Berry always saw in humanity’s relationship with its land, and with the wider creation, a litmus test of what kind of people we were, or were becoming. “I have made myself its follower and its apprentice,” he wrote of his own farm in his 1968 essay “A Native Hill.” If we wanted to begin living better lives, he wrote in 2011, we should also apprentice ourselves to something local and particular, in whatever form we found it. “We must not work or think on a heroic scale,” he insisted, because heroes “too lightly risk the lives of people, places, and things they do not see.” Instead, “we must work on a scale proper to our limited abilities. We must not break things we cannot fix.” A better world would not come through more grand plans, tech fixes, or centralized, ideological impositions. It would not come through “wage slavery or by enslaving nature.” It would come from the place it had always come from: “locally adapted economies, based on local nature, local sunlight, local intelligence, and local work.”