The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture

257 Pages·2015·0.87 MB·English

by  Wendell Berry

“ The Unsettling of America is one of the most cogent books of the decade T
and in its claims for a healthy man-earth relationship, one of our most H
revolutionary.” —Wallace Stegner E

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“ This book is about culture in the deep, ripe sense: a nurturing habitat. With
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unwavering focus, Wendell Berry shows what we lost of our real human
S
American potential when we lost our commitment to living well, in place,
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on the land.” —gary Snyder
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T
Since its publication by Sierra Club Books in 1977, The Unsettling of America L
has been recognized as a classic of American letters. In it, Wendell Berry argues I
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that good farming is a work of culture and a work of faith and hope. Today’s
G
agribusiness, however, takes farming out of its cultural context and away from fami-
o T H E U N S E T T L I NG
lies. As a result, we as a nation are more estranged from the land than ever —from the f

intimate knowledge, love, and care of it. A
Sadly, his arguments and observations are more relevant than ever. We continue M of A M E R IC A
to suffer loss of community, the devaluation of human work, and the destruction E
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of nature under an economic system dedicated to the mechanistic pursuit of prod-
I
ucts and profits. Although “this book has not had the happy fate of being proved C
cUltUre & agr IcUltUre
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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
W W E N DE L L BE R RY
working, as ever, with passion, eloquence, and conviction.
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Wendell Berry is the author of more than fifty books
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of poetry, fiction, and essays. He was recently awarded the
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National Humanities Medal, the Cleanth Brooks Medal for L
Lifetime Achievement by the Fellowship of Southern Writers, L
and the Louis Bromfield Society Award. For more than forty
B
years he has lived and farmed with his wife, Tanya Berry, in E
Kentucky. R
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Y
U.S. $16.95 SOcIal ScIence
Jacket Design: Debbie Berne
Art: © Andy Larson and Jim Richardson ISBN 978-1-61902-599-8
51695
www.counterpointpress.com
9 781619 025998
Distributed by Publishers Group West
The Unsettling of America

The Unsettling
of America:
Culture &
Agriculture
by Wendell Berry
C O U N T E R P O I N T
b e r k e l e y
Copyright © 1977 Wendell Berry
Afterword © 1996
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations
embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First Counterpoint edition 2015
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Berry, Wendell 1934-
The Unsettling of America.
1. Agriculture—Economic aspects—United States.
2. Agriculture—Social aspects—United States.
I. Title
hd1761.b47338.1'097377-3729
isbn 978-1-61902-599-8
Interior design by David Bullen
Cover design by Debbie Berne
Counterpoint Press
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318
Berkeley, CA 94710
www.counterpointpress.com
Printed in the United States of America
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Maurice Telleen

Contents
Preface ix
Preface to the Second Edition xi
Acknowledgments xiii
chapter one
The Unsettling of America 5
chapter two
The Ecological Crisis as a Crisis of Character 19
chapter three
The Ecological Crisis as a Crisis of Agriculture 31
chapter four
The Agricultural Crisis as a Crisis of Culture 43
chapter five
Living in the Future: The “Modern” Agricultural Ideal 55
chapter six
The Use of Energy 85
chapter seven
The Body and the Earth 101
chapter eight
Jefferson, Morrill, and the Upper Crust 147
chapter nine
Margins 175
Afterword to the Third Edition 229
Notes 235

Preface
This book was meant to be a criticism of what I have called modern or ortho-
dox agriculture. As I now realize, it is more a review than a criticism. Criticism
requires a subject that is “finished.” When agriculture is “finished,” no would-
be critic will be available. I am therefore constrained to accept my demotion
as a privilege.
Nevertheless, there is a difficulty in writing a book on so inherently topical
a subject as agricultural policy, and this difficulty is time: events that were the
immediate cause of the book may be “finished” before the writing is. No reader
of this book can fail to observe that it deals at length with the assumptions and
policies of former Secretary of Agriculture Earl L. Butz, though Mr. Butz and
the administration he served are now out of office.
I can only insist that my book is not for that reason out-of-date. Secretary
Butz’s tenure in the Department of Agriculture, and even his influence, are
matters far more transient than the power and the values of those whose inter-
ests he represented. Moreover, the cultural issues that I attempt to deal with
have been with us since our history began, and, barring miracle or catastrophe,
they will be with us for a long time to come.
As a matter of fact, this book’s origins go back farther than the secretaryship
of Mr. Butz. The first notes I made for it were incited by a news story in the
summer of 1967 on the report of President Johnson’s “special commission on
federal food and fiber policies.”
The commission said, according to an article in the Louisville Courier-
Journal, that the country’s biggest farm problem was a surplus of farmers:
“. . . the technological advances in agriculture have so greatly reduced the
need for manpower that too many people are trying to live on a national farm
· ix ·