The Gift of Good Land

Wendell Berry's The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural is the 1981 publication (North Point Press, San Francisco) of a collection of essays hailing mostly from the 1970s, the environmental crises of which are a prelude to the same and similar questions now--and crises that have mostly only been exacerbated, not improved, by the passage of time.

It goes almost without saying that Wendell Berry's reputation as a thinker and writer was made by such essays and that the essays are well worth the reading, even now, for their obvious attention to the craft of writing. It is enjoyable, not just informative, to read Berry. This collection in particular was a followup to Berry's critically acclaimed The Unsettling of America, which is indeed where readers should start, if they haven't already, in reading Berry's work.

About the Essays:

"An Agricultural Journey in Peru" is a travel essay in the spirit of F.H. King's Farmers of Forty Centuries: Or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan. Instead of eastern traditional modes of farming, Berry focuses on what can be learned from traditional Peruvian potato farmers, especially what can be learned of preserving soil using terraces for hillside farming. The contrast between the traditional modes of preserving the soil and the methods promulgated by the "International Hill Land Symposium" (the subject of chapter 4) is obvious to Berry, and therefore also to the reader. Throw in such classics as "Horse-Drawn Tools and the Doctrine of Labor Saving" (Berry thinks labor saving leads to poor employment, as in a dearth of good work to do well.) or "Agricultural Solutions for Agricultural Problems" (i.e., industrial solutions to agricultural problems are no solutions at all) or "The Reactor and the Garden" (no, nuclear energy is no safer a bet now than it was when Berry first wrote the essay) or "A Good Scythe" (for anyone whose ears hurt after using a gas powered 'weed eater') and you've more than recovered the cost of the book.

Better yet, save some trees and check it out from your local library. I just returned it to ours for safe keeping. (I'm running out of shelf space.)

The book does include Berry's usual paeans to the Amish way of living. These are available elsewhere in many of Berry's non-fictional books. From Berry's own Foreword, the most compelling reason to read the book is for its presentation of many "exemplary practices" in farming and living. That's surely reason enough!