Friends tell one another a story, and the story invites the friend into its own world. Here\u2019s mine: last year Kris and I decided to have a garage built. (We had lived here for about 20 years without one; it was time.) So, we called in a garage builder, and he got things rolling. Friends tell one another a story, and the story invites the friend into its own world. Here\u2019s mine: last year Kris and I decided to have a garage built. (We had lived here for about 20 years without one; it was time.) So, we called in a garage builder, and he got things rolling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":197,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[476,425],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-missional"],"yoast_head":"\n
\nThe first thing I learned about when he began to contact the village officialcrats was what Bob, our garage guy, called \u201cimpervious coverage.\u201d We had a long driveway. Impervious coverage is concerned with too much cement and not enough green space on the property. So, we had to have a new plan that reconfigured everything so our driveway was not so long and so that we had more green grass \u2026 eventually we found ourselves opening a garage and getting into a car not swamped by snow.
\nNow to Wendell Berry\u2019s Citizenship Papers<\/em>. Berry, so I imagine, might be quite happy with laws about impervious coverage. I\u2019m not Dark Green, but I\u2019m light green and I thought this was a good principle.
\nBerry is known for his commitment to work being shaped by location \u2014 protecting the land \u2014 and for his \u201cagrarian argument.\u201d Essentially here it is: \u201cwe humans can escape neither our dependence on nature nor our responsibility to nature.\u201d
\nNow stop right here for a question that pesters me whenever I read Wendell Berry: What should I do to live more like this? What do you do to live more in tune with the \u201cagrarian argument\u201d? Tell me the truth, are you doing anything about this? What are some practical steps we can do to live out dependence on nature and responsibility to nature?
\nBerry contends that industrialism is \u201cbased squarely upon the principle of violence toward everything on which it depends \u2026 violence toward nature, human communities, traditional agri-cultures, and local economies \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"