all incredibly analytically powerful because Berry’s ideas help offer a framework for social relations and behavior that many methods struggle to capture. I spend a lot of time with surveys, asking about churches, clubs, volunteering, and other forms of civic life. Those measures struggle to explain well why someone gives up a Saturday morning to help a neighbor who may never return the favor or why people in some places show up for community regularly but other places have so little civic culture.
In “Think Little,” Berry argued that people can care deeply about large causes and still neglect and overlook what is right around them. Local institutions do not run on their own. A parent-teacher association, synagogue, church, or neighborhood group works only if people keep showing up and doing the small, often unglamorous things that need to get done. Because of Berry, I think about geographic variables in trying to explain these differences and outcomes.
His work also shaped how I think about higher education. In his 2012 Jefferson Lecture, Berry borrowed Wallace Stegner’s distinction between “boomers,” who take what they can from a place and move on, and “stickers,” who stay and build a life there. One reason trust in higher education is low is that colleges are sticker institutions. They occupy buildings and towns for generations, yet many do not create durable connections within their communities. Their populations—from students to faculty to presidents—are regularly in flux, making connections and relationships a challenge.
One of the most potent works for me comes from Berry’s 1987 essay on why he would not buy a computer. He wrote in pencil and by daylight, and his wife, Tanya, typed the manuscripts. Berry could have easily bought a computer, but he refused because he was worried that what the technology was improving may not outweigh what was being lost with its adoption.
A version of that question is being asked constantly with social media and wearable technology and on every college campus today with the rise of large language models. Students have ChatGPT on their phones, and this technology can summarize a book, answer a discussion question, and produce a paper before class. But what does this mean for learning? I teach without laptops or phones and ask students to read on paper because I want them to do the work themselves and pay attention to the people around the table.
This fall, I will ask my new students to read Berry, and I’ll pull out the same worn books I have been using for years. My undergraduates have come of age and live in a very different world from his, especially when it comes to technology, but I want them to spend some time with a writer who asks them to notice where they are and who is around them. I knew Wendell Berry only through his work, but his impact on me has been monumental. With his passing, I realize now that I have been carrying his ideas with me whenever I look at a town, a street, or a landscape.