The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture

A probing, personal inquiry into the way in which we use the farmlands that sustain us, and the roots of American attitudes towards farming. Portions of this book have appeared in slightly altered form in The Nation and The CoEvolution Quarterly. "The Unsettling of America" is Wendell Berry's personal, dramatic inquiry into the way in which we use the land that sustains us. For the roots of our attitudes toward farming, Berry goes back to the industrial revolution, which promised freedom from physical toil, and to the "conquistador" mentality that ruled the settlement of North America, treating land, resources, and ultimately people as infinitely expendable. Out of this history comes a disturbing, and officially sanctioned, vision of the farm of the future -- where the supreme value is maximum production, where the environment is to be controlled by technology, and where a man has no place. Berry challenges these and other orthodox values and assumptions: techniques of cultivation that damage the soil and sacrifice quality to mere abundance; the reliance on huge inputs of energy to fuel machines and manufacture chemicals; the "get big or get out" philosophy that has driven millions of farmers from the land and "unsettled" whole communities. This is above all a book that will change minds, a work of passion, eloquence, and conviction. -- From publisher's description In The Unsettling of America Wendell Berry argues that good farming is a cultural development and spiritual discipline. Today's agribusiness, however, takes farming out of its cultural context and away from families, and as a nation we are thus more estranged from the land - from the intimate knowledge, love, and care of it. Sadly, as Berry notes in the afterword to this new edition, his arguments and observations are still relevant today. We continue to suffer loss of community, the devaluation of human work, and the destruction of nature under an economics dedicated to the mechanistic pursuit of products and profits. A critical inquiry into the ways Americans have exploited and continue to exploit the land that sustains them, tracing attitudes toward and methods of farming from the eighteenth century to the present