First published in A Continuous Harmony in 1972, "Think Little" is cultural critic and lifelong farmer Wendell Berry at his best: prescient about the dire environmental consequences of our mentality of greed and exploitation, yet hopeful that we will recognize war and oppression and pollution not as separate issues, but aspects of the same.

The mentality of greed and exploitation that exploits and destroys the natural environment is the same that abuses racial and economic minorities.

This first book in the Counterpoints series gathers “Think Little” together with one of Mr. Berry's most popular and personal essays, "A Native Hill." This gentle essay of recollection is told alongside a poetic lesson in geography, as he explains at length and in detail, that "what [he] stands for is what he stands on." Many of us can identify with him as he suggests, "Sometimes I can no longer think in the house or in the garden or in cleared fields. They bear too much resemblance to our failed human history—failed, because it has led to this human present that is such a bitterness and a trial. And so I go to the woods."

I have been walking in the woods, and have lain down on the ground to rest… And suddenly I apprehend the dark proposal of the ground. Under the fallen leaf my breastbone burns with imminent decay. Other leaves fall. My body begins its long shudder into humus. I feel my substance escape me, carried into the mold by beetles and worms. Days, winds, seasons pass over me as I sink under the leaves…

 

When I move to go, it is as though I rise up out of the world.

 “Each palm-size book in the Counterpoints series is meant to stay with you, whether safely in your pocket or long after you turn the last page. From short stories to essays to poems, these little books celebrate our most-beloved writers, whose work encapsulates the spirit of Counterpoint Press: cutting-edge, wide-ranging, and independent.” —the publisher