Why Would Wendell Berry Read The Tempest at a Protest?

During the hustle and bustle of the spring semester, former UK professor, famous poet-farmer, and environmental activist Wendell Berry staged a sit-in/sleep-in protest at the state capitol building as a way to draw attention to Kentucky’s destruction of its natural landscape.  Berry has long been a critic of mountaintop removal coal mining in Kentucky, citing the ecological damage and social pollution it brings as a travesty against the Commonwealth.  With hundreds of other protestors, Berry lead a week-long resistance in the state’s main legislative building at Frankfort.  The events and movement were organized under a grassroots group called Kentucky Rising, which launched a blog to organize the resistance to exploitative mining practices.

Wendell Berry reads an older copy of The Tempest while protesting/sleeping at the capitol in Frankfort (February, 2011). This photo belongs to the Kentucky Kernel and was taken by Brandon Goodwin.

“Obviously, we are determined to stop the abuses of the coal industry, and to that end we are determined also to keep this conversation going,” Berry said in a statement that was posted on the Kentucky Rising blog.  Berry pointed out in the statement that rather than being jailed or arrested and forced off of the premises, he and his fellow protesters were invited to stay the night, which turned into several nights, and wait until Gov. Beshear found time to talk with them.

I’m bringing up this incident, which happened about three months ago, because of a striking photo that the Kentucky Kernel ran to accompany their coverage of the event.  In it, Berry sits on a hard office floor, propped up by a few pillows, and reads a really old, faded copy of The Tempest.  One has to wonder why, in this time of personal sacrifice and intentional action–a public protest against coal mining in Kentucky–Berry would stave off boredom by reading a ratty copy of a 400-year old play about the tropical island adventures of a displaced European duke?  In such an intense moment, wouldn’t Berry be more amused by the Scrabble app on his iPhone, the latest issue of GQ, or perhaps some lighter reading from the New York Times Bestseller list?

It’s clear that Berry brought his trusty copy of The Tempest along to the protest because it is a text that has helped him think about many of the difficult questions our society must grapple with in the context of coal mining and mountaintop removal.  Coal mining is at the core of some deep contradictions and anxieties concerning our desire to control the environment, our desire to benefit from nature’s abundance without dealing with the complexities of life, and our fear that our indulgence might spell catastrophic disaster for us.

In Kentucky, we allow Massey Energy and other large mining corporations to destroy mountaintops and pollute streams in rural Appalachia because we benefit from the cheapest electricity in the United States.  Mining coal provides a power source that never runs out, and as long as we don’t think about the social and environmental costs associated with our electricity consumption, we don’t have to worry about doing anything substantial or radical to change how we live.  We can leave our computers on all night, plug in an extra refrigerator, or use an extra appliance.  What’s it cost to run a wireless router 24/7/365 now?  Maybe a few extra cents per months.

Massey Energy has managed to fund many coal-positive advertising campaigns, all of which remind us of what we enjoy:  the power to extract a limitless supply of energy from the environment and control it without consequence.  I’m sure that Berry was reading The Tempest while he waited at the capitol building because it is a text that forces him (and us) to think long

Coal: It keeps the lights on!

and hard about these assumptions and realize that for every optimistic hope for a nature of bounty and perfect control there is a dark underside, a deep fear that our power over nature and others who live in nature is ultimately limited.  Shakespeare’s final play viciously ridicules European courtiers who scheme to control their virgin landscape or who get carried away with the prospect of limitless natural resources.  Consider Gonzolo, a gentleman who fantasizes about a nature that “should bring forth / Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance, / To feed my innocent people” when he sees the island terrain for the first time (2.1.158-60).  Like all of the other Europeans who arrive on the island, Gonzolo assumes that the land is his, and it can be controlled, ordered, and exploited as he sees fit.  There are no boundaries, no limits to curtail the dream of an easy life that he has conjured.  Or so we’d like to believe.

However, I imagine that Berry spent most of his time thinking about Prospero when he sat on the floor and read Shakespeare that evening.  If anything, Prospero is a man after Berry’s own heart in that he is enraptured by pursuit of the liberal arts, the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric that was seen to be the foundation of a civic education for all people.  Berry, a resident of Henry County, Kentucky, has recently received national recognition for his devotion to the humanities.  In March, President Barack Obama presented Berry with the National Humanities Medal at the White House.  But is this award anything more than the state paying lipservice to the place of humanistic study in the place of our society?

Prospero became lost in his books while holding office in Milan, and now, his own source of power, his magic, has brought his political enemies to the island, where he can exact revenge on them.  He holds in his power both the island’s native population, an eloquent monster named Caliban, and a sprite named Ariel.  However, as the play progresses, Prospero begins to realize some deeply troubling things.  He realizes that his control of other people, and of nature, is limited.  He cannot manipulate his environment with certainty, nor can he control his own fate.  The saddest moments in the play come when Prospero grapples with the truth, that his magic has been a ruse.  He famously breaks his staff, drowns his books, the source of his intellectual control, and ultimately restores the relationships in his life.