The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture
Wendell Berry
ISBN: 0-87156-877-2
Sierra Club Books
$13.95

Book reviews are usually done for relatively new books, yet this book has aged like a locally grown, organic, and small, family run farm wine.  So, thirty-one years later, this book is being included for review because of both its impact on the agrarian movement and all of its branches as well as the theme of this issue.

For a reviewer who is part of the first generation to fully feel the effects of the unsettling described in this prophetic book, and to review a book written to an audience who were my parent's age (and written before I was born), the immediacy of the book is still not lost.

The prophetic outcry and call-to-arms issued in this book are not lost so many years later because the agricultural problems and cultural devolution outlined in this book are far worse, and what Berry said would happen has unfortunately happened beyond his most mad and liberated farming dreams.

Obesity is a national epidemic, killing thousands of preventable diseases each year.  The food sold in the supermarket is not food grown in the ground but agricultural products mixed, packaged, and sold like chemicals formulas.  Humane treatment of the land is secondary to the amount of B-12 fortified in a box of artificially flavored, high fructose corn syrup glazed cereal.  Animals are penned and treated like bacteria in a laboratory and pumped full of pharmaceuticals that make there way into our bodies and have begun to create super-germs that fortunately have been staved off (so far).

The entire book is quotable, yet one quotation in particular sums up the breath of this tome:

"But is work something that we have a right to escape? And can we escape it without impunity? We are probably the first entire people ever to think so.  All the ancient wisdom that has come down to us counsels otherwise.  It tells us that work is necessary to us, as much as a part of our condition as mortality; that good work is our salvation and our joy; that shoddy or dishonest or self-serving work is our curse and our doom.  We have tried to escape the sweat and sorrow promised in Genesis---only to find that, in order to do so, we must forswear love and excellence, health and joy.

"Thus we can see growing out of our history a condition that is physically dangerous, morally repugnant, ugly." (12-13)

Berry wants to connect the body back to the land, for from dust we came and to dust we shall return.  Our very bodies are part of God's creation, and this is counter-intuitive to most Christians, let alone to all the powers of the world:

"The modern urban-industrial 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." (137)

For Berry, the modern industrial societies of today are the true Dark Ages.  Knowledge and specialization are meaningless when our bodies are crumbling, our food is poor quality, our culture is fragmented, and life is undesirable and needs to be bombarded with entertainment and consumption in order to placate ourselves in the culture we created.  The "Dark Ages" were dark because there was no knowledge, but researchers are beginning to realize that though the people might not have had access to advanced scholarship and Enlightenment reason they were far more advanced than our history books are telling us.

What will the history books say of the mess we have ourselves in?  They will most likely look at us as a people who forgot what it was to be human, and depraved ourselves as animals and slaves to machines.  Berry, and the subculture that is founded in his work, argue for another way to be human, the ancient way, the normal way.  And they argue for a part of society to say "no" to the patterns of this world and be part of the margins. Berry's prophecy is a warning, and we are wise to heed it.