The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture

The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture by Wendell Berry

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


"The Unsettling of American is Wendell Berry's probing and personal inquiry into the way in which we use the land that sustains us, and an expression of profound awareness that farming cannot be considered separately from the larger culture. His provocative suggestions for change are by turns passionate and eloquent, here is a book that gathers urgency for today's troubled society."
~~back cover

When I was doing my upper division course work at UC Santa Cruz, there was no graduate program offered in my major. Nonetheless, several graduate level courses were offered. I took them all eagerly. One of them knocked me on my bottom! The course was on transhumance. The syllabus was 3" thick, of xeroxed articles from professional journals. The reading assignments were brutal -- 5 or 6 articles at a time. And you better have read them -- they were discussed in class. And class was small -- no hiding out in the back row. There wasn't a back row. Even worse, my mentor was teaching the class -- a clear fiat to perform and perform well.

I struggled with those damn readings. It took me hours to get through each one. I constantly felt behind, consequently dull, lumbering, inadequate. Eventually I realized that I was struggling so because I had never read anything about transhumance before, and suddenly I'd been thrown off the bank into the deep water of the cutting edge of theory. No wonder I was struggling -- I didn't have any of the foundation, the resonances, didn't know the paths through the jungle. My mentor, of course, could read those articles in minutes, appreciating the nuances as she went.

This book was somewhat of the same experience for me. It read like a textbook, or a professional journal. Indeed, he's been a university professor (amongst many other things -- he's a true Renaissance man), which explains the tenor and depth of his language. I struggled with the language, and of course that made it difficult to unlock his ideas. But I'd waited so long to read Wendell Berry -- no matter how much I wanted to put it down, I needed to finish it, to be sure I got it all.

I'm glad I did.

The crux of the book is that agribusiness and the US Dept. of Agriculture are in bed together, the one aiding and abetting the other. And agribusiness is killing the land. Small diverse personal farms are the only way to save or restore the land. Agribusiness will drain all productivity and make the land unusable. He takes a lot of words and a lot of examples to support this hypothesis. Because he's passionate about it. He thinks it's a matter of life or death.

And it is. But I doubt that many will be persuaded by this book, which is offputting in its complexity and obscurity.