Politics & Power Quote by Wendell Berry

Berry slips a knife into the soft, self-flattering language of politics: “deals and decisions” sound tidy, rational, human-scaled. Then he widens the frame until that tidy world looks absurdly small. Nature, in his formulation, isn’t scenery or “the environment” as a policy category. She’s a participant at the table - and not a silent one. The line is built to puncture the fantasy that power is merely electoral or procedural. You can win the room, pass the bill, cut the ribbon, and still lose the argument because the argument was never only among humans.

The anthropomorphism is deliberate and strategic. Giving Nature “votes,” “memory,” and “justice” is less a sentimental move than a moral reversal: it drags consequences into the realm of accountability. Politicians can spin, forget, delay, or bury costs in the future; Nature can’t be lobbied, distracted, or made to accept a convenient narrative. “Longer memory” is climate and soil and water behaving like ledgers, keeping score across decades. “Sterner sense of justice” is ecological cause-and-effect that doesn’t care about intent, party, or ideology.

Context matters: Berry’s career is a sustained critique of industrial agriculture, extractive economics, and the civic habit of treating land as an externality. Written in that tradition, the quote reads like a warning shot against technocratic optimism and short-term governance. He’s not asking for greener rhetoric; he’s insisting that any real politics starts with limits, and that limits will be enforced whether we vote for them or not.