Wendell Berry's wisdom
The Stewardship Connection
- Sun, Sep 13 2026 at 10:00 AM
Hi Mark,
I wanted to share my latest column with you. As always, I welcome your thoughts and comments—you can reach me at john at popconnect.org.
Thanks,
John
The Stewardship Connection
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
— Wendell Berry, Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
The writer, farmer and environmental thinker Wendell Berry died recently at age 92. His work endures, calling on us to steward the Earth. Berry understood something that modern society often forgets: the most important work is rarely rewarded with immediate results — as when he called on us in that same poem to “Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years.”
We live in an age of instant gratification. With a few taps on a screen, we can buy almost anything, consume an endless stream of information, and expect solutions to arrive overnight. Yet such gratification seems to spawn deep dissatisfaction.
The challenges that matter most seldom operate on insanely accelerated digital timetables. Human population connections offer a particularly clear example. Unlike fruit flies, whose life cycle lasts only days, we are a long-lived species.
Demographic trends unfold over decades and generations, not weeks or months. It took roughly two centuries for the world's population to grow from 1 billion to more than 8 billion people. Creating a future in which population size is sustainably balanced with available resources will take patience, persistence, and thoughtful action over generations. And there should be no understating the obstacles.
That does not mean progress is invisible. During my lifetime, average family size worldwide has fallen from about five children per family to approximately 2.2 today. This remarkable, albeit wildly uneven, transformation reflects countless individual decisions and expanding access to education, healthcare, and voluntary family planning — along with sustained advocacy. Yet because most of us live for many decades, population momentum continues to shape our future long after fertility rates begin to decline.
Berry's words remind us that meaningful change often requires planting trees whose shade we may never enjoy. The work of Population Connection is often much the same. We invest in a future we may not live to see fully realized, trusting that steady, patient effort today will help create a safer, healthier, and less-crowded world for future generations. That kind of work demands commitment, care, and faith in the long view.
To borrow Berry's wisdom, we continue to invest in the future. We continue tending the forest. And we call that profit.
John Seager
President and CEO
Comments
Post a Comment