Berry is a farmer who sees the world from a literal ground level. In one of the essays, “Faustian Economics,” he contends, “The real names of global warming are ‘waste’ and ‘greed.’” He has no tolerance for the conspicuous consumer, accusing him of not only “Prodigal extravagance” but also of having “an assumed godly limitlessness.” These are accusations that would not sting so much if they weren’t true.

The irony bears noting, by the way, that in our energy deal with the devil – only the most recent downside of which is the horrendous catastrophe now killing the Gulf of Mexico – the dirty, pollution-prone fuels come from the depths, while the sustainable, clean fuels come from the heavens. Yet we insist upon more of everything now, guaranteeing a whirlwind harvest, a condemned future. A Faustian bargain indeed.

Also noted here, parenthetically, is a thought on biofuels, or what fellow deep thinker Raj Patel calls “the preposterous notion that we should grow food in order to set it on fire.” Berry says, “Perhaps by devoting more and more of our already abused cropland to fuel production, we will at last cure ourselves of obesity and become fashionably skeletal, hungry but – Thank God! – still driving.”

The essays in What Matters? are at once lyrical and concise. The author’s meaning is so unimpeachable and his logic so solid that I defy an economist of any stripe (in the unlikely event that they would read the book) to refute his contentions.

The sort of economy Berry envisions, indeed the sort of local food economy that so many of us are working toward, will undoubtedly come to pass. It will come the easy way or the hard way, but it will surely come. Make no mistake, the easy way is by no means easy – things worth doing rarely are – but the hard way is desperately, dustbowl hard. We fail to heed Mr. Berry’s warnings at our children’s peril.