Read "The Unsettling of America (1977)" by Wendell Berry online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
In The Unsettling of America I argue that industrial agriculture and the assumptions on which it rests are wrong, root and branch; I argue that this kind of agriculture grows out of the worst of human history and the worst of human nature. From my own point of view, the happiest fate of my labors would have been disproof. I would have been much relieved if somebody had proved me wrong, or if events had shown that I need not have worried. For this book certainly was written out of worry. It was written, in fact, out of the belief that we were living under the rule of an ideology that was destroying our land, our communities, and our culture-as we still are.
My argument, as I saw it twenty years ago, was addressed to leaders in the schools, the governments, and other places, who presumably were interested in argument as a way of approaching certain kinds of truths. The years since its publication have demonstrated, among other things, my naiveté. The argument set forth in this book, though it has been much and sometimes vehemently disagreed with, has never been answered, let alone disproved.