The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture was published by Sierra Club Books in 1977 and is Wendell Berry’s most influential nonfiction work — the book that established him as America’s foremost agrarian thinker and one of the most penetrating critics of industrial capitalism. Its central argument — that the destruction of small farming is not merely an economic problem but a cultural, spiritual, and ecological catastrophe — has only grown more relevant in the half-century since publication.
The Argument
Berry’s thesis is deceptively simple: how a society farms reflects its deepest values. Industrial agriculture — which treats land as a factory, soil as a medium, plants and animals as machines — produces not just food but a culture of exploitation. The same mentality that strips topsoil for short-term profit also strips communities of meaning, marriages of fidelity, and individuals of skill and self-reliance.
The book’s most devastating chapter — “The Body and the Earth” — connects agricultural destruction to the destruction of sexual and familial relationships. Berry argues that a culture that sees land as something to be used rather than cared for will inevitably treat human bodies and human relationships the same way. The exploiter and the nurturer are not just economic categories but spiritual ones.
The exploiter asks: how much can I take? How quickly? At what profit? He specializes, delegates, moves on. He has no loyalty to place, to people, to the future.
The nurturer asks: what does this place need? How can I give back what I take? What will sustain this through generations? She generalizes, participates, stays.
Context
Berry wrote the book partly in response to Earl Butz, Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture, whose policy of “get big or get out” deliberately drove millions of small farmers off the land in the 1970s. The government’s explicit policy was to replace family farming with industrial agriculture — to treat farming as any other industry subject to economies of scale.
Berry saw this as catastrophic — not just for farmers but for American culture. The knowledge, the communities, the ecological relationships that small farming sustains cannot be rebuilt once destroyed. The efficiency that “getting big” produces is purchased at the cost of sustainability, resilience, and human meaning.
Influence
The Unsettling of America became the foundational text of multiple movements: sustainable agriculture, local food, land conservation, and the broader critique of economic growth as the measure of civilization. Its influence on the organic farming movement, on writers like Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver, and on the political resistance to corporate agriculture is incalculable.
The book has remained continuously in print since 1977 — extraordinary for a work of cultural criticism. Each agricultural crisis (farm consolidation, soil loss, water contamination, climate change) brings new readers who find Berry’s analysis prophetic.
Collecting The Unsettling of America
First edition (Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, 1977): Trade paperback original with photographic cover. Also issued simultaneously in hardcover (scarce).
Identification points:
- Sierra Club Books imprint
- “First edition” stated
- 228 pages
Market values: The hardcover first edition brings $300–$800 in dust jacket — genuinely scarce as the hardcover printing was very small. The first paperback ($50–$100) is more common.
Signed copies: $500–$1,500 (hardcover). Berry’s infrequent signing makes any signed copy valuable.
The 1996 revised edition (Sierra Club Books) includes a new afterword and is a separate collecting item ($50–$100).
The book’s status as the founding document of American agrarian thought ensures permanent demand from both literary collectors and the growing audience for sustainable agriculture writing.