Unsettling of America

The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture by Wendell Berry, 223 pages

In this early work, Wendell Berry decries what he sees as the continuing colonization of the North American continent, concentrating on the colonization of the rural by the urban.  This colonization is carried out by technocratic elites who reduce everything to economics, ignoring the human, social, and environmental costs of their policies.  Although Berry's subject is agriculture, his theme is over-specialization and fragmentation, a feature of modern life that of itself tends to transform all human interaction - even "charity" - into forms of money-exchange.  The alternative, he insists, must be the invention (or recovery) of an economics, a politics, a philosophy, and even a theology of limits.

This was always intended as an argumentative work, a new salvo in an ongoing debate.  Now it is a mostly forgotten volley in a debate that has moved on, but its echoes can, perhaps, still be heard in the hills.  While it is explicitly tied to the particular time and place in which it was composed and published, with considerable space taken up by criticism of academic and political figures in power or in fashion in the late '70s, the underlying principles are hardly outdated, and what it has lost in ripped-from-the-headlines relevance is compensated for by what it has gained in historical value.