Fearnside: You left your job as a professor at the University of Kentucky. Why did that position become untenable?

Berry: I had so much going on outside the university, so many obligations and causes, that I needed to quit something. And I’m not a very good employee. I don’t like bosses. I don’t like being under the expectations of a damned administration, and the universities are getting more administrative and industrialized: too much rigmarole, not enough substance.

Fearnside: Is the influence of global businesses, which increasingly are endowing scholarships, professorships, and chairs, threatening the objectivity of research being conducted at universities?

Berry: There’s real concern for the context of the work being done in the universities today. The assumption that professors can concern themselves only with their specialties, and that the results will somehow be used for good, is bankrupt, shot. Too many bad results have come of well-intentioned work. The old intellectual structure is breaking down. Academic life is going to have to rearrange itself so that it can deal with consequences and responsibilities. The shallow optimism of the specialist system is no longer tenable.

On the other hand, we need specialists, to some extent. If you want the best masonry, for example, you’ve got to have people who know the trade secrets. Your amateur householder who decides to build a stone wall is almost certainly not going to build the best possible stone wall, and any civilization worth anything at all wants the best possible stone walls. So you’ve got to have people who are practiced. But there’s a limit. If this person becomes so specialized that he or she can’t speak to ordinary people or to other kinds of specialists, then something’s wrong.

Fearnside: How can writers, especially those who don’t find success through corporate publishing, support themselves and still have enough time to produce a body of work?

Berry: I don’t think there’s an answer to that question except the ones writers make for themselves. I’ve written pretty steadily over the years and farmed pretty steadily, and I’ve always had to have a third source of income. Sometimes it was teaching. And for ten years I earned the extra income we needed by lecturing and giving readings. I could get a thousand dollars sometimes to speak at a college. But to do that, I had to make phone calls and reservations, and write the speeches, and take the trips, and then come home and do the things I ought to have been doing while I was gone. It’s not easy. If you have children, it’s more of a struggle — not that that should stop anyone from having children if they want them.

We had two friends, Harlan and Anna Hubbard, who had a little income from renting out Harlan’s mother’s house after she died. I think that was all the regular income they had. Harlan painted and wrote, and he and Anna played music every day. They lived, as Harlan put it, “on the fringe of society.” They didn’t have electricity. All their technology was nineteenth century. But they were satisfied, and they lived a great life — they made a great life. It was a work of art.

Fearnside: So their answer was to simplify their lives so that they required less income and could do the things they were passionate about.

Berry: They reduced costs, but when you do that, you make your life more complex. It’s much simpler to live by shopping.

Fearnside: For me, as for many people, being a writer means getting up early in the morning — sometimes when it’s dark — writing as much as possible, and then going out and working a full-time job. I’m content with this, knowing that I’m doing my best under the circumstances, and I define myself as a writer even though I’m not writing full time or earning my living from it.

Berry: That’s good, but you need to realize something else: that you can lead a perfectly good and satisfactory life even if you’re not a writer. When I figured out that I could be perfectly happy and not be a writer, I became a better writer.

Fearnside: But you never gave up writing.

Berry: No, but I don’t think you ought to let your happiness depend on writing. There are a lot of worthwhile things you can do. The unhappiest people in the world may be the ones who think their happiness depends on artistic success of some kind.

Fearnside: In the 1960s you wrote the poem “The Morning’s News” in reaction to the Vietnam War: “I will purge my mind of the airy claims / of church and state, and observe the ancient wisdom / of tribesman and peasant, who understood / they labored on the earth only to lie down in it / in peace, and were content. I will serve the earth.” All these years later, with our country in the midst of another terrible war, do those lines still describe how you feel?

Berry: I suppose so. I’m doubtful I would put it that way now, but I’m not going to subscribe to anybody’s excuse for coldblooded killing. There’s no such thing as a “just” war anymore, if there ever was. You can’t defend bombing children and innocent people. It isn’t right to teach people how to torture and kill each other. Wars never end, really. The Crusades aren’t quite over yet. Our Civil War certainly isn’t over yet. I don’t think we can afford this kind of behavior anymore. Nobody’s talking about the ecological damage of war.

Fearnside: When the army practices bombing at Fort Knox, it rattles our windows a dozen or more miles away.

Berry: The guns and bombs from Indiana’s Jefferson Proving Ground, which is now decommissioned, rattled windows here for two generations.

Fearnside: My wife and I feel depressed when we think about how many millions of dollars are being blown up in our backyard.

Berry: It’s great for wildlife protection, though, because nobody can go where they’ve got all that unexploded ordnance. The Jefferson Proving Ground is now a wildlife refuge. They’ve got unexploded ordnance and depleted uranium, and they’ve got rare birds, too. It sounds like a joke, but it’s a fact.

Fearnside: In your book Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Christ’s Teachings about Love, Compassion, and Forgiveness [Shoemaker & Hoard], you write that until recently the scale of wars was relatively small and the destruction relatively controlled. Yet Genghis Khan massacred millions of innocent civilians, and the Bible speaks of pillaging on a scale that’s appalling even today. Why this belief that, once upon a time, war was more civilized?

Berry: I don’t mean it was more civilized. I just mean that the weapons weren’t as destructive. I don’t think wars ever were civilized, though the U.S. once conducted wars without torturing prisoners.

Fearnside: And the destructive power of war only grows. How can we justify blowing up buildings and infrastructure only to rebuild it all again at several times the original cost?

Berry: It’s good for business. If you were Halliburton, you’d look upon that as a business opportunity.

Fearnside: Do you really think people see it in such crude terms?

Berry: I think there are people who are perfectly capable of seeing it in those terms. If you can arrange somehow to be paid for building back what you’ve torn down, that’s an opportunity to make money. It’s also profitable to make weapons in the first place, and you’ve got to create a demand for more. We’ve got twelve thousand nuclear warheads. How does that make sense except in terms of some kind of insanity? Suicidal insanity. Plumb craziness. Or big business.

Fearnside: I used to be a newspaper journalist, and I had a chance to interview a number of World War ii veterans. None of them glorified war, seeing it as a last resort to be used only when all diplomacy has failed. Yet even as we hold these people up as heroes, we don’t heed their words.

Berry: Veterans are appropriated by the pro-war crowd. Not just veterans, but casualties, too. The appropriation of the dead is one of the worst war crimes. If you’re a soldier, as soon as you’re dead, the government says that you died for your country and that your sacrifice justifies the war.

Fearnside: The writer and Trappist monk Thomas Merton lived and wrote just a couple of hours up the road from here, at Gethsemani Abbey. Are you familiar with him?

Berry: I’ve read a number of his books. He interests me. He was a man capable of real seriousness, but he was capable of real merriment, too, and that’s important.

Fearnside: What interests me about Merton is that he believed that service and contemplation — which I interpret as right action and a constant scrutiny of the motives that inspire the action — could bring one closer to God. Do you believe this?

Berry: That’s fairly formulaic. I suppose the appropriate answer to something that formulaic is “Probably” or “Maybe.” Some of those formulas are all right; there’s no question about it. The monastic life is a formula.

The most important thing I’ve read by Merton is a series of talks he gave in Alaska, just before he left for Asia. Some people think that when he showed interest in the East he was abandoning his Christian commitment, but I think it’s clear in those talks that he wasn’t doing any such thing. He was talking earnestly to those people in Alaska about how we could get along with each other.

Fearnside: You’re a Christian.

Berry: I’m a subscriber to the Gospels; you could put it that way.

Fearnside: You strike me as being both devout and skeptical; firm in your faith, yet willing to question it. Do you see skepticism as something that nurtures your faith?

Berry: Faith implies skepticism. It implies doubt. Faith is not knowledge. It’s not the result of an empirical study. So I would think that people of faith would always be involved in some kind of maintenance to shore it up. Sometimes it’s easy to have faith, and sometimes it isn’t. Maybe if you’re in a monastery it’s easier, because everything there is established for the purpose of preserving your faith. The world, as it operates today, isn’t made to preserve it.

Fearnside: In your essay “Standing by Words” you note that love is not abstract and cannot lead to abstract action. Love is the catalyst for concrete action, which is taking responsibility for what we do here and now. It seems to me that in some ways this kind of love is the salvation of the world.

Berry: That’s true. But like religion, love has to be practiced. It has to find something to do. Love isn’t just a feeling. It’s an instruction: Love one another. That’s hard to do. It doesn’t mean to sit at home and have fond feelings. You’ve got to treat people as if you love them, whether you do or not.

Fearnside: The Buddhists try to follow a path of “right livelihood,” which means that a person should not engage in work that brings harm to others, either directly or indirectly.

Berry: Right livelihood would prohibit strip mining and building warplanes. And so would “Love one another,” if anybody took it seriously.

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