Ron Swanson on Wendell Berry

"My favorite writer is Wendell Berry, from Kentucky. He’s a farmer, an agrarian, an essayist, a poet, a novelist. His overarching philosophy is that we’ve lost touch with the land we’ve grown up on, and if we could all take two steps back, if everybody planted a garden or if somebody in the neighborhood made shoes, we’d probably be a much stronger society with less need for the distractions of video games and all that. I often think of the shockingly accurate fat, baby-like adults in the movie Wall-E. If I had a soapbox—which I’d build myself—I’d use it to encourage people to make things with their hands or to get outside and walk in a park, to experience the world in ways that don’t involve screens."

--Nick Offerman