Thinking Little with Mary Berry, Executive Director of The Berry Center—RERELEASE

Wendell Berry died on August 31st, 2026. A listener once made a Reversing Climate Change bingo card and one of the squares was just "someone mentions Wendell Berry," which turned out to be a rigged square. So rather than write another appreciation, I have pulled the conversation I had with his daughter in 2020 and recorded a new introduction to sit in front of it. The episode I made the week he died is here.Mary Berry runs The Berry Center in New Castle, Kentucky, founded in 2011 after a lifetime of farming. She started it because a forty-year local food movement had produced some very good farmers' markets and almost no change to the culture of farming, and because the best agricultural program her state ever had was being forgotten inside that very state.Listen in to hear more about why the local food movement concentrated on food and skipped land use and the economic lives of farmers, and what you do about any of this if you have no Henry County of your own to go back to.My new introduction is about that last part, and about whether those of who without such roots are like locusts, but somehow worse? What a grim sentence to pen, and there's a lot more coming on this topic soon...This Episode's Sponsor⁠EcoEngineers⁠: a full-service advisory and consulting firm focused on carbon dioxide removal, decarbonization, and carbon markets.⁠Listen to the RCC episode I made with David LaGreca from EcoEngineers about how to choose, hire, and fire carbon market contractors.⁠⁠2026 EcoForums Training Series: Navigating Global Carbon and Fuel Regulations, Market Mechanisms, and Life-Cycle Analysis Fundamentals⁠ResourcesSubscribe to the ⁠⁠Reversing Climate Change Substack⁠⁠⁠⁠Become a paid subscriber⁠⁠ for bonus content and ad-free episodesCheck out my new show, Climate Workers AnonymousThe original 2020 release of this conversationThe Berry Center, and Our Home Place Meat, and the shopThe Berry Center Farm and Forest Institute: the education program Mary describes as the Wendell Berry Farming Program of Sterling College, now run by the Berry Center itselfThe Agrarian Culture Center and the Archive of The Berry Center, which holds her grandfather's and uncle's papers from the Burley Tobacco ProgramThe Land Institute, and Wes Jackson's Becoming Native to This PlaceRemovals, avoidances, and what Wendell Berry thought of making tonnes fungibleWendell Berry, Jayber Crow and the Port William novels, and The World-Ending Fire<l