The following are extracts (for review purposes) from The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture, Wendell Berry, 1977:
Chapter One: The Unsettling of America
"Generation after generation, those who intended to remain and prosper where they were have been dispossessed and driven out, or subverted and exploited where they were, by those who were carrying out some version of the search for El Dorado. Time after time, in place after place, these conquerors have fragmented and demolished traditional communities, the beginnings of domestic cultures. They have always said that what they destroyed was outdated, provincial, and contemptible." – p. 4
"Bernard DeVoto wrote[,] in The Course of Empire [(see note 1):] 'The first belt-knife given by a European to an Indian was a portent as great as the cloud that mushroomed over Hiroshima....Instantly the man of 6000 B.C. was bound fast to a way of life that had developed seven and a half millennia beyond his own. He began to live better and he began to die.'...
"The principal European trade goods were tools, cloth, weapons, ornaments, novelties, and alcohol. The sudden availability of these things produced a revolution that 'affected every aspect of Indian life.' " – p. 5
"DeVoto...is so clearly describing a revolution that did not stop with the subjugation of the Indians, but went on to impose substantially the same catastrophe upon the small farms and the farm communities, upon the shops of small local tradesmen of all sorts, upon the workshops of independent craftsmen, and upon the households of citizens. It is a revolution that is still going on. The economy [of today] is still substantially that of the fur trade, still based on the same general kinds of commercial items: technology, weapons, ornaments, novelties, and drugs. The one great difference is that by now the revolution has deprived the mass of consumers of any independent access to the staples of life: clothing, shelter, food, even water....The Indian became a redskin, not by loss in battle, but by accepting a dependence on traders that made necessities of industrial goods. This is not merely history. It is a parable." – p. 6
"One cannot help but see the similarity between this foreign colonialism and...domestic colonialism[.] Now, as then, we see the abstract values of an industrial economy preying upon the native productivity of land and people. The fur trade was only the first establishment on this continent of a mentality whose triumph is its catastrophe." – pp. 6–7
"We can understand a great deal of our history...by thinking of ourselves as divided into conquerors and victims. In order to understand our own time and predicament and the work that is to be done, we would do well to shift the terms and say that we are divided between exploitation and nurture....
"Let me outline as briefly as I can what seem to me the characteristics of these opposite kinds of mind. I conceive a strip-miner to be a model exploiter, and as a model nurturer I take the old-fashioned idea or ideal of a farmer. The exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The exploiter's goal is money, profit; the nurturer's goal is health—his land's health, his own, his family's, his community's, his country's. Whereas the exploiter asks of a piece of land only how much and how quickly it can be made to produce, the nurturer asks a question that is much more complex and difficult: What is its carrying capacity? (That is: How much can be taken from it without diminishing it? What can it produce dependably for an indefinite time?)" – p. 7
Chapter Four: The Agricultural Crisis as a Crisis of Culture
"A healthy culture is a communal order of memory, insight, value, work, conviviality, reverence, aspiration. It reveals the human necessities and the human limits. It clarifies our inescapable bonds to the earth and to each other. It assures that the necessary restraints are observed, that the necessary work is done, and that it is done well." – p. 43
Chapter Nine: Margins
"Whatever their claims to 'objectivity,' [certain] people will not examine [a] problem and apply the most fitting solution; [instead] they will reverse that procedure and define the problem to fit the solution in which their ambitions and their livelihoods have been invested. They are thriving on the problem and so can have little interest in solving it.
"And so the first necessary public change is simply a withdrawal of confidence from the league of specialists, officials, and corporation executives who for at least a generation have had almost exclusive charge of the problem and who have enormously enriched and empowered themselves by making it worse....
"[A]s a people, we must learn again to think of human energy, our energy, not as something to be saved, but as something to be used and to be enjoyed in use. We must understand that our strength is, first of all, strength of body, and that this strength cannot thrive except in useful, decent, satisfying, comely work. There is no such thing as potential bodily energy. By saving it—as our ideals of labor-saving and luxury bid us to do—we simply waste it, and waste much else along with it." – p. 219
"[T]he land-grant schools...should be required, as the Hatch Act instructs, 'to assure agriculture a position in research equal to that of industry.' These schools, and their professors individually, should be forbidden to accept work on assignment from any corporation or other outside interest that might wish to market any resulting product[, except] on their own time[.]" – p. 221
"[F]aculty members could be paid half their salary in cash and given the use of a boundary of college farmland the potential annual income from which would be equivalent to the other half. [T]he professor would be in a position to 'take his own advice before offering it to other people.' And much good might be expected from that. Professors might again become people of experience rather than experts. They might again be able to apply their learning to the small problems of ordinary people and to recommend means and methods not profitable to the suppliers of 'purchased inputs.'...
"[W]e must address ourselves seriously, and not a little fearfully, to the problem of human scale. What is it? How do we stay within it? What sort of technology enhances our humanity? What sort reduces it? The reason is simply that we cannot live except within limits, and these limits are of many kinds: spatial, material, moral, spiritual. The world has room for many people who are content to live as humans, but only for a relative few intent upon living as giants or as gods....
"[H]aving exploited 'relativism' until, as a people, we have no deeply believed reasons for doing anything, we must now ask ourselves if there is not, after all, an absolute good by which we must measure ourselves and for which we must work. That absolute good, I think, is health—not in the merely hygienic sense of personal health, but the health, the wholeness, finally the holiness, of Creation, of which our personal health is only a share." – p. 222
1 – The Course Of Empire, Bernard DeVoto, 1952
Copyright (c) 2025 Mark D. Blackwell.