The Pub

A reflection on Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling Of America

Jana Papp

“As a people, we have lost sight of the profound communion—even the union— of the inner with the outer life.”—Wendell Berry

To me, farms mean more than food. But like most children, I always thought that half the fun of growing up on a farm was being able to eat things without my mother knowing: a direct communion with nature. I wandered through the sticky humidity of Kentucky summers with a baptism of blackberry juice on my tongue, my fingernails, and my chin. Sometimes a particularly plump berry contained a leggy surprise in the middle, but not like one of those Tootsie Roll lollipops. As I explored, I often carried a book on edible wild plants, which included pictures of poisonous mushrooms and other helpful tips for wilderness survival. Once, I succumbed to the rich savor of a wild onion, pulling it carefully out of crumbling earth and washing it in the creek. Taking a tiny bite of the opalescent bulb, I gagged and spit it into the water where it all disappeared in a few seconds, but the pungent taste lingered for hours.

Mine was a land that begged to be known. Clothed in elastic-cuffed sweatpants tucked into black rubber boots, I delighted in finding its secret spaces, seeing treasure in five-toed footprints beside the creek and mysterious sinkholes that appeared overnight. The potholes in the driveway from rumbling farm equipment ensured that every rollerblade ride held the excitement of a black diamond ski hill. The needs of the farm shaped the pattern of my daily life, from early mornings dodging roosters and chicken dung to collect the eggs, to nights bundled against the cold, waiting for a new-born llama to take its first wooly-legged, trembling steps across a bed of straw. Plowing season sent my siblings out into the fields after a heavy rain, teetering down fresh-made furrows in search of the damp, grey-white shine of flint arrowheads. The age-old cycle of plowing, harvest, and fallow occurred under our noses.

For me, farms were a part of everyday existence. But in the lives of most Americans, farms are a distant reality. We can only snatch a few images from airplane windows: extraterrestrial crop circles, a silver froth of fertilizer spread from a plane, and the occasional tractor slowly grinding over hewn earth. You, perhaps, have visited a farm and possibly even fed goats out of a tightly squeezed palm, trying not to cringe when their gluey lips smacked down.  On a trip to the grocery store, you might stop to consider whether those Idaho potatoes are really from Idaho, or wonder whether the farmers who raised your green beans ever glimpse their crop on the grocery shelves. But how often do we remember that every piece of food is personal, coming from a piece of land and an agricultural community? The concerns facing those farming communities are hidden from most of us by barriers of distance and disinterest. What is the future of these farms that grow more and more distant from the average American’s reality?

This is the question that provoked Wendell Berry’s book, The Unsettling of America. In eight essays, he commends the land to a people who have forsaken it, fleeing to the cities in droves to escape an unnamed fear of work. Berry is unafraid to name the consequences of America’s “unsettling,” namely, the mismanagement of the land by a culture over-dependent on technology, large-scale industry, and unchecked consumption.  For the last forty-three years, Berry and his wife Tanya have lived on a farm named Lane’s Landing in the tiny town of Port Royal, Kentucky. He writes from experience, the kind gained from hours spent perched on fencerows and walking furrows, exemplifying the intimacy of place that he advocates. Berry's location in rural Kentucky continues to deeply influence the agricultural themes of his essays, poems, and novels. Although Unsettling was first published in 1977, it transcends the decades with broad implications on contemporary issues like the energy crisis, fluctuating gas prices, and pollution. Through his essays, Berry discusses the relationship between culture and agriculture, highlighting the intimate connections joining the life of the body to the life of the soul.

In writing that flows as slowly and steadily as his beloved Kentucky River, Berry unmasks the causes that provoked the unsettling of American farms. In particular, he points out the appeal of specialization, rapid job advancement, and an increasingly unsettled lifestyle, where a quick move is the solution to any problem. But by distancing ourselves from our farms, we have lost something valuable: hard work in the soil of one’s own land –dirty fingernails and rough hands— no longer carries respect and honor from the community. Instead, we live in a society that makes leisure its goal. From playtime to paychecks, we are taught that work has no innate worth, but needs a measurable reward to be valuable. Although we are not necessarily working less, we are undoubtedly working differently, and to different ends.

As students, we wage a constant struggle against academic work of all kinds. Just a step into Buswell Library shows a host of people engrossed in the work of the mind –churning out papers, lab reports, PowerPoint presentations— all of which, though mentally taxing, require nothing more than a slight wiggling of the fingers above the keyboard. A sore back, caffeine addiction, tired eyes, and writer’s cramp are the most dangerous side effects. But as we barricade ourselves in our books, Berry argues that our lives have grown too distant from the source of work that sustains us. No longer do we work with our own two hands to supply our food, our heat, our shelter. Rather, we spend the better part of the day earning money to pay other people to supply these things for us.

Yet in my experience, not even most farmers have a close relationship with their land. Often, the land is not even theirs, for most working farmers lease land on several different properties. Current economic realities require diversified crops and an abundance of land, but few farmers can afford these things due to a lack of community-supported agriculture. In order to develop a successful operation, monetary profit takes precedence over intimacy with the land or its needs. For example, cattle erode topsoil and put a heavy burden on the land, but cattle are selling well, so many Kentucky farmers raise cattle on the same pastures year after year. In this way, farms are stripped of their crop-bearing potential. The land must lie in fallow for years in order to regain its bearing ability. In the end, any short-term profit comes at a much greater cost to the fragile soil.

In addition to a lack of personal, long-term concern for the soil's health, farming is being stripped of its generational aspect. A century ago, a farmer could live his whole life on his land and be buried there in a family graveyard, passing his land on to his children. Even Wendell Berry's family farmed near Port Royal for several generations, and both his children farm within twelve miles of Lane's Landing. But his is an exceptional case. Modern farming has taken on a persona of strict business, lacking a familial connection. The employees of large agribusinesses come to the land with big machines, seed it, harvest it, and move on.

In my small town of Nicholasville, Kentucky, centuries-old farms are purchased by developers whose first action is to raze every living thing to the ground. Huge bur oaks topple and bluegrass is scraped from dark, rich soil. Next, they scoop the topsoil to sell it for even more profit. This complete lack of stewardship or forward thinking is appalling. But in reality, the man who drives the equipment and removes the topsoil will never live on that land. In a few weeks he will move on to another project, unaffected by the consequences of his actions. And what will happen to the future homeowners? They will be left with a fragile land unable to sustain even a small garden, as clay offers little nourishment for tomatoes or pansies. Their lawns will be a sprinkler-watered illusion of sod and E-Z-grow. How can that family build a deep connection with a land that is already depleted?

My connection to the land is my father’s doing. I loved to follow him on after-dinner walks around the farm as he taught me the names of native trees and plants and told me stories about the history of Kentucky. Each time our conversation lagged, I’d look behind to see him bent down, absorbed in examining another plant. Every corner of the farm is dotted with saplings he seeded, from blue ash to shagbark hickory. He even planted two lines of beeches along our quarter-mile driveway. Every Sunday as our family drove to church, he would slow the car, saying, “It does me good to see these trees. You know, kids, they will be here when I’m gone, stretching out their branches in a canopy over the driveway.” I never understood why it was so important to him that each pair of trees touch, forming leafy archways that, though beautiful, he would never see. But my dad took joy in using the land to join himself to those he would never know. Berry would see this as an example of what occurs when deep connections are forged between the land and its dwellers.

As a whole, Unsettling advocates this kind of responsibility. Berry presents a union of agriculture and culture, two circles that overlap far more than the average consumer is aware. He says, “Our culture must be our response to our place, our culture and our place are images of each other and inseparable from each other.” He considers the connection of human culture and the natural world with a sense of mystery and wonder that is altogether lacking in most modern farmers. Ideally, we should acknowledge and embrace our debt to the earth. But that would be a different kind of world, one where we walk with our feet on soil, not asphalt.

When I go out into the fields in the back acres of the farm, I sometimes lie down flat on my back, no longer above the earth but a part of it. I am bait for the vultures circling above me, a silent observer of the hundred sparrows that move as one through the air. Small sounds grow in my eardrums. But I also feel the vibration and hear the distant hum of the nearby highway, only temporarily masked by the sounds of crickets. Were I to lie there until night, the glow of the newly constructed shopping center a mile away would dim the stars and slice the night with its come-hither spotlight. I realize, helplessly, that though I am personally connected with my farm, my wishing cannot prevent the steady degradation of once-rural places.

Yet, even as someone who has grown up close to the land, I am uncomfortable with the concept of responsibility to the land. Quite honestly, I already feel burdened by the number of issues about which I am supposed to care deeply and engage in on a daily basis. The connection to my farm was easy to maintain as a child, tromping through the woods in rubber boots every day. But as I enter an adult world, how can I remain rooted in my land without sacrificing other dreams to maintain that connection? In general, I am much more concerned with my responsibility toward people than with the land. But Berry calls for me to cherish my responsibility to both. As he gently crafts connections between religion and food consumption, between our bodies and the earth, Berry alters my perspective, encouraging me to see myself as part of the land, rather than surrounded by it.

In the end, Berry says, “The only real, practical, hope-giving way to remedy the fragmentation that is the disease of modern spirit is a small and humble way [...] One must begin in one’s own life the private solutions that can only in turn become public solutions.”  It is those private solutions that we must search for in ourselves. I am unsettled.

Jana Papp is a Junior English Writing major and Art minor from Nicholasville, KY. In her spare time, she makes crop circles.