posted on Orion Magazine’s FB page:

Happy Birthday to our esteemed contributing editor Wendell Berry! Still truckin’ at age 80 and keeping his fans on their toes: the so-called father of sustainable agriculture (not his words) stopped by the Bay Area studios of KQED this week and called the word sustainability ‘useless,’ but then expanded a bit: ” So this issue of sustainability requires a lot of careful thought about ways of work and kinds of materials and it’s a conversation that we’ve just begun. The thing that we’re most needing to sustain is the health of the ecosphere, which is a big job. It then divides itself naturally into the need to sustain local ecosystems. The great fact of our time is that while our conversation about sustainability is trying to get started, we’re destroying the health of the local ecosystems.”