Customer Reviews

The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture

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This was the first Wendell Berry book I ever read. Berry is a Kentucky farmer and a prolific poet, essayist, and novelist. Since it was first published nearly twenty-five years ago, I have reread this Sierra Club classic many times. It remains as relevant today as when it was written. In fact, Berry notes in the 1986 Preface, "every problem I dealt with in this book . . . has grown worse since the book was written" (p. viii).

Americans are alienated from the land and from each other. This is the theme that resonates through the nine chapters--essays, really--of Berry's book. Because our modern society is dedicated to the mechanistic pursuit of products and profit, it suffers the loss of community, the devaluation of human work, and the destruction of land. "The modern urban-industrialized society is based on a series of radical disconnections between body and soul, husband and wife, marriage and community, community and the earth. At each of these points of disconnection the collaboration of corporation, government, and expert sets up a profit-making enterprise that results in the further dismemberment and impoverishment of the Creation" (p. 137), Berry writes in "The Body and the Earth." Intending only to read the passages on fidelity contained within that essay, I ended up rereading Berry's book cover to cover today.

"Marriage and the care of the earth are each other's disciplines" (p. 132) In discussing marital fidelity, Berry notes that "there is an uncanny resemblance between our behavior toward each other and our behavior toward the earth" (p. 124). For Berry, fidelity can be seen "as the necessary discipline of sexuality, the practical definition of sexual responsibility, or the definition of the moral limits within which such responsibility can be conceived and enacted. The forsaking of all others is a keeping of faith, not just with the chosen one, but with the ones forsaken. The marriage vow unites not just a woman and a man with each other; it unites each of them with the community in a vow of sexual responsibility toward all others. The whole community is married, realizes its essential unity, in each of its marriages" (p. 122). In other words, "where we live and who we live there with define the terms of our relationship to the world and to humanity" (p. 123). Fidelity leads us "to the highest joy we can know: that of union, communion, atonement (in the root sense of at-one-ment)" (p. 122).

THE UNSETTLING OF AMERICA, however, is about more than fidelity metaphors. In the book's title essay, Berry observes that today, "the most numerous heirs of the farmers of Lexington and Concord are the little groups scattered all over the country whose names begin with 'Save': Save our Land, Save the Valley, Save our Mountains, Save our Farmland . . . people without official sanction . . . who are struggling to preserve their places, their values, and their lives as they know them and prefer to live them against the agencies of their own government which are using their own tax moneys against them" (p. 5). "No longer does human life rise from the earth like a pyramid, broadly and considerately founded upon its sources," Berry writes in "The Ecological Crisis as a Crisis of Character." "Now it scatters itself out in a reckless horizontal sprawl, like a disorderly city whose suburbs and pavements destroy the fields" (p. 21). In that essay, Berry is critical not only of the "supposedly fortunate citizen," interested only in "making money and entertaining himself" (p. 20) with irresponsible consumption (p. 24), but also of the Sierra Club (his publisher). In another essay, Berry argues that "the only possible guarantee of the future is responsible behavior in the present" (p. 58). "We must cleanse ourselves of slovenliness, laziness, and waste," he writes. "We must learn to discipline ourselves, to restrain ourselves, to need less, to care more for the needs of others. We must understand what the health of the earth requires, and we must put that before all other needs" (pp. 65-6).

Unsettling more often than not, readers will find words to live by in this insightful Berry classic. This passionate book has the potential to change your life.

G. Merritt

I read this book years ago. Haunting. Who would have thought that a book about agriculture in America could qualify as literature. What Berry says in this book should wake you up (it woke me up, and that is enough to expect from a non-fiction work). But it is not just the facts that make this book. The writing is extraordinary. It is well researched. The ideas are presented in a very sober and direct manner. And at the same time, it is no dispassionate account. That is what was so striking to me on first reading. It is written as if the author were trying to restrain himself, holding back. And by doing so, it creates a sort of tension -- between the lines -- that you can feel from cover to cover. I don't think that I have ever read another book since that oozed so much of anger without ever stating the anger outright. Because of this book, I've gone on to read most of Berry's work as it has appeared, and I would recommend it all. But start with this one. It breathes fire.

Berry writes in a very eloquent and poignant manner to enlighten readers about the big American misconception that modern agriculture and technology is the only way to prosper. It's time for education, politics, and the public make intelligent decisions based on real consequences that affect the land, our health, and common bonds, and to look beyond the narrow minded system of profits and production. I recommend this book to any person who cares about the environment, agriculture, and public policy.

I make my living trying to understand the dynamics of rural landscapes and culture, and this is one of the few books I return to over and over again. It is the best place to start if you want to think through how we Americans relate to our countryside.

Just simply blowed away by negative reviews of this book. I grew up on a small farm when you could still make a living there. Our rural community was much closer, neighborly, trusting, and thick with the smells, sounds and sights of country living. I left home at 18 traveling the world in our military and ran from that "work ethic and way of life" on the farm. Lived in some of this worlds largest cities discovering first hand all the reasons why country living was "paradise on earth."
Oh, I've heard all the urban preachers and their reasons why they love the city. I lived it!!!!!
Is there any wonder why higher income people are moving into rural america! Land prices are thru the roof, they come here with their city mind, mouth and motivations. Why? Because they want a view and try to escape all those negative things in the city. Not to mention raise their kids in a small coummunity in hopes of everyone and everything turning out ok. They don't understand farming communities, our culture, our history nor our way of life.
Ah! We are free! But wait, they come here and destroy our pastoral settings and fill the land with strip malls, fast food joints, quick marts and infrastructure that makes it "country no more."
If any farmer holds out in this "developers dream of a jauggernaut" these new "country folk" start raising cain about the country sights, smell and sounds and want the farmer gone.
Wendell is right on in this book. Oh sure there are bits and pieces of his opinion that rub some liberal wrong. But hey I'm sure a few conservatives cried foul too.
Open up your mind and heart. Look at the facts. Can you trust corporate america? Big brother? Individual selfishness and greed? A bank director and his real estate developer friend once told me that they had joined forces with our county commissioners and planning commission community and preach their "farming is dead lets split up the land and develope the farms" gospel. If they build people will come! Hmm, sounds like a movie I once saw. They are building and people are coming.
Reality of wendell's book tells it like it is. There has been a movement (I like the word conspiracy better but that will alienate a few) to industrialize american agriculture since 1940's. The corporate machine and its disciples have forclosed on many family farms, driven off the "inefficient", destroyed many lives, all in the name of progress!!!!!!
It is all about just a select few industrial size farmers doing business as corporations, corporate chemical company profits off corporate farmers, college/universities gifted $$$millions of dollars to report and publish thru sound science (you don't believe that do you?) the wonderful benefits of more food with less land, by less farmers and healthier for you. And oh yes, our environment will be cleaner because splicing plant genes with chemical compounds and breeding new GMO (genetically modified organisms)foods means the farmer uses less chemicals (is that what the chemical company wants to do, put itself out of business for the sake of humanity? -- remember a portion of your 401k is tied to that companies performance and if they don't do well, neither will you) Roundup Ready Corn/beans/cotton/wheat is here. Spray roundup on your lawn and it does what? Dies!! Put a teaspoon of pure roundup in your coffee each morning and stir, how long before you may come up with cancer or some other ailment? No! Corporate America and our Universities have managed to fill our food pipeline with RR products for years and you consume a portion of it everytime you dine. Just a few steady PPM on a weekly basis, you'll be fine and live to a ripe old age?
Thanks Wendell for preaching the TRUTH!!!!!!

I grew up in Clarksville, TN, on the border with Guthrie, KY. Up the road not too far is Port Royal, KY, where one of the greatest living Americans still resides. He has lived there as long as I have been alive, and I am now over 30, but I had never heard of Wendell Berry until I had passed my thirtieth year. Were it not for the incomparable radio program "Unwelcome Guests", I may never have heard of him. It is a testament to the failure of our economy, education system, and culture, and it is why no thinking American doubts we are nearing a tragic and historic collapse; we are sliding fast down a snow-packed slope like a child on a greased sled. Our only short-term destiny is to smack into a tree.

"The Unsettling of America" is nearly as old as I am, and it is as alive and timely as the day it was written. Probably even more so, since its remedies are the salves for our national malady, and they need an even more urgent prescription and application today than they did 30 years ago. Berry not only succinctly and brilliantly describes how we lost our small farmers, he astutely ties that loss to the loss of culture, belonging, responsibility, community, and character we all feel and mourn in our modern lives, even if we don't understand or fully comprehend that empty feeling. It is, after all, called agri-CULTURE because the land is tied intimately with culture, and to convert agriculture into agribusiness is to divorce people from nature, from a responsibility towards nature, and from an understanding of her cycles and patterns, without which, we are incomplete; it is to convert all of us from nurturers into usurpers and exploiters, as Berry explains throughout.

So, this is not just a book about the loss of the small farmer. It is a book about our loss of liberty, independence, personal satisfaction, wealth, pride, mystery, and community. The way Berry weds these losses together throughout the book is a completely compelling. Berry's clean, beautiful, crystal clear prose moves deliberately, with a purposeful trajectory, and it effortlessly maintains a palpable weight of authority that can only be derived from real wisdom. He is a voice at once profoundly conservative and astutely liberal, or, in short, a real prophetic voice.

"The Unsettling of America" is indeed wise, and it was indeed prophetic. The dangerous excesses he foresaw 30 years ago have come to pass in ever accelerating fashion. His remedies absolutely essential for the preservation of America, and for that matter, the world. Everyone should read this book and read Wendell Berry in general. Should we carry on our culture after we smack that tree (we might, after all, break our necks), Wendell Berry will be remembered when Polk, Buchanan, Clinton, and Bush are long, long forgotten, or so we should all hope.

Wendell Berry's writings have to be the most to-the-point, profound and real about life in rural America, how it used to be, how it might still be, but how often it is not. 'The Unsettling of America' encapsulates this all with a strong and real writing style and which tells the truth about our current way of living.

I would recommend this book to all readers, country and city dwellers alike, as it is so telling and exposing of the mess we have made of our landscape, the reasons why, and how we might actually return it to being more vibrant and real.

I would also recommend reading "Against the Machine" by Nicols Fox, recently published, which goes into more detail about the destruction of people's lives by the 'machinery' of the system in which we live, and how we might stop this also.

So many things talked about in this book have happened. There's things he talks of that seem unbelievable...but years ago he said there would be dairy farms here and beef farms there and the diverse farms would give way to specialization. That has happened. There's a good many points in this book that presents his views - and that of many Americans - straight up. Not everyone will agree. There are companies who say it's safe to use their chemical or it's only the other guy who's careless. Country and farms are disappearing today at a rate that most don't even realize. When it's all paved over or subdivided...reread this book.

Wendell Berry says everything I feel and everything I have thought since I was a child growing up in S. Calif. watching the beautiful land be consumed ruthlessly by development. There is something wrong with todays ways, and I can't put it to words, but thankfully Wendell can! I wish I could get this book into everyones home and read by all. Though you do sense the sadness of the loss of all that is of real value, you also sense the hope of what our future will be like, after the oil. We will have to return to this eventually, or we will become extinct. Well done Wendell, I will be looking for your other works.

i have used this book as a first read for environmental science majors since the early 90's, there is no better introduction to the choice that lies before us; unless human communities have a living relationship with the land which sustains them, responsible (or "kindly") use cannot be an evolutionary possibility, and catastrophic misery is implicit in that failure.........

evolution means that the creation is the creator; at the precise moment one species becomes aware of its origins, that same species is hacking away at the very roots of its own existence.......

how much longer can we remain so ignorant?