⁂ KalebI have myriad concerns with certain positions taken by the author or The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, but filtering them as merely noise revealed wisdom sorely missing in today’s agricultural dialog.
With a land ethic not so dissimilar to that of Aldo Leopold, but focused almost entirely on the agricultural use of land, Wendell Berry predicts – though he never knew it as this was published in 1977 – the unfortunate reality of 21st century farm and land management practices.
While the data set we have today is larger, the conclusions and solutions apparent today are essentially the same as when this was written. The primary difference is that in addition to applying the principals he advocated for, we have also to remediate the damage done over the latest five decades.
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The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture - Hardcover
In The Unsettling of America Wendell Berry argues that good farming is a cultural development and spiritual discipline. Today's agribusiness, however, takes farming out of its cultural context and away from families, and as a nation we are thus more estranged from the land - from the intimate knowledge, love, and care of it. Sadly, as Berry notes in the afterword to this new edition, his arguments and observations are still relevant today. We continue to suffer loss of community, the devaluation of human work, and the destruction of nature under an economics dedicated to the mechanistic pursuit of products and profits.