The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture
by Wendell Berry

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Book Reviews of The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture

Book Review: Classic Berry.
Summary: 5 Stars

Americans are alienated from the land and from each other. This is the theme that resonates through the nine chapters--essays, really--of Berry's book. Because our modern society is dedicated to the mechanistic pursuit of products and profit, it suffers the loss of community, the devaluation of human work, and the destruction of land. "The modern urban-industrialized society is based on a series of radical disconnections between body and soul, husband and wife, marriage and community, community and the earth. At each of these points of disconnection the collaboration of corporation, government, and expert sets up a profit-making enterprise that results in the further dismemberment and impoverishment of the Creation" (p. 137), Berry writes in "The Body and the Earth." Intending only to read the passages on fidelity contained within that essay, I ended up rereading Berry's book cover to cover today.

"Marriage and the care of the earth are each other's disciplines" (p. 132) In discussing marital fidelity, Berry notes that "there is an uncanny resemblance between our behavior toward each other and our behavior toward the earth" (p. 124). For Berry, fidelity can be seen "as the necessary discipline of sexuality, the practical definition of sexual responsibility, or the definition of the moral limits within which such responsibility can be conceived and enacted. The forsaking of all others is a keeping of faith, not just with the chosen one, but with the ones forsaken. The marriage vow unites not just a woman and a man with each other; it unites each of them with the community in a vow of sexual responsibility toward all others. The whole community is married, realizes its essential unity, in each of its marriages" (p. 122). In other words, "where we live and who we live there with define the terms of our relationship to the world and to humanity" (p. 123). Fidelity leads us "to the highest joy we can know: that of union, communion, atonement (in the root sense of at-one-ment)" (p. 122).

THE UNSETTLING OF AMERICA, however, is about more than fidelity metaphors. In the book's title essay, Berry observes that today, "the most numerous heirs of the farmers of Lexington and Concord are the little groups scattered all over the country whose names begin with 'Save': Save our Land, Save the Valley, Save our Mountains, Save our Farmland . . . people without official sanction . . . who are struggling to preserve their places, their values, and their lives as they know them and prefer to live them against the agencies of their own government which are using their own tax moneys against them" (p. 5). "No longer does human life rise from the earth like a pyramid, broadly and considerately founded upon its sources," Berry writes in "The Ecological Crisis as a Crisis of Character." "Now it scatters itself out in a reckless horizontal sprawl, like a disorderly city whose suburbs and pavements destroy the fields" (p. 21). In that essay, Berry is critical not only of the "supposedly fortunate citizen," interested only in "making money and entertaining himself" (p. 20) with irresponsible consumption (p. 24), but also of the Sierra Club (his publisher). In another essay, Berry argues that "the only possible guarantee of the future is responsible behavior in the present" (p. 58). "We must cleanse ourselves of slovenliness, laziness, and waste," he writes. "We must learn to discipline ourselves, to restrain ourselves, to need less, to care more for the needs of others. We must understand what the health of the earth requires, and we must put that before all other needs" (pp. 65-6).

Unsettling more often than not, readers will find words to live by in this insightful Berry classic. This passionate book has the potential to change your life.

G. Merritt

Summary of The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture

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