Community Development and a Sense of Place

Wendell Berry <p>The work of community development is very much tied to place. Even though today we speak of virtual communities or communities of practice that are disconnected from place, when we speak of community development we are talking about developing the capacity of local communities–neighborhoods, towns, regions. Wendell Berry is one of America’s preeminent thinkers and writers on sustainable communities and the importance of having a sense of place in particular. Berry has said “if you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.”</p> <p>Wendell Berry is a writer of poetry and fiction, as well as many influential essays on community, place, and environmental sustainability. He is also a farmer and vigorous advocate for community sustainability and is seen as somewhat of a founding father of the local foods movement. Among his many books of essays are classics such as The Unsettling of America, What Are People For?, and The Way of Ignorance. Although Berry’s point-of-view is very much from an agrarian (Jeffersonian) perspective, his ideas about communities and a sense of place are more universal.</p> <p>Berry was recently honored to give the Jefferson Lecture established by the National Endowment for the Humanities. It is “the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.” In that (2012) lecture, Berry noted that “I have never separated myself from my home neighborhood, I cannot identify myself to myself apart from it. I am fairly literally flesh of its flesh. It is present in me, and to me, wherever I [...]</p>