#000209
The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture
Wendell Berry
*The Unsettling of America*, first published by Sierra Club Books in 1977, is Wendell Berry's landmark polemic against industrial agriculture and the culture that produced it. Berry - poet, essayist, and a farmer himself in his native Kentucky - argues that the reduction of farming to agribusiness has severed the vital link between land, food, and community, damaging soil, rural life, and something in the American soul. The book's title says it plainly: a people who no longer know how to care for their place have been "unsettled." Written in Berry's grave, unhurried, deeply moral prose, it ranges from farm economics to sexuality to the meaning of good work. Nearly half a century on, it reads as prophetic. For anyone thinking about food, land, or how to live well, it remains a foundational and stirring book.
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The author
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and farmer who has lived and worked the same Kentucky land for decades. One of the most important agrarian voices of his time, he writes across genres in defense of place, community, husbandry, and limits.
The book
The Unsettling of America indicts the industrialization of farming, arguing that treating agriculture as mere production - rather than as culture and stewardship - degrades soil, dissolves rural communities, and corrodes character. It links ecological damage to a deeper failure of care.
How it has aged
Controversial when it appeared, it has become a founding text of the local-food, sustainable-agriculture, and environmental movements, and its warnings look increasingly prescient. Some of its arguments about gender have drawn later criticism, but its core case endures.
For more context
Read it beside Berry's essay collections and Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, which openly builds on him.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Wendell Berry
- Publisher
- Sierra Club Books
- Place of publication
- San Francisco
- Year
- 1977
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Essays
- Condition
- Poor
- Condition notes
- Extensive underlining in pencil, no dust jacket
- Location
- Colorado