wendell for wednesday

You did read Wendell’s Jefferson Lecture, yes? If not, read or watch it ASAP! I might be quoting from it for awhile here. I liked this hopeful bit – something that I think we’re a moving toward right here in Hamilton County:

A positive cause, still little noticed by high officials and the media, is the by now well-established effort to build or rebuild local economies, starting with economies of food. This effort to connect cities with their surrounding rural landscapes has the advantage of being both attractive and necessary. It rests exactly upon the recognition of human limits and the necessity of human scale. Its purpose, to the extent possible, is to bring producers and consumers, causes and effects, back within the bounds of neighborhood, which is to say the effective reach of imagination, sympathy, affection, and all else that neighborhood implies. An economy genuinely local and neighborly offers to localities a measure of security that they cannot derive from a national or a global economy controlled by people who, by principle, have no local commitment.

Wendell Berry, Jefferson Lecture

Also, a little bonus Wendell this week from Mark Bittman in the New York Times (Wendell Berry, American Hero? Obviously!).