The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture
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- ISBN13: 9780871568779
- Condition: New
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Product Description
Berry’s assessment of modern agriculture and its relationship to American culture–our health, economy, personal relationships, morals, and spiritual values–is more timely than ever. This new edition of Berry’s work presents a a classic tribute to the value of the American family tree farm.Amazon.com Review
The mid-20th-century environmental crisis that led to vital 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 additional, they mistreat persons 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 make more meaningful work, sustain more pleased and in excellent health lives, and return to what conservatives call “family tree values.” The Unsettling of America is a quarter century ancient now, but most of its opinion remain current.
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I had to read this in high school. It is a dangerously seductive piece of propaganda that persuasively hits all the “right notes,” especially for anyone with a muddle-headed agenda that exists in defiance of common sense. When looked at rationally, it is probably the single most evil, despise-filled piece of writing I have ever encountered. It could only have been written from one of two perspectives. Either the leader has absolutely no understanding of the realities that make human life possible, or else he has a profound and deep-seated loathing of civilization. I am not exaggerating when I state my feeling that, if there is ever another truly treacherous ideology that, like Nazism, will be embraced by the weak-minded and easily misled, a book like this could very easily be their bible. In it, they will find all of the misguided ammunition they need to justify destroying everything of value and beauty in the human world.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
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 establish an ancient 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 marvel if Berry himself has ever had to pound clothes with rocks on a riverbank, or if he makes the small wifey do that.)
Also, from what I recall, he seemed to be insisting that “outside of scenery” — 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 permanently 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* scenery as a force in and of itself, in the form of “Mother Planet,” “the Goddess,” “Gaia,” or various additional anthropomorphisms for what is essentially a huge chunk of rock with some greenery on it…and, conversely, demonizing humanity as “a disease on the Planet’s skin,” as Nietzsche did.
This new incarnation of environmentalism has some very disturbing allies: the more radical, virulently anti-male branches of feminism; Planet First!, the Planet Liberation Front, and additional terrorist groups who don’t scruple to harm their fellow human beings or ruin their property in the name of “the planet”; the very much 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 excellent plague to get rid of about a third of the people on this planet.”
But back to Berry. Additional 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 facts 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, but, didn’t even seem to grasp that he was questioned to write something TO an unhappily pregnant woman. He as a replacement for 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 reassured 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 reflect 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 liberal 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! Agreed how well loved 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 permanently writing his tales, essays, etc. out long-hand, then having a name else type it up. I suppose this momentously endears him to the ’60s relics who stayed on the community long after everyone else grew up and went home. To me, it smacks of Luddite pretension — and hypocrisy. *A name* is going to have to type up that manuscript, so he’s not minimizing the net use of equipment all that much.
Not to mention that the secretary or typesetter — and I’ve been both — is going to have to place a lot more work into the job than would have been right had Berry had the freakin’ basic consideration to type it up himself and save it to a floppy or CD-ROM. Question 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 allies of his like Bill “Enough” McKibben, are the left-wing equivalents of William Bennett: they gratify their bottomless self-virtue and desire to control others, comfort the ranks of Scenery 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 delight in themselves. Too terrible so many people with enough sense to snub Bennett fall for this tripe.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
This book has many fantastic thoughts but sorry to say I establish the presentation very dull/tedious. Much of the book is in answer 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 fleeting email message but is not excellent for something as lengthy as a book, IMO.
I would still recommend this book to friends.. it introduces many thoughts that challenge the traditional “corporate farm” which need to be heard.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
This book changed my life for the better. It reminded me of how I felt when I was 17 years ancient, when I had a sense of all the waste around me, but couldn’t place my finger on the reason.
As a teacher, I will start to learn more about these issues of farming, distribution and huge industry, and incorporate them into my lesson plans.
I’m also seriously considering buying a tiny farm.
Read the book, see for your self.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
Wendell Berry is a profound man that can see straight into the heart of the problems of rural agricultural communities. He writes with fantastic beauty, but also a deep sadness that reflects the slow (and perhaps inevitable) decay of the life that he likes.
Foremost in Berry’s mind is the gradual shift from the independant farmer who knows and likes his land to the manufacturing farm, which though more productive in the fleeting term, regularly ignores the long-term health of the land.
Sorry to say, I have to agree with the additional reviewer who mentioned that Berry was long on diagnosis, but fleeting on cure. Sadly, this flaw may well be because there is no cure to be establish. A moving work.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5