The Unsettling of America

"The Unsettling of America" is Wendell Berry's personal, dramatic inquiry into the way in which we use the land that sustains us. For the roots of our attitudes toward farming, Berry goes back to the industrial revolution, which promised freedom from physical toil, and to the "conquistador" mentality that ruled the settlement of North America, treating land, resources, and ultimately people as infinitely expendable. Out of this history comes a disturbing, and officially sanctioned, vision of the farm of the future -- where the supreme value is maximum production, where the environment is to be controlled by technology, and where a man has no place. Berry challenges these and other orthodox values and assumptions: techniques of cultivation that damage the soil and sacrifice quality to mere abundance; the reliance on huge inputs of energy to fuel machines and manufacture chemicals; the "get big or get out" philosophy that has driven millions of farmers from the land and "unsettled" whole communities. This is above all a book that will change minds, a work of passion, eloquence, and conviction. -- From publisher's description.