Wendell Berry, "The Gift of Good Land" and "The Unsettling of America"

Berry, Wendell, The Gift of Good Land. New York: North Point Press; Farrar Straus, and Giroux, 1982.
To Wendell Berry, the farm, the soil, and the land are not just mechanisms of food production, institutions out in the country, and far removed from the city, but rather the glue that binds together society and all of humanity. Berry is a man much interested and maybe obsessed with how modern society, in its quest to absolve itself of its agrarian roots with gleaming cities, mass-production, and high levels of efficiency achieved only through invention, is still inextricably attached to the fields and forests from whence it came. It is this connection that strikes at the heart of the essays collected here in Gift – the “taint’ of progress, with its mechanized and chemical means of production, has Berry here questioning whether such progress is rather just a step backward. Berry is a proponent of the agrarian ideal, because he lives it. To him, a farmer with his or her own hands and a set of well-selected tools, is quite capable of producing enough food to make a living off of, without submitting to the tragedies of factory farming, with its farms of excess acreage, chemicals, and short-term production goals, ignorant of land stewardship or conservation.
Perhaps the greater import of Berry’s work, is that the act of growing food, is not just a profession selected according to what one is best-suited for, but maybe more a philosophical journey, one that carries with it a gravity that has unfairly been stripped from it by the stomp of progress in the years following the Industrial Revolution, and more specifically, after World War II.

Berry, Wendell, The Unsettling of America. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977.
This book echoes many of the same sentiments in The Gift of Good Land, but it’s more an examination of the connections between agriculture, human society and culture, and the environment, and how a fracture in any part of that triumvirate sends echoes and tremors to the other two. It seems the argument here is that by the rise of the city and the demands that urban dwelling places upon the environment (through pollution and urban sprawl), and the food supply (it’s awfully difficult, if not impossible for a city dweller to raise enough food to live off of), the agrarian environment must in turn compensate for that demand, which impacts the environment, usually negatively due to the demand for perfect produce and marbled meats, which often requires the use of pesticides, hormones, and other ‘supplements’ to the growing process. Not so much as Gift, Unsettling further reinforces and embraces the organic ideal of the rural land, and by proxy, the art of farming, as a sort of religion – a cult of the pure soil. Berry never lets go the notion that our grip on the Earth is transient – certainly our mark has been irreparably made, but we are, for all intents and purposes, stewards of the land. We could either trammel upon it, or coddle it, either is within our means, but Berry argues that it is our own personal responsibility to treat the planet as we ourselves would want to be treated.
It is this idea that is at the heart of many of those who farm organically: humans are mere caretakers of the land, and by farming organically, one is keeping with a sort of farming “ideal.”