Farmer-poet Wendell Berry’s Environmental Ethics Were Deeply Rooted in His Christian Faith and Belief in Caring for Creation

Wendell Berry, right, joins an 'I Love Mountains' rally against mountaintop mining at the Kentucky Capitol in 2013. AP Photo/James Crisp. For most of his 92 years, Wendell Berry farmed his Lane’s Landing homestead in Henry County, Kentucky, using methods that embraced the land. He preferred draft horses to diesel-powered tractors and used crop rotation and manure fertilizer to naturally nurture his fields.

The widely revered poet-farmer, who wrote passionately about rural American life and humans’ responsibility to care for the land, believed in practicing what he preached. Those beliefs were rooted firmly in his Christian Baptist faith. Wendell Berry interviewed by Bill Moyers.

The Berry Center. Throughout his life, Berry, who died on Aug. 31, 2026, was a leading advocate of environmental stewardship. You might recognize his belief system in what’s known as creation care today.

It embraces a responsibility to care for the Earth and all its creatures. Berry increasingly saw that ethic violated by the industrialization of agriculture and ignored by a dominionist theology, preached by some prominent American Christians, which holds that humans have a God-given right to exploit the Earth’s resources. Biblical base for Berry’s environmental ethics.

Berry’s environmental ethics had their basis in Genesis, the first book of the Bible, which emphasizes that humans are not the owners of the Earth but rather are called to be caregivers and to tend the planet. He wrote, “We are allowed to make no exceptions – every person’s obligation toward creation is summed up in two words from Genesis 2:15 ‘Keep it.’” In contrast, the dominionist view emphasizes Genesis 1:8, which has been interpreted by some to mean that humans are to subdue the Earth and to establish Christian dominance. Berry opposed the idea that Christian scripture advocated for environmentally destructive practices such as mountaintop-removal coal mining, which led to the destruction of streams and forests in his native Kentucky.

In 2011, he participated in a multiday sit-in protest of the mining practices, saying, “I intend to stay interested in it and involved as long as the Lord spares me. Wendell Berry, who died on Aug. 31, 2026, shared some thoughts on Instagram in 2024. WendellBerryPoems/Instagram.

I am a scholar of American Christianity and have spent my career researching and writing about how Christians practice their beliefs. I was in the audience when Berry was awarded the 2013 American Academy of Religion’s Martin Marty honor for the Public Understanding of Religion. For over an hour I listened raptly, as did the rest of the standing-room-only crowd, as he detailed his love for the land, community and his wife, Tanya.

I also taught students using his book Jayber Crow, about small-town living, religion and community, in my honors course at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest. I returned to his work when I was researching modern-day agriculture in Iowa for my book Meatpacking America ”. A photo of Wendell Berry on his farm graces the cover of a set of his books. The title captures his respect for the land.

Penguin Random House. I saw how Berry’s beliefs that humans have a responsibility to care for the Earth shaped his critiques about agripower, which he viewed as showing little regard for the fertility of the soil or the health, wisdom, thrift, or stewardship of the farming community. His poems, fiction and nonfiction often advocated for consuming less and living more communally.

Those beliefs rested on his commitment to caring for God’s creation. The idea of ‘enough’. Berry’s Christianity-infused agrarianism began in earnest in the 1970s and helped popularize family-run farms, organic farming and farm-to-table eating establishments.

The modern creation care movement began as part of a wider network of American social justice movements. It took shape in the 1980s and ’90s, especially among those Christian evangelicals who read the Book of Genesis as instructing humans to care about all of God’s creations. Today, creation care is a broad Christian movement that calls for environmental stewardship, repairing the harm that humans have done to the environment, and belief in a loving God who is responsible for the Earth’s creation. As the religious studies scholar Laurel Kerns has written, the Christian environmental movement that began in the 1980s laid the theological groundwork for creation care.