The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture

by Wendell Berry

Since its original publication in 1977, The Unsettling of America has been recognized as a classic of American letters.
In it, Wendell Berry argues that good farming is a cultural development and spiritual discipline. But today's agribusiness 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 this edition, his arguments and observations are even more relevant than ever. 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. Although "this book has not had the happy fate of being proved wrong," Berry writes, there are good people working "to make something comely and enduring of our life on this earth." Wendell Berry is one of those people, writing and working, as ever, with passion, eloquence, and conviction.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Agriculture, Nature, Food, Environment, Philosophy

228 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Wendell Berry is a conservationist, farmer, essayist, novelist, professor of English and poet. He was born August 5, 1934 in Henry County, Kentucky where he now lives on a farm. The New York Times has called Berry the "prophet of rural America."

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

maybe you'll find this at a garage sale in a beat up box for twenty-five cents. you'll pull it from the box. rub two dimes and five pennies together. you'll read it and research rain barrels. you'll sell that book to some used bookstore. you might. and a thin bookstore employee will set it on a shelf where some manicured hand might find it and bring it back to her loft. maybe she'll turn the pages and sigh at her consumption. maybe. or maybe she wont. maybe she'll walk more. and ride her bicycle to the local market. slowly. in gradual steps. she will find herself in her landscape. here is the revolution she might think as shuts her door for the last time. gone to a place. a plot of land that she cares for and which in turn cares for her. the nurturing of her landscape becomes almost spiritual in her recognition of the land and its affect on her.

or maybe she is just standing in a shopping mall and feeling the emptiness. with the people walking by. talking into cell phones. bags on their arms. maybe she will stop there in the center of the mall feeling the emptiness.

or maybe she will be driving city streets. just all green lights and fluorescent gas station lights and the radio playing some seventies song. and she will feel the emptiness. maybe she will pull into a grocery store parking lot at dusk and listen to the grackles as they call and shout on architect planned trees. in the calling of those birds the emptiness might turn into something else. a step. a decision. to bridge the gap of the estrangement of herself from her landscape. maybe her heart moves an inch closer to the right place.

[Heather Shaw · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every once in a while, a book comes along at the right place and at the right time, and that book has the power to change your life. This was that book for me. It moved me out of the city and into the country, and inspired me to grow food for people. It changed the way I view my relationship to the earth, and my responsibility to it. Don't read this book if you want to live comfortably with your current worldview.

[Arleen Jenson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having spent five years at a land grant institution, I can safely say that everything Mr. Berry accuses agricultural education programs of is true, even today. All of my ag professors, save one, laughed at the idea of "organic" and "sustainable" and would only allow the non-regulated trend of "all-natural" a measure of respect, because... frankly... they make a ton of money off of false advertising.

I moved to the city after graduating, and took work on a small organic farm half an hour outside of town. While they are a callow operation still, their success is great. I've struggled with the idea of writing my mid-west ag college and insisting on a refund for my bogus, biased, non-sustainable and recently declared "most worthless in the nation" education.

While I don't follow Mr. Berry's religious leanings (You could often replace "Christian" with any other religion.. as most agree on terms of goodness and responsibility, which he seems to forget.) reading the book felt like sitting in the pews of a call-and-response sermon. Sometimes I had to mark my place, put the book down, and feel a surge of adrenaline pass before continuing. The relief and joy of finding so much truth in one book was more exciting than any fiction I've picked up in years.

There are few books that I would pay someone to read. This one would make the list.

[Cindy Rollins · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book pairs well with Alan Noble’s You are not your Own.

I read this years ago and recently reread it. All is not well with the “community.”
Berry is opinionated which is also what makes him interesting and helpful.

This time around I listened to Ron Swanson read it. I had to speed it up to 1.6. But the voice of Nick Offerman was perfect.

[Old Dog Diogenes · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my introduction to Wendell Berry's writing, and I have to say, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Coming from small town USA with family roots in a town established in agriculture, I was easily convinced by his arguments against big agribusiness vs. small, organic farms centered around family and community. I have seen just within my lifetime the slow and painful decay of small towns with agricultural roots as they deteriorate into poverty, crime, homeless, and drug-filled cesspools because of the ever increasing proposition that these people are not needed, and as Berry expresses that simple (non-specialist) work is 'drudgery' that we look to be freed from.

Where Berry excels in this book though is in his understanding of God's creation and design in this world and it's connection to all aspects of life. His wholistic approach to agriculture based on his connective understanding of creation and the interlaced relationships from land to plant to animal to man to wife to child to house to family to community to nation and finally to the world then cycled back again through the natural revolutions of life and death.

This book is about much more than agriculture. Berry is a philosopher with a succinct understanding of culture in general. If you want to know how the deterioration of the family affects the food we eat, if you want to know how a materialist and consumerist culture effects the kinds of education we receive, how progressive ideals, technology, etc. affect our agriculture and our culture at large negatively, Berry identifies the interrelatedness of these things that most people miss.

“The modern urban-industrial 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. Together, these disconnections add up to a condition of critical ill health, which we suffer in common—not just with each other, but with all other creatures. Our economy is based upon this disease. Its aim is to separate us as far as possible from the sources of life (material, social, and spiritual), to put these sources under the control of corporations and specialized professionals, and to sell them to us at the highest profit.”

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is the classic that all Wendell Berry readers should read first. It goes through his ecological ethic and his belief that morality and ecology are inseparable; that our disconnection from the earth and our disconnection from each other are part of the same problem. This quote from his essay Think Little is a perfect introduction to his philosophies. See [http://www.msu.edu/~kikbradl/little.html]

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Most of us, for example, not only do not know how to produce the best food in the best way - we don't know how to produce any kind in any way. Our model citizen is a sophisticate who before puberty understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato. And for this condition we have elaborate rationalizations, instructing us that dependence for everything on somebody else is efficient and economical and a scientific miracle. I say, instead, that it is madness, mass produced. A man who understands the weather only in terms of golf is participating in a chronic public insanity that either he or his descendants will be bound to realize as suffering. I believe that the death of the world is breeding in such minds much more certainly and much faster than in any political capital or atomic arsenal.
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Wendell Berry has long been an inspiration to me, the kind of person I think about when facing highly symbolic questions that are of little import. What would Wendell Berry think about my job/clothes/car/haircut, I wonder? Alas, in almost all cases I end up feeling like I've let the poor chap down.

He is my hero and I love him.

[Cameron Brooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

*becomes farmer*

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Over the past 5-6 years, Berry's writings have changed me, shaping my worldview more than perhaps any other single author's ever have. This book continues in that vein, both frustrating and inspiring me. I give it 4.5 stars. It is a flawed book. Full of polemic, often lacking in nuance and charity. But it speaks so much truth to power. And it speaks so much to me personally, to my family and personal history -- growing up on a modern, industrial, somewhat-large-but-relatively-small family farm that was squeezed out because we couldn't get even larger. And then leaving to university on the East Coast to "make something of myself," now becoming an academic, a specialized "expert," disconnected from my original community and from the land. Like Berry's fiction and poetry, these essays are an indictment of my life, my career, my "mobility." His words bring me to an awareness of my sinfulness, of my complicity in the sins of my generation; they call me to repentance.

At the same time, I feel that with this book, I am finally ready to put Berry to rest for a season. Ready to instead pick up where he leaves off, exploring how to implement the vision of community and membership and connection to the land that he espouses within the life that I now have. I am ready to "connect [my]self responsibly to practical circumstances... [to] learn to stay put in the body to which [I] belong and in the place to which preference or history or accident has brought [me]... in short, to find [my]self in finding [my] work" (p. 111).

A collection of my favorite passages from The Unsettling of America:


On our personal responsibility to take action:

"Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live." P. 19


"The only real, practical, hope-giving way to remedy the fragmentation that is the disease of the modern spirit is a small and humble way--a way that a governmental agency or organization or institution will never think of, though a person may think of it: one must begin in one's own life the private solutions that can only in turn become public solutions." P. 23


"A responsible consumer would be a critical consumer, would refuse to purchase the less good. And he would be a moderate consumer; he would know his needs and would not purchase what he did not need; he would sort among his needs and study to reduce them." P. 24


"The lost identity would find itself by recognizing physical landmarks, by connecting itself responsibly to practical circumstances; it would learn to stay put in the body to which it belongs and in the place to which preference or history or accident has brought it; it would, in short, find itself in finding its work." P. 111


"If change is to come, then, it will have to come from the outside. It will have to come from the margins." P. 174


On ecology, healthy agriculture, and our connections to our bodies and communities and the land:

"Though we have no choice but to live at the expense of other life, it is necessary to recognize the limits and dangers involved: past a certain point in a unified system, 'other life' is our own." P. 47

"There is, in practice, no such thing as autonomy. Practically, there is only a distinction between responsible and irresponsible dependence." P. 111

"we are members of the human community and are therefore bound to help or harm it by our behavior." P. 172


"It is typical of the mentality of our age that we cannot conceive of infinity except as an enormous quantity. We cannot conceive of it as orderly process, as pattern or cycle, as shapeliness. We conceive of it as inconceivable quantity--that is, as the immeasurable." P. 84

"But [farming] is also a practical religion, a practice of religion, a rite. By farming we enact our fundamental connection with energy and matter, light and darkness. In the cycles of farming, which carry the elemental energy again and again through the seasons and the bodies of living things, we recognize the only infinitude within reach of the imagination." P. 87


"The energy crisis reduces to a single question: Can we forbear to do anything that we are able to do? Or to put the question in the words of Ivan Illich: can we, believing in 'the effectiveness of power,' see the disproportionately greater effectiveness of abstaining from its use'?" P. 95


"Odysseus found his father in solitude
spading the earth around a young fruit tree.

He wore a tunic, patched and soiled, and leggings--
oxhide patches, bound below his knees
against the brambles.

"Although Odysseus jokes about his father's appearance, the appropriateness of what he is doing is never questioned. In a time of disorder he has returned to the care of the earth, the foundation of life and hope. And Odysseus finds him in an act emblematic of the best and most responsible kind of agriculture: an old man caring for a young tree." P. 128-29


"For the true measure of agriculture is not the sophistication of its equipment, the size of its income, or even the statistics of its productivity, but the good health of the land." P. 188


(writing of the Amish) "It is possible, I think, to say that this is a Christian agriculture, formed upon the understanding that it is sinful for people to misuse or destroy what they did not make. The Creation is a unique, irreplaceable gift, therefore to be used with humility, respect, and skill." P. 213


"For the orthodox obsession with production, profit, and expansion, this healthier agriculture would substitute a more complex consciousness, the terms of which would be ecological integrity, nutrition, technological appropriateness, social stability, skill, quality, thrift, diversity, decentralization, independence, usufruct. Or, put more simply, it would replace the concern for production with a concern for reproduction." P. 217


"We must learn again to think of human energy, our energy, not as something to be saved, but as something to be used and to be enjoyed in use." P. 219



On the household and marriage:

"Degenerate housewifery is indivisible from degenerate husbandry. There is no escape. This is the justice that we are learning from the ecologists: you cannot damage what you are dependent upon without damaging yourself. The suffering of women is noticed now, is noticeable now, because it is not given any considerable status or compensation. If we removed the status and compensation from the destructive exploits we classify as 'manly,' men would be found to be suffering as much as women. They would be found to be suffering for the same reason: they are in exile from the communion of men and women, which is their deepest connection with the communion of all creatures." P. 116


"Fidelity can best 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


"No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it. Where we live and who we live there with define the terms of our relationship to the world and to humanity. We thus come again to the paradox that one can become whole only by the responsible acceptance of one's partiality." P. 123


On religion and ecology and orthodoxy:

"This separation of the soul from the body and from the world is no disease of the fringe, no aberration, but a fracture that runs through the mentality of institutional religion like a geologic fault. And this rift in the mentality of religion continues to characterize the modern mind, no matter how secular or worldly it becomes.

"But I have not stated my point exactly enough. This rift is not like it's your logic fault; it is a geologic fault. It is a flaw in the mind that runs inevitably into the earth. ...

"And yet what is the burden of the Bible if not a sense of the mutuality of influence, rising out of an essential unity, among soul and body and community and world? These are all the works of God, and it is there for the work of virtue to make or restore harmony among them." P. 109


"Invariably the failure of organized religions, by which they cut themselves off from mystery and therefore from sanctity, lies in the attempt to impose an absolute division between faith and doubt, to make belief perform as knowledge; when they forbid their prophets to go into the wilderness, they lose the possibility of renewal." P. 130


"the very nature of orthodoxy: one who presumes to know the truth does not look for it." P. 173-74


"The pattern of orthodoxy in religion, because it is well known, gives us a useful paradigm. The encrusted religious structure is not changed by the institutional dependents--they are part of the crust. It is changed by one who goes alone to the wilderness, where he fasts and prays, and returns with cleansed vision. And going alone, he goes independent of institutions, forswearing orthodoxy ('right opinion'). I'm going to the wilderness he goes to the margin, where he is surrounded by the possibilities--by no means all good--that orthodoxy has excluded. By fasting he disengages his thoughts from the immediate issues of livelihood; his willing hunger takes his mind off the payroll, so to speak. And by praying he acknowledges ignorance; the orthodox presume to know, whereas the marginal person is trying to find out. He returns to the community, not necessarily with new truth, but with a new vision of the truth; he sees it more whole than before." P. 174


On academia, careerism, and "mobility":

"The professor lives in his career, in a ghetto of career-oriented fellow professors. Where he may be geographically is of little interest to him. One's career is a vehicle, not a dwelling; one is concerned less for where it is than for where it will go.

"The careerist professor is by definition a specialist professor. Utterly dependent upon his institution, he blunts his critical intelligence and blurs his language so as to exist 'harmoniously' within it--and so serves his school with an emasculated and fragmentary intelligence, deferring 'realistically' to the redundant procedures and meaningless demands of an inflated administrative bureaucracy whose educational purpose is written on its paychecks.

"... They begin to need, and so to promote, the mobility, careerism, and moral confusion that are victimizing the local population and destroying the local communities. The stock in trade of the 'man of learning' comes to be ignorance." P. 147-48


"The typical American 'success story' moves from a modest rural beginning to urban affluence, from manual labor to office work.

"We must ask, then, what must be the educational effect, the influence, of a farmer's son who believes, with the absolute authorization of his society, that he has mightily improved himself by becoming a professor of agriculture. Has he not improved himself by an 'upward' motivation which by its nature avoids the issue of quality--which I assume is simply that an agriculture specialist is better than a farmer? And does he not exemplify to his students the proposition that 'the way up' leads away from home? How could he, who has 'succeeded' by earning a Ph.D. and a nice place in town, advise his best students to go home and farm, or even assume that they might find good reasons for doing so?" P. 160


On what modern agriculture has wrought:

"I remember, during the fifties, the outrage with which our political leaders spoke of the forced removal of the populations of villages in communist countries. I also remember that at the same time, in Washington, the word on farming was 'Get big or get out'--a policy which is still in effect and which has taken an enormous toll. The only difference is that of method: the force used by the communists was military; with us, it has been economic--a 'free market' in which the freest were the richest. ...

"And so those who could not get big have got out--not just in my community, but in farm communities all over the country. But as a social or economic goal, bigness is totalitarian; it establishes an inevitable tendency toward the one that will be the biggest of all. Many who got big to stay in are now being driven out by those who got bigger. The aim of bigness implies not one aim that is not socially and culturally destructive." P. 41


"By this 'most logical' of developments, then, we have passed from a farm-based, family-based, independent agriculture to an agriculture abjectly dependent upon many kinds of industrial 'inputs' and firmly based upon several kinds of disaster. We are producing, at an incalculable waste of topsoil and of human life and energy, and at the cost of destroying communities and poisoning the land and the streams, food to be used against the hungry as a weapon." P. 167


"It would be possible to calculate the probable monetary cost of the unemployment, community and family breakdown, crime, vandalism, pollution, and soil loss that are the results of overwhelming 'inputs' of technology--but apparently an agricultural economist is not expected to look either so widely around or so far ahead." P. 168

[Jared · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ugh.
I proudly did not finish this book. I will recommend Berry to no one and will in fact be throwing my copy away.
Why you ask? (all the trigger warnings)

Berry, on pg.102-104, claims that suicides only occur in industrialized settings, as cities cause "despair" and "a wound that cannot be healed." The cause of this is not mental health, genetics, family situation, etc. Rather, to Berry, suicides are caused by not living in an agricultural space. This mindset, with no statistical or research back up, is vile, a rural superiority complex.

Secondly, in this agricultural setting where only farmers are healthy, who gets to farm?? "The best farming requires a farmer-a husband-man" (45).

Thirdly, in the opening section, Berry chooses to keep the language of "Indian" and adopts the attitude of manifest destiny. This book was published in 1977.

Fourthly, in the 100 pages I read, Berry loves to quote, but only quotes STRAIGHT WHITE MEN. IN 1977. Oh, and in the preface, he identifies himself as "a member of a threatened minority." White Fragility anyone?

I truly hope you did not make it to the end of my review, any time spent discussing Berry's thoughts is utterly meaningless. I am ardently pro-city, to be true, but I did grow up in the country and do understand and appreciate why some people choose to live there. Berry, however, is elitist, sexist, racist, and woefully disregardful of human life. I have better uses for my time.

[Paul Cloutier · Rating 5 out of 5]

A funny thing happened with this book, I read it last year before the election and felt it was beautifully written but sort of idealistic and naive. Then after the election, I reread it, and my mind was much more prepared for it. It is truly a masterpiece of American literature and letters. I think if you want to understand how things have gotten to how they are, politically, culturally and economically, or even if you want to understand one of the possible causes of ennui in America today, then this book is a lovely place to start. Not always perfect, but definitely always thought provoking.

[Micah Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The curious thing is that many agriculture specialists and "agribusinessmen" see themselves as conservatives. They look with contempt upon governmental "indulgence" of those who have no more "moral fiber" than to accept "handouts" from the public treasury-but they look with equal contempt upon the most traditional and appropriate means of independence. What do such conservatives wish to conserve? Evidently nothing less than the great corporate blocks of wealth and power, in whose every interest is implied the moral degeneracy and economic dependence of the people. They do not esteem the possibility of a prospering, independent class of small owners because they are, in fact, not conservatives at all, but the most doctrinaire and disruptive of revolutionaries."

[J. Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

That’s top shelf stuff.

[Stacy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Have you ever read an obscure book that no one you know has heard of, and felt that it was so good that it should be required reading for every human being? That's how I felt about this book.

Wendell Berry is a hero for many, including Barbara Kingsolver, who references many of Berry's ideas in her novel "Animal Vegetable Miracle". I've been meaning to get into his stuff for quite some time, and when I read this book it resonated with so many things I have believed or thought of, but never articulated or laid out in so orderly a fashion.

A bit of a Michael Pollen from 20 years ago, Berry wrote this essay on the disintegration of the diversified American farm back in the 1970's. Things only seem to have gotten worse in many ways since then. Berry outlines the roots of many problems in agriculture and how they came from government policies. He talks about how the concept of "getting big or getting out" was intended to prevent starvation (supposedly) but has killed off the diversified small farm and created an unhealthy monoculture system of farming. He compares this with the healthy, sustainable, organic Amish traditions, which totally made me want to go hang out with the Amish and learn how to wield a scythe.

The one good thing I see that has occurred in our country since the publication of this book is the trend towards farmers markets and CSAs. They are the one ray of hope I see in our current situation, when most of us haven't a clue where or how the food we put in our bodies was grown. The land won't be able to produce forever if large farms continue to misuse it.

Bottom line: Grow your own food. If you can't do that, join a CSA or patronize a farmer's market. That is the only way small farms stand a chance, and perhaps the only chance we ourselves have to make a stand for the health of the land, the soil, and our own bodies.

[Ginny · Rating 5 out of 5]

I initially read this book very slowly because I wanted to be sure I was understanding and absorbing its messages. Then I was distracted by my husband's hospitalization and serious complications following surgery and needed lighter reading material for several weeks. Now I've finally finished and am more convinced than ever that Wendell Berry really is a prophet. He makes me feel very grateful to be living in Sonoma County, CA, where many local farmers subscribe to the same approach to small-scale traditional agriculture that Berry advocates. We are lucky to have easy access to many varieties of "heirloom" fruits & vegetables, organic dairy products from a farm whose energy comes almost exclusively (99%, I believe) from the manure produced by the cows, and numerous cheesemakers and bakers who make use of local ingredients from small farms. This book, written in 1977, helped tie it all together for me in 2013!!!

[Haley Baumeister · Rating 5 out of 5]

What can be said that hasn't already been said? It's his most-read nonfiction book for good reason.

I was inspired to finally listen to it after meeting a new friend who said she had listened to it recently (her first foray into Berry's writing which she loved, as a seriously industrious gardener.)

This is primarily a discussion of the history and downfalls of Big Agriculture — but that, of course, has social & philosophical implications which are also discussed (the thread in all his work).

As someone very interested in (and always learning more about) fertility awareness and women's health, I especially loved his comparisons of the new version of cheapening, mechanized, and destructive forms of chemical-laden agriculture... to our society's experiment in mechanized, cheapening, and destructive hormonal contraception (among others). The chapter on fertility and health was probably my favorite for this reason. Our knowledge & care for the health of the land and its fertility should go hand in hand with our knowledge & care for our own bodies and its fertility.

Other books to read with tangential themes:

Uprooted — Grace Olmstead
The Shepherd's Life / Pastoral Song — James Rebanks
The Omnivore's Dilemma — Michael Pollen
Take Back Your Family — Jefferson Bethke
The Life We're Looking For — Andy Crouch

[Lawrence FitzGerald · Rating 1 out of 5]

I thought that I might like Wendell Berry. The romance of rural America. I live on 50 acres in rural East Texas. I hunt (mostly wild hogs - tasty) and fish. I grow things: tomatoes, watermelons, cantaloupes. Not for sale, just to enjoy. I worked in cities; I made enough money to move to the country. I'm Wendell Berry's best audience. I thought.

He may be a very nice man. If I met him in person I might instantly like him. But in this book he comes across as a blowhard and a hypocrite. A blowhard? Well, there is this:

The household that prepares its own meals in its own kitchen with some intelligent regard for nutritional value, and thus depends on the grocer only for selected raw materials, exercises an influence on the food industry that reaches from the store all the way back to the seedsman. The household that produces some or all of its own food will have a proportionately greater influence.

No Wendell, it's not so. The more you meet your own needs, the less you engage with the larger economy and thus you will have proportionately less influence.

And all the BS about specialization. Wendell, I assume you live in a house. Did you mill the lumber? Did you make the nails? How about your farm equipment. Plow? disk? harrow? On and on.

Wendell Barry regrets the passing of the small farm. I don't. It's a hard life. Both my parents were raised on working farms. My grandparents and great-great grandparents. My father went to college on the GI Bill and never looked back. I went to graduate school on the GI Bill and gained knowledge valuable enough that I could retire after twenty years.

Yes, first the weavers then the blacksmiths, wheelwrights, millwrights, on and on and eventually obsolescence found the small farmer. Why not a paean to the rest?

Regrettably, rural poverty has always been with us. It is still with us and it is hard. Reviving the small farm will not change that, it will only reduce another generation to serfdom. After all, if it was so rewarding everyone would be doing it.

[Isaac Solberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wendell Berry has something to say and he’s saying it.

In Unsettling of America, Berry is able to articulate, with deep passion, on how the United States has lost its mind when it comes to agriculture and farming. Moving from the localized family farm to a more cooperate model, Berry argues that people are sacrificing something deep in their soul that makes them human. And as we move further and further away from this culture and settle for exploitative behavior, I think I agree with him, at least as far as I can tell.

But Berry doesn’t strike me as a cynic. He advocates for a hope in humanity to create a sustainable, healthy, and even Holy pursuit of care for the land. And through this pursuit humans will be enriched in character and being instead of economic gain. He also seems to believe that the human and the land should be mirrors to each other. The health of the farm should reflect the health of the farmer. Through Berry’s articulation and ability to walk the talk, this pursuit of sustainability is one I can get behind!

Finally this is not a book to be read alone. Jayber Crow by Berry was really helpful to have personified characters of his ideas. Other books that would pair nicely would be The Pastor by Eugene Peterson and Surprised by Hope by NT Wright. Both of these, I think, get after a similar a truth as Unsettling of America.

Wendell Berry is special. I’ve only read two of his works so far, but I’m eager to read him for the rest of my life. As far as I can tell, everything he’s written seems to be worth reading.

[kayla · Rating 1 out of 5]

it should be said before reading my review that i am a white, urban, farmworker, and i am *not* a fan of wendell berry. i have written up quite a harsh review. the harshness of this review, i believe, is deserved. he is a man with a cult following and fair amount of influence (power) that goes unrecognized in the manor of his writing. he truly says what he likes and it is so (for the communities who follow him). he needs to be checked, and the fantasy that he has created for white farmworkers (the white cishetero rural nuclear family homestead) needs to be dismantled. it should be the blueprint for nothing and it is unsustainable and far from regenerative. overall this book is weird, gross, and ultimately uncreative/uncurious/limited. i do not have room in my life for the perspective of people like this, who write and philosophize beyond their means.

i would not recommend this book to a single person. i suffered through most of this book over my christmas break. i had to skip large chunks where he rambled as a self-righteous genius yet offering no interesting or refreshing perspective. you know suburban white people who problematically romanticize the post war era? he is like that but for rural white homesteaders. i will just provide bullet list of my dislikes and then tw bullet list below.

- his perspective is so limited and it's felt on almost every sentence of every page.you can just tell the life he has lived has been entirely homogenous. while he understands the role of capitalism to the land, it pretty much ends there. his race, gender, religious, etc. analyses are nonexistent or weak. the book breathes rural white man who should really only readdressing himself and other men seeing that:
- he almost exclusively cites and quotes other white men throughout the book. and he does this a LOT. this just cakes on the crust of his entire vibe and perspective.
- he makes several dangerous claims throughout the books about agrarians lifestyles vs industrial/technological/modern lifestyles.
- weird outdated critiques of sexism being the fault of the industrial world??? as if sexism/divided labor did not exist before industrialism lmfao. (pg. 117).
-his perspective of what he calls "modern cities" and "urban civilization" is entiry f*cked up. once again speaking beyond his means. it's clear he has spent little to know time in urban settings or the people who habitats them. he is entirely uninformed about how cities function. he dangerously plays into the urban vs. rural mindset which is a false dichotomy and detrimental to all. (pg 142).
- he writes from a dangerously heteronormative perspective. constantly referring to the role of husband/wife dynamic. honestly at times it feels blatantly homophobic the way he reveres cishetero unions in the role of farming....anyways, gross.
- i lived in a predominantly amish county for 2.5 years and i find his writing on amish people weird and out of touch. "i adore and respect them deeply, with few reservations." he says of the amish on page 215. do not get wrong, i am averse to the topic critique of amish people that is often crudely reductive--they are uncivilized/outdated/silly/etc. but i also am wary of outsiders who romanticize amish people and their way of life because it too is crudely reductive. there is no understanding of the great diversity within amish people, different value sets, different approaches to the land, the systems of abuse that exist, the tendency toward exploitation. wendell berry would probably be alarmed to learn that many amish folks are slum lords and highly exploitative business people. not only that many are actively destroying the land they farm. the same issues he discusses for mainstream american culture also exist within the communities he weirdly romanticizes.




tw critiques:


- he just sprinkles the n-word in as he pleases and as soon as page 14. its fucking deplorable. i'd love to find this man in his kentucky mountainside or whatever and kick him in the arse .
- berry uses offensive language in how he speaks of Native Americans. even used a slur as soon as page 6 (it was in quotes but it was *entirely unnecessary*. this book was written well after this language was appropriate. and as someone *writing* from *expert* position should display a bit more understanding for the communities he is writing about. that would also include paid interviews with native peoples and researchers and farmers. he literally just says whatever he wants and much of it is dangerous.
- there are probably more but i can't think of them at this time

[Emma Casey]

I just found out his 90th birthday was yesterday! I would have finished it yesterday had I known.

A LOT about agriculture and culture. A bit sloggy for me in those parts because it's sort of like, what do I care? But I see the big picture, and I do understand the importance for all of us to have some part in nature and growing things and making things, etc. Chapter seven remains my favorite for going broader in the cultural side of things

[Alec Sampaleanu · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I can find myself agreeing with Berry over some of the evils of modern agriculture that he so vividly describes, I fundamentally disagree with the basic premise of the book. From the beginning, Berry makes the claim that agribusiness is exploitative, and therefore immoral; smallhold farming is nurturing, and therefore moral. From this premise expands the entire book, and indeed at times the experience is quite lovely, with Berry waxing poetic over the communion between man and soil.

Yet Berry does not empirically back up his underlying assumption. To claim that smallhold farming does not exploit and deplete land is much more contentious than Berry believes it is, and it's a shame that he does not take the time to properly develop a defence for this idea.

It seems like Berry is informed heavily by Christian understandings of the communion between man and nature, and this Christian tone is carried out throughout the book, seeming particularly out of place when Berry employs racial and sexual rhetoric that diminishes very real concerns about the insular society that he desires (although this is more understandable in the context of when the book was written.)

I think Berry is a great writer, but I also think that to treat what he writes as gospel is to ignore serious flaws in his arguments, as well as to ignore the very real gains we have accomplished solely because agri-business has enabled so many humans to leave the farm and work and create. The books we rate on this website, the computers we run it on, and even our ability to communicate and discuss novels with one another are dependent on a surplus of free labour that just would not exist in an Unsettled (North) America and world.

[Paula · Rating 4 out of 5]

Agribusiness has been destroying our soil fertility, killing beneficial insects (like bees), decimating our waterways (through eutrophication that kills fish and all aqueous life), and striping the nutritional content from our food (you can grow crops on industrial chemicals, but you can't make them nutritious) for roughly eighty years. As a consequence Americans are unhealthier than any other population in the world (along with European nations with the same practices), and life on the planet is at serious risk. Yet, our government continues to subsidize the industry and fund agricultural colleges that are perpetuating this destruction.

Berry wrote the book over forty years ago, in hopes that he might forestall further damage. Unfortunately, the powers that be have ignored his book. If we want to see a change, and turn around our agricultural practices before it's too late, we need more young farmers dedicated to a scientific approach to organic methods, and we need informed consumers who refuse to support Big Ag. Reading this book would be a good place to start.

[Grey · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had to read this book for class or else I never would have made it past the introduction. While Berry makes some fair points about classism, he does it by comparing the plight of white land owning farmers having to sell their land to that of native americans being violently forced off of their land. he also makes comparison to african americans, but lets just say his choice of words less than savory.

Berry is an extremely priviledged white man who feels the need to use racial slurs just to convey the idea of oppression. Not only is this patently offensive, it stinks of bad writing and poor creativity. If you can't explain the oppression of a group you identify with without camparing it to the oppression of another then you are unlikely to bring any real substance to your writing.

Others have explored the issues he explores in this book better and without using genocide and slavery as props to make a point. Don't waste your time with this book.

[Luke LeBar · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is rare to hear someone so reactionary that they believe we should ditch tractors for horses and praise the Amish for their inventiveness. And yet, that is exactly who Wendell Berry is. Written in the midst of the farm crisis of the 1970’s Wendell Berry intervenes in the controversial yet oft forgotten topic of American agriculture (or rather, the lack of it). He identifies the industrialization and corporate consolidation of American agriculture, its growing mechanization, and overall largeness as key symptoms of and causes of moral disorder within the individual and society.

If you want more of the details, I highly recommend you read this book yourself, there is much to discover. As I said, there is no doubt Wendell Berry is reactionary. I do not say conservative on purpose. Berry finds nothing virtuous to preserve in our current model of agriculture. If he could he would burn it all down, he would. Berry’s reactionary thought is refreshing. He wishes only to conserve the land itself and the virtue of the men (and they are all men to Berry) who cultivate it. It’s like Peter Maurin said, and I am paraphrasing, “we need a program so old it seems new again.”

Berry challenged me to rethink my conception of American agriculture. I deeply agree with many of Berry’s points. The current system of industrial agriculture is broken. It turns farmers into serfs and the land into a wasteland. One need only look at our environmental outlook to see how far industrialization has gotten us, deep into trouble indeed. But on the other hand, look at how far industrial agriculture has gotten us. We are able to feed more people than we ever have been before. Of course we don’t know what the counterfactual is, but the Green Revolution and Norman Borlaug saved 1 billion lives. Berry would likely cast that aside as harmful to the environment and to the farmer, but I don’t think you can throw out that kind of achievement.

So I am left, as a plant breeder who cares both about feeding as many people as possible and the health of the land, somewhat lost. Can we have a high yielding agriculture that is both good for people and land? I think so, and I think Berry does too. His phrase “appropriate technology” was key to my understanding of this text as a scientist. Small farmers couldn’t compete because we stopped making technology for small farmers. We removed the intimate relationship between the farmer and the land.

I like technology, I think it helps a lot of people and can reduce a huge amount of suffering, the Covid vaccines are recent proof of this. But we can’t put the cart before the ass (I think Berry would like that idiom). Technology must serve human needs. Human needs include healthy land. Thus, an appropriate technology serves the small farmer and allows him to be small.

As much as I want this agriculture, I don’t know if farmers do. My classmates come from farms, but they have no desire for smallness. They have been taken in by a system that they have known their entire life. I wouldn’t classify them as particularly virtuous. We no longer seem to have the resources and competency to escape our predicament. Berry identifies the land grant colleges as enemies towards a better agriculture. Certainly, there are still enemies, especially in precision agriculture, agricultural economics, and agribusiness. But I actually think the best resources for revival are within the universities. I think of my own lab. We are wheat breeders and much of what we do is make it possible for farmers to do more with less. Less chemicals, less inputs, less land. One of our projects addresses phosphorus deficiency in developing countries for smallholder farmers. I had great soil science professors who cared deeply about conservation and giving farmers conservation practices.

Technical knowledge, much belied by Berry, is necessary. Farmers need practical education. I think Wendell distrusts science because he has seen it do so much bad. I trust it because I have seen it do so much good. I believe there is a way out of this mess. I think it is hard. An arduous good is usually a good to be most desired. Berry is a friend to me, but I think we would argue if we met, in the way friends who love the same thing argue. Both of us I believe have the same goal. I have met Berry at the end of his life project and the beginning of mine. We both want to nourish people and the land, he through writing, I through plant breeding. May we both succeed, for the sake of both our souls.

I loved this book. I will not soon forget it.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great, although uneven, criticism of the reigning agricultural and cultural mentality in the U.S. It's impressive that Berry wrote this more than 30 years ago since the argument seems just as timely today. The first two and last two chapters were the strongest. In between, he gets into an abstract discussion on the relationship between our connection to the land, ourselves, and other human beings. The vagueness of some of his terminology and expressions in these chapters resulted in my losing interest. The argument itself was subtle, but it wasn't as well elucidated as I would have liked. It seems that Berry was relying on his readers to have a poetic sensibility that I myself lack. I fully admire the lyricism of his writing in these chapters; it just didn't quite scratch my particular itch this time around. Some day I'll come back to this when I'm older and wiser and give it the five stars it probably deserves. Either that, or I'll feel the same way I do now and move it down to three.

@pointblaek

[Laura Clawson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will be reading this book for the rest of my life.

[Drew Newitt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have no serious issues w/Wendell Berry. This was a somewhat hope-filled book, and I appreciate the fact that he recognizes that our problems of food delivery are also moral, perhaps spiritual, problems---and definitely deeply human problems. But I felt like this book annoyed me. He's writing in the tradition both of a Romantic agriculturalist and the Jeffersonian tradition, all of which I find not only useless in the face of actual climate change and actual capitalist agriculture, but potentially distracting. Here, we find an idealized conception of nature, one which recognizes that humans have a crucial part to play, but an idealized one at that. Berry is quick to note that conservation ethics, the ones that imagine nature is best protected by separating it from humans, is stupid and misunderstands much about our relationship to nature. Nonetheless, Berry seems committed to an argument that proceeds as follows: we have screwed up our relationship to nature, and in order to fix it, we must replace our estrangement from land and cultivation with love, intimacy, care, and knowledge. Ultimately, for Berry, this estrangement is the problem, and it a moral problem, a sickness at the core of either our nation or much of global humanity. I just find this sort of argument useless. It proceeds at the level of a silly hope that we would all just, first, change our minds, and then individually shift our behaviors, as if climate change and our relationship to land is not a product of our political economy, of colonialism, of racism. In any event, Berry's work seems essentially conservative and, like most *good* conservative thinkers, Berry avoids exclusionary thinking. The book nonetheless leaves those of us who want to dream of a different, better, real world with little to work with other than an ideal concept of nature that has oneness and identity. Given that climate change, colonialism, racism, and our political economy are, importantly, fractured things that differ radically in actualization across geographies, this a) seems like a self-defeating idealism, and b) seems to misunderstand many of the dynamics at stake in our current crisis. This, of course, was written in the 1970s, so I have no idea about Berry's more recent work. Appreciate what he does, but in the end this one was not for me.

[Ian Keim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book dives deep into the intersection of society and agriculture. Berry argues that society has abused the land via “agricultural advancement” because of poor incentives and greed and are therefore paying the price via the food we have.

Note: this book is the conceptual backdrop of Berry’s fiction (Jayber Crow, Hannah Coulter, etc)

Takeaways:
Berry has extremely perceptive things to say about American culture, consumerism, work/life balance, and the specialist driven society we are in. I am grateful for this book in the way that it has made me think of my home’s place in community.

“To damage the Earth is to damage your children”

In the name of efficiency, big agriculture has not just pushed out small farmers, but families and communities. Essentially agricultural ethics have been replaced by manufacturing efficiencies and processes.

Instead of household, being hubs of production for its community, the household is now the epicenter of consumption .

“Why does the health of the body and the health of earth decline together?“

“it is clear to anyone who looks carefully at any crowd will see that we are wasting our bodies exactly as we are wasting our land. Our bodies are fat, weak, joyless, sickly, ugly—the virtual prey of the manufacturers of medicine and cosmetics”

Berry argues in ch 8 that agricultural education from the universities have created industrial solutions to fix agricultural problems and that it’s become more apparent that “they would rather be professionally reputable than locally affective.” and “they pay little attention, if any, to the social, cultural and political consequences of their actions”

Essentially, Argri-business has replaced Agri-culture. The expense is the degradation of farming ethics, because now, the farmer treats the food he creates more like a product and less like the food that will nourish or harm his neighbor. The main focus is “how much food can I make on these acre” rather than “how good of food can I make on these acres.” Agri-business has been the great temptation of quantity over quality in food and social status. A son will now prefer less that he would be a better farmer than his father, but a bigger, more business-like farmer. How do you think all of these things affect your food? The answer? In every way possible.

The answer to all this madness oversimplified? Communities/farms like the Amish have.

[Andy F · Rating 4 out of 5]

My review for the other of Wendell Berry’s books that I’ve read (The World Ending Fire) applies here for The Unsettling of America just as well. This stern repudiation to the industrious world we’ve all found ourselves being churned through is exceptionally thought out, intelligent and well written. Though, I can’t call it enjoyable. The truth of his words hurts too much to call it enjoyable. That of course says nothing of how devastatingly important it is. His 1995 Afterword written nearly 20 years after original publication does an excellent job summarizing the results he desperately warned of throughout the book.

[Abram · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this to be an immensely challenging book in a very positive way.

[Max Bodach · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The Body and the Earth” is the best essay I’ve read this year