Photo by Guy Mendes, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0.
The work by which good human and natural possibilities are preserved is complex and difficult, and it probably cannot be accomplished by raw intelligence and information. It requires knowledge, skills, and restraints, some of which must come from our past. In the hurry of technological progress, we have replaced some tools and methods that worked with some that do not work. But we also need culture-borne instructions about who or what humans are and how and on what assumptions they should act.
I've been working my way through a collection of Berry's essays, The World-Ending Fire. I'm about halfway through, and they've mostly been bangers so far. His analysis seems to be a bit too focused on moral and cultural failings rather than on the material conditions which underpin and reinforce those failings, in my opinion, and we part ways when he speaks of spirituality and religion, but otherwise I see the beginnings of threads that I'd like to start pulling on more.
As I work my way through his essays and get a better idea for his ideas, I find myself inexorably drawn to the conclusion that his writing, though predating the subculture by roughly fifty years in some cases, incorporates a lot of solarpunk ideas.
I've not progressed in The World-Ending Fire since writing the above, between April and July of 2025. It's November now, and I've spent a brief amount of time reading about the author himself, reading reviews of his other work. It does sound like Berry has unfortunately soaked up some revisionist ideas about the Antebellum South and the Civil War. Though I haven't dug into these accusations yet myself, ordinarily the accusation alone would be enough to make me drop an author and avoid ever speaking voluntarily of them again. In this case, I do intend to finish reading the collection of essays I still have in my posession, as I found the ones I've read so far have sparked a lot of my own thoughts and ideas, which I hope to collect in writing someday.