Wendell Berry, the award-winning poet, novelist, activist and farmer, has died at the age of 92 at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky. In his poems, stories, novels and essays, he celebrated rural communities in his native Kentucky and warned against the excesses of modern, industrialized society. In 2011, he risked arrest by taking part in a four-day sit-in at the office of Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear to protest mountaintop removal strip mining. He spoke to the journalist Jeff Biggers about why he was committing an act of civil disobedience.

Wendell Berry: “Over these years, there’s been one protest after another, one march on Frankfurt after another, one visit to a legislator after another. And last year we visited the governor. And all this has been without any perceptible political effect, no acknowledgment even that the problems exist. And so, we’re doing this simply as the next logical step. We’d exhausted all other possibilities.”