 If you haven’t heard of Wendell Berry, now is the time to get acquainted with this amazing author. Berry is a jack of many trades; an academic, a cultural and economic critic, and a farmer. He was won numerous awards for his novels, essays, poetry, and short stories.
Berry believes that a good life includes sustainable agriculture, appropriate technologies, a connection to place, the pleasures of good food and good work, and a reverence for the interconnectedness of life. He is a defender of agrarian values, reminding us that caring for the land and being connected to the cultivation of living things is essential to understanding how the world works and caring for our planet.
“The Unsettling of America” was written in 1977, when the first green revolution occurred in response to the agricultural use of DDT and other environmental crises. As Berry summarizes, such atrocities occurred because Americans became divorced from the land. He argues that, in order for Americans to heal their relationship with the environment, we need to create more meaningful work, sustain happier and healthier lives, and return to family values. He defines family values as doing such things as eating meals together and working together on the land, even if that’s a garden in your backyard.
“The Unsettling of America” is a compilation of essays that, together, form an argument against contemporary farming methods, which, as Berry reminds us, removes the culture from farming, and removes farming out of our culture. We simply cannot have large corporations running our food supply. Rather, Berry suggests, we need to cultivate a culture of farming, so that it improves all of our livelihoods. As any gardener knows, the taste of a tomato that was grown yourself tastes infinitely better than a store-bought tomato. Undoubtedly, your tomato lacks all of those pesticides and chemicals, and it was picked at the height of its ripeness, but it tastes so much better because it was grown by you; it’s just like how your kids are always cuter and smarter than any other kids. It’s not that the other kids are ugly or dumb, but your kids are yours; you grew them and cared for them. Such love for the things we have invested our time in is lacking in the food industry, and Berry argues that we need to get it back.
Berry takes his readers through the history of how our farms were taken out of our hands and thrown into a mechanized, corporate methodology that stripped the culture and love out of growing food. Berry compares the fall of the family farm to other shifts in our American consumer culture, like replacing quality for quantity. He also discusses the oxymoronic legislations that, initially, were put in place to protect consumers, but in reality, inhibited small family farms.
Berry is an intoxicating writer. For Berry everything is irrefutably interconnected. His main premise for “The Unsettling of America” is the interdependency between culture and nature. With that premise, there are inevitable ramifications when the intrinsic connection between culture and nature become separated. This is a wonderful book that everyone interested in preserving our environment should read.
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