Customer Reviews

The Unsettling Of America: Culture and Agriculture

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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

This book changed my life for the better. It reminded me of how I felt when I was 17 years old, when I had a sense of all the waste around me, but couldn't put my finger on the reason.

As a teacher, I will begin to learn more about these issues of farming, distribution and big industry, and incorporate them into my lesson plans.

I'm also seriously considering buying a small farm.

Read the book, see for your self.

This book has many great ideas but unfortunately I found the presentation very boring/tedious. Much of the book is in reply to articles written by others and things said by others, which reads like something off an internet mailing list or newsgroup. This format is okay for a short email message but is not good for something as lengthy as a book, IMO.

I would still recommend this book to friends.. it introduces many ideas that challenge the traditional "corporate farm" which need to be heard.

Wendell Berry is a profound man that can see straight into the heart of the problems of rural agricultural communities. He writes with great beauty, but also a deep sadness that reflects the slow (and perhaps inevitable) decay of the life that he loves.

Foremost in Berry's mind is the gradual shift from the independant farmer who knows and loves his land to the industrial farm, which though more productive in the short term, often ignores the long-term health of the land.

Unfortunately, I have to agree with the other reviewer who mentioned that Berry was long on diagnosis, but short on cure. Sadly, this flaw may well be because there is no cure to be found. A moving work.

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.

Preaching to the choir, that is. One senses this is an important book and some of it is fascinating but a little goes a long way, especially if you are not deeply involved in agriculture. Like many ecological jeremiads, it is long on diagnosis and short on cure. The saving graces are Berry's graceful prose and sometimes luminous wisdom, occasional lyricism.

Unsettling America is about how our most cherished ideals have fared in the face of the technological and commercial assault of the 20th century. In showing how American agriculture has succumbed to this assault, he also shows how the lives of the non-farming population, the "consumers," have been altered for the worse. From a deep well of insight and experience, Mr. Berry shares a wisdom about our culture and times, seeking to inspire us to dust off the ideals that were abandoned in the rush to "eat the future," and regain our heritage of community and right livelihood. This is one of the best and most influential books I have ever read, and one I have turned to over and over again for a renewed feeling of faith and fellowship.

I suppose I should take comfort in that there are only nine reviews of this book so far, even if nearly all of them are wildly positive. It means Berry's influence remains minimal both here and abroad.

Years ago, I found an old edition of this book at a yard sale. Back then I was much more to the left politically than I was now, so I read it and agreed with many of its points. Still, there were things that stuck in my throat. Such as Berry's insistence that time-saving devices like washers and dryers had taken all the meaning and honest labor out of housework -- can't remember exactly how he worded it, but that was it in a nutshell: modern women had been cheated out of a kind of primal experience. (I wonder if Berry himself has ever had to pound clothes with rocks on a riverbank, or if he makes the little wifey do that.)

Also, from what I recall, he seemed to be insisting that "outside of nature" -- that is, in the cities and suburbs -- one could not get back in touch with one's humanity, or creation, or ghod, or whatever. As a child of the suburbs who has always preferred to live in urban areas, this struck me as narrow-minded, just like when fundamentalist preachers insist that *their* sect is your only path to salvation.

Of course, this isn't inconsistent with the devolution of environmentalism in recent years. It used to be about "preserving the trust" for future human generations -- i.e., stewardship. Now it seems to be about *worshipping* nature as a force in and of itself, in the form of "Mother Earth," "the Goddess," "Gaia," or various other anthropomorphisms for what is essentially a big chunk of rock with some greenery on it...and, conversely, demonizing humanity as "a disease on the Earth's skin," as Nietzsche did.

This new incarnation of environmentalism has some very disturbing allies: the more radical, virulently anti-male branches of feminism; Earth First!, the Earth Liberation Front, and other terrorist groups who don't scruple to harm their fellow human beings or destroy their property in the name of "the earth"; the profoundly misanthropic animal-rights subculture, which would rather see all their grandmothers die of cancer (as mine did) than one lab rat perish; and various individuals unaffiliated with but sympathetic to these causes. Such as the morons I encountered this summer at a yard sale who were raising money for their pet dog's chemotherapy...and who said in all seriousness, "We need a good plague to get rid of about a third of the people on this planet."

But back to Berry. Other words and deeds of his I've noted over the years:

-- In a _Harper's_ feature entitled, "She comes to you for an abortion. What do you say?", various political figures and social commentators gave their opinions. I was struck that even Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan's one-time speechwriter and certainly not a liberal, wrote a piece in the second person, addressing the young woman with respect and empathy. So, by the way, did the representative of Feminists for Life.

Berry, however, didn't even seem to grasp that he was asked to write something TO an unhappily pregnant woman. He instead produced a numbered list of reasons that he opposes abortion, each in the tone of a pulpit preacher denouncing adultery. I was, shall we say, less than comforted when he concluded with, "I could see how some women might get abortions, just as I could see how I might commit murder. All in all, I don't think abortion is a topic to get self-righteous about." Gee, thanks for clearing that up, Wend.

- Berry was once quoted in the _Boston Globe Magazine_ that he disapproved of motorboats. Fine, that's his right; but he claimed that the owner of a motorboat is merely fulfilling the needs of the corporation who made the boat, not his own. Fortunately, Felicia Ackerman, a long-standing activist with the Rhode Island Civil Liberties Union, wrote in to tear Berry a new one: Maybe the boat owner IS fulfilling his needs, because he LIKES driving the damned thing! Given how popular motorboats have become, she just might be right, even if an arrogant technophobe like Berry would never choose to buy one.

- Finally, there is Berry's practice of never using a computer, or even a typewriter, but always writing his stories, essays, etc. out long-hand, then having someone else type it up. I suppose this greatly endears him to the '60s relics who stayed on the commune long after everyone else grew up and went home. To me, it smacks of Luddite pretension -- and hypocrisy. *Someone* is going to have to type up that manuscript, so he's not minimizing the net use of technology all that much.

Not to mention that the secretary or typesetter -- and I've been both -- is going to have to put a lot more work into the job than would have been true had Berry had the freakin' basic consideration to type it up himself and save it to a floppy or CD-ROM. Ask anyone, like myself, who's ever been paid piss-poor wages to transcribe up the hideous scrawls of doctors, lawyers, and others who felt that learning even to hunt and peck was "beneath" them.

Berry, and cohorts of his like Bill "Enough" McKibben, are the left-wing equivalents of William Bennett: they gratify their bottomless self-righteousness and desire to control others, comfort the ranks of Nature Nazis out there who wish for apocalyptic plagues and the razing of cities on a grand scale; impress the hordes of college students addled by Luddite ideology; and earn buttloads of money...by deploring the way most Americans prefer to live, work, and enjoy themselves. Too bad so many people with enough sense to ignore Bennett fall for this tripe.