Gift of Good Land : Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural by Wendell Berry

Amazon.com
In this collection of essays, continuing the argument begun with The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry writes of the importance of good farming to a healthy culture. By health he means not the mere absence of disease, but the operation of a balanced, nondestructive way of life; his essays on the Amish people of Pennsylvania and Ohio offer a model. "An economy of waste," Berry writes, "is incompatible with a healthy environment"--an environment that operates in balance, within bounds. Arguing for the primacy of family-based, local economies, and for the exercise of intelligence, reverence, and community values, Berry crafts a prose idyll celebrating the pastoral existence.

Book Description
In the twenty-four essays of this collection, Wendell Berry stresses the carefully modulated harmonics of indivisibility in culture and agriculture, the interdependence, the wholeness, the oneness, of man, animals, the land, the weather, and the family. To touch one, he shows, is to tamper with them all.
Here he continues issues first raised in The Unsettling of America; the problems addressed there are still with us and the solutions no nearer to hand, Mr. Berry writes of his journeys to the highlands of Peru, the deserts of southern Arizona, and the Amish country to study traditional agricultural practices. He writes of homesteading, tools and their uses, horses and tractors, family work, land reclamation, diversified land use.

In the title essay Mr. Berry draws parallels between the Christian notion of stewardship and the Buddhist doctrine of "right livelihood." He develops the compelling argument that the "gift" of good land has strings attached: the recipient has it only as long as he practices responsible stewardship.

About the Author
Wendell Berry has worked a farm in Henry County, Kentucky, for some two decades. He is a past fellow of both the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, and he received an award for his writing from the National Institute and Academy of Arts and Letters in 1971. He has emerged as an eloquent spokesman for conservation, common sense, and sustainable agriculture, topics he has pursued in The Unsettling of America and in Meeting the Expectations of the Land (coedited with Wes Jackson and Bruce Colman). His poetry includes A Part, The Wheel and Collected Poems: 1957-1982. His novels have included Nathan Coulter and A Place on Earth, and among his other collections of essays are Recollected Essays: 1965-1980 and Standing by Words. He is a writer with a rare combination of intelligence, eloquence, and integrity; as Wallace Stegner has written, "It is hard to say whether I like this writer better as a poet, an essayist, or a novelist. He is all three, at a high level."

 

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