Wendell Berry on rural life and ecological complexity

Here is an essay by Wendell Berry on the present and the future of the rural US, where fewer and fewer people live from the land and hence act as observers and stewards of the land.  If you've read much Berry, he's not saying anything very new or different here.  But these themes that he keeps returning to just become more and more relevant, the problems he explores becoming more and more extreme.  He also reminds us of the complexity of nature, and how even conservation scientists in the US (where scientists are abundant and very active) are unable to explain much of what is happening in broad swaths of our environment, when they're not totally unaware of what is happening there.  Not a promising prospect.