From the jacket flap of the first edition:

Wendell Berry is a poet, teacher, and farmer -- to use one of his own words, a nurturer. The Unsettling of America is his 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 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.

Good farming, Berry argues, is a cultural development and a spiritual discipline. But in taking farming out of its cultural context, and turning over to the "agricultural specialists" the time-hallowed act of food production, we have become estranged from the land -- from the intimate knowledge, love and care of it. Berry sees this as a piece with the estrangement of generations, of the sexes, of urban and rural society, of neighbors.

The awareness that farming cannot be considered as an issue separate from the larger culture rules out the easy answer, and there are none here. But Berry does examine some creative options and possibilities in how other agricultural societies work with the land, and discusses some contemporary marginal approaches: homesteading, farm co-ops, alternative technologies, peasant agriculture. His conclusions will be controversial; his ideas are profoundly conservative on one hand and fiercely radical on the other. But this is above all a book that will change minds, a work of passion, eloquence, and conviction.

Book design by James Robertson. 228 pages.

Contents:

Chapter One
The Unsettling of America

Chapter Two
The Ecological Crisis as a Crisis of Character

Chapter Three
The Ecological Crisis as a Crisis of Agriculture

Chapter Four
The Ecological Crisis as a Crisis of Culture

Chapter Five
Living inthe Future: The "Modern" Agricultural Ideal

Chapter Six
The Use of Energy

Chapter Seven
The Body andt he Earth

Chapter Eight
Jefferson, Morrill, and the Upper Crust

Chapter Nine
Margins