Learning from the land: Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson on knowledge and nature.

This dissertation seeks to identify the sources of the ideas of Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson about acquiring knowledge of nature, and to study the development of those ideas into proposals for sustainable agriculture. Their works were perhaps the most prominent and extensive theories of how humans can acquire knowledge necessary to work sustainably in nature in recent America. This study uses their work to explore the relationship of the environmental movement to ideas about using nature, and the conditions under which environmentalist epistemologies have developed. Berry's 1960s attempts to realize aesthetic principles inspired by William Carlos Williams and others shaped his later theories about knowledge of nature, which I suggest can be described as a theory of 'situated knowledge.' Jackson's proposal for a research program for a perennial polyculture of new grain crops was enabled by his experiences with appropriate technology, environmental ethics, and alternative education at The Land Institute. The dissertation is based on intellectual biographies of the two subjects, relying heavily on close readings of their writings. My subjects ideas relied on hybridizations between environmentalist discourses and their work as, respectively, a poet/novelist and a scientist. Berry and Jakcson grwe concerned about human damage to nature, which I demonstrate was due largely to interactions with the developing environmental movement. I explain that Albert Howard and Rodale Press, leading promoters of organic growing, played significant roles both in shaping my subjects' work and developing the ideas of the movement as a whole. Most work on Jackson and particularly Berry emphasizes the agrarian influence on them; I complement that by arguing for the importance of understanding them within the context of the environmental movement, including their interactions with the Sierra Club and David Brower, and readings of Aldo Leopold and J. Russell Smith. Influenced by such experiences, they objected to the epistemologies of contemporary agricultural scientists, which they saw as reductionist and over-confident. In response, Berry and Jackson sought agricultures utilizing properties emerging on higher levels of organization, hoping that by mimicking properties of ecosystems they could use attributes of nature they did not need to fully understand.PhDAmerican historyAmerican literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsScience historySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/124398/2/3138147.pd