The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture

Our time is characterized as much by the abuse and waste of human energy as it is by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy.

This gluttonous enterprise of ugliness, waste, and fraud thrives in the disastrous breach it has helped to make between our bodies and our souls.

the possibility of the world’s health will have to be defined in the characters of persons as clearly and as urgently as the possibility of personal “success” is now so defined.

is one of the miracles of science and hygiene that the germs that used to be in our food have been replaced by poisons.

so the standards of cheapness and convenience, which are irresistibly simplifying and therefore inevitably exploitive, have been substituted for the standard of health (of both people and land), which would enforce consideration of essential complexities.

Aware that there is no such thing as a specialized—or even an entirely limitable or controllable—effect, one becomes responsible for judgments as well as facts. Aware that as an agricultural scientist he had “one great subject,” Sir Albert Howard could no longer ask, What can I do with what I know? without at the same time asking, How can I be resp

whole, the parts of which are all “turned into one.” A good agricultural system, which is to say a durable one, is

work, but his characteristic wish is to work as well as possible.

The conservationists who are merely organized function as specialists who have lost sight of basic connections.