 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com | The mid-20th-century environmental crisis that led to important protective legislation in the 1970s, is, to poet/farmer Wendell Berry's mind, also a crisis of character, agriculture, and culture. Because Americans are divorced from the land, they mistreat it; because they are divorced from each other, they mistreat those around them. Berry, writing in a prophetic mode, argues that if Americans are to heal the environmental wounds their land has suffered, they will also need to create more meaningful work, sustain happier and healthier lives, and return to what conservatives call "family values." The Unsettling of America is a quarter century old now, but most of its arguments remain current. |
Average Customer Rating:   An argument for a nostalgic way of life About 50 percent of the time I found myself agreeing with Wendell Berry. The other 50 percent I was convinced this man was completely off his rocker. Berry takes into consideration various sources of information to make his point that farms, that is farms that don't use modern technology in terms of machinery, pesticides, chemical fertilizers, etc. are good.
Berry's got a hard-on for farming. Any other way of life is somehow pitiful in his estimation. It's a romantic idea, but it's not realistic. Old fashioned farming is nice, but it's not the end all be all. It's not the pinnacle of human existence. I get the feeling that Berry has a nostalgic love for farming based on boyhood memories and wants that old farming way of life to continue. He wants us to go back to the way things used to be. The problem with this line of thinking is where does one stop in this trip back through time. Farming after all is not natural. Human beings started out as hunter gatherers and farming itself, no matter how practical we may see it, does go against nature.
Berry weighs in on anything and everything from birth control to suicide and seems to genuinely believe that all of it would be unnecessary if people just stopped using those dang tractors. Some of the examples that he calls upon are bizarre. Shakespeare's King Lear is used to promote a simple agrarian lifestyle. Thomas Jefferson is held up as an example of a man who did not use machines on his farm, conveniently left out is the fact that the man did use people (the slaves he owned) as machines on it. When writing in favor of the use of draft horses on the modern farm, Berry quotes extensively from a publication called the Draft Horse Quarterly, who judging by the title of their publication might have a vested interest in the whole draft horse as farm workers thing. I would have appreciated a quote or two from a less partial source.
Berry holds up the Amish as a human ideal, but it's hard to see people who are opposed to anything beyond an eighth grade education as ideal. In one section Berry comes up with a list of 8 falsehoods promoted by love songs which he feels lead people unwittingly into marriage. I have a hard time conceiving of anyone who takes a love song as proved fact. Perhaps his undereducated friends in the Amish community, although from what I understand they do not listen to this sort of music.
Despite all my complaining, I do agree with a lot of the things Berry says. Organic farming is very important. Factory farming is a nightmare that could lead to huge problems down the road. Still, I don't know that one has to shun all technology to have a sustainable organic farm. Then again, I don't really have any romantic notions about farms. If it worked out to be healthier for us to grow all our food in greenhouses that were staffed by a bunch of robots, well then I would have no problem accepting that.
Berry, on the other hand, is writing about a bygone way of life that he longs to bring back, and he tries to use everything from suicide rates to the environment to make it clear why we should do so. next to walden 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? One of the greatest books I have ever read. 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. prophetic 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. Discovering a buried treasure 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. |  |
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