A passive populace obsessed with easy answers has led to an economy that is destroying America’s land, author Wendell Berry told a packed-in crowd at the University of Virginia on Thursday evening.

“Simple solutions will always lead to complex problems, surprising simple minds,” he said.

In a lecture in the full auditorium of the Mary and David Harrison Institute for American History, Literature and Culture/Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, Berry outlined the need for small-scale landholders engaging in forestry and farming, as opposed to the industrial-scale operations now in place.

Large-scale and corporate operations cause long-term damage to the environment and to rural cultures, he told the crowd.

Farm and timber economies that simply export raw materials for processing elsewhere kill towns because they also export jobs, he said.

“And then you will be exporting your young people to take those jobs,” he said.

He added, “Our tendency has been to fasten upon one product and allow that one to determine the local land economy.”

Berry, a poet, novelist and essayist, is part of a movement that is trying to spark high-level discussion by proposing a 50-year farm bill that calls for, among other things, a switch to majority perennial crops.