Paleos try to annex Wendell Berry

Scott Richert represents the paleo kind of conservatives, those who realize that capitalism is not their friend. Writing in The University Bookman (h/t Jameson Campaigne), he gives a friendly review to Eric Freyfogle (a University of Illinois law professor who has long argued that the environmental crisis requires a rethinking of private property rights in a more communal direction) and to a collection of essays about the Kentucky agrarian poet and essayist Wendell Berry.

Berry has long escaped partisan categorization (over the years he's been featured in Mother Jones and Mother Earth News) and the paleos' clumsy efforts to appropriate him as some kind of conservative Catholic are a stretch that would be funny if Richert weren't so invincibly earnest. There seems to be a boom in books by and about Berry these days, and I'll be interested to see if any of them can take him on his own idiosyncratic terms, horse farming and all, without trying to assimilate him into traditions (like Catholicism) that are many thousands of years younger than his agrarianism.