First published in A Continuous Harmony in 1972, “Think Little” is cultural critic and agrarian Wendell Berry at his best: prescient about the dire environmental consequences of our mentality of greed and exploitation, yet hopeful that we will recognize war and oppression and pollution not as separate issues, but aspects of the same. For the first in our Counterpoints series we have gathered it together with one of Mr. Berry’s most popular and personal essays, “A Native Hill.” This gentle essay of recollection is told alongside a poetic lesson in geography, as he explains at length and in detail, that “what [he] stands for is what he stands on.” Many of us can identify with him as he suggests, “Sometimes I can no longer think in the house or in the garden or in cleared fields. They bear too much resemblance to our failed human history–failed, because it has led to this human present that is such a bitterness and a trial. And so I go to the woods.” “A better possibility is that the movement to preserve the environment will be seen to be, as I think it has to be, not a digression from the civil rights and peace movements, but the logical culmination of those movements. For I believe that the separation of these three problems is artificial. They have the same cause, and that is the mentality of greed and exploitation. The mentality that exploits and destroys the natural environment is the same that abuses racial and economic minorities.” –From “Think Little” Each palm-size book in the Counterpoints series is meant to stay with you, whether safely in your pocket or long after you turn the last page. From short stories to essays to poems, these little books celebrate our most-beloved writers, whose work encapsulates the spirit of Counterpoint Press: cutting-edge, wide-ranging, and independent.

Think Little: Essays (Counterpoints Series) PDF

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