The Gift of Good Land by Wendell Berry
"The Gift of Good Land" by Wendell Berry is a collection of essays that engages with themes of agriculture, ecology, and the cultural implications of industrial farming practices. Written in the context of the late 20th century, the work reflects Berry's deep connection to rural life, particularly after he transitioned from academia to managing his family’s farm in Kentucky. The essays explore the intricate relationships between human settlement, ecosystems, and agricultural practices, emphasizing the importance of sustainable farming methods and community values.
Berry critiques the mechanization of agriculture, advocating for a return to more traditional practices that prioritize balance, diversity, and responsible stewardship of the land. He draws upon personal experience and observation, positioning himself as both a farmer and a writer deeply invested in the health of the environment. The collection is structured in five sections, each addressing different aspects of these themes, culminating in a compelling argument for ecological and agricultural responsibility that resonates with biblical principles.
Overall, Berry's work serves as a thoughtful critique of modern agricultural practices, urging readers to reconsider their relationships with land and community. His prose seeks not only to inform but also to inspire a reevaluation of values surrounding farming and environmental stewardship.
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Subject Terms
The Gift of Good Land by Wendell Berry
First published: 1981
Type of work: Cultural criticism
Form and Content
Beginning in the late 1960’s, Wendell Berry, a young author and member of the English department at the University of Kentucky, turned to the writing of essays as an avenue of exploring topics he had already introduced in his first two novels, Nathan Coulter (1960) and A Place on Earth (1967), as well as in numerous poems published in the previous decade. Beginning with The Long-Legged House (1969) and continuing with A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural (1972) and The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (1977), Berry established himself as an able critic of what he terms “industrial agriculture” and as a seasoned commentator on diverse environmental and cultural matters.
In 1965, a year after moving from New York to Lexington, Kentucky, to join the faculty at the university, Berry moved with his family to a small farm near the community of Port Royal. Berry was of the fifth and the sixth generations of his father’s and mother’s families, respectively, to farm in the neighborhood; in the succeeding decade Berry, with his wife and two children, made their farm into a productive one, despite it being on what Berry has called “marginal” land. Far from being a professor’s country estate, the farm required a considerable amount of manual labor; in 1978, after nearly two decades of academic life, he resigned his teaching position at the university to devote himself to farming and to writing from the point of view of a person living in, and committed to, a rural community.
Berry’s first book published after leaving the university was a collection of essays written between 1965 and 1980. The Gift of Good Land followed in the same year, 1981. Though the title of this volume is derived from that of an article in 1979 in the magazine published by the Sierra Club, that essay is the last chapter of the book. Most of the other essays in The Gift of Good Land are taken from material published in several periodicals, including The New Farm and Organic Gardening.
Not including an ample foreword, The Gift of Good Land is divided into five untitled sections encompassing twenty-four chapters; the reader seems to have been given responsibility for establishing the significance of their grouping, which is, in any case, not chronological. The first section can be considered to be broadly concerned with the relationship of ecosystems to the dynamics of human settlement and to politics. Part 2 examines causes of the technical and theoretical problems of industrial agriculture and proposes revised ways of thinking about agriculture and society. The essays of the third and fourth sections are shorter and more numerous; though each stands alone (reflecting, to a degree, their original publication in magazines) they provide examples of observations made in the previous essays and reveal more clearly than the other chapters the poet Berry.
The fourth section, comprising six chapters, celebrates examples of good farming. In the last chapter of this section, “Seven Amish Farms,” Berry summarizes many of the views represented in The Gift of Good Land by saying that Amish farms suggest “that agricultural problems are to be properly solved, not in expansion, but in management, diversity, balance, order, responsible maintenance, good character, and in the sensible limitation of investment and overhead.” This statement, blending in a way characteristic of Berry his spiritual and material concerns, is an effective prelude to the last chapter of the book, “The Gift of Good Land,” in which he seeks to formulate “a biblical argument for ecological and agricultural responsibility” which affirms the “‘this-worldly’ aspects of biblical thought.”
Critical Context
Even if Wendell Berry’s projections of the precariousness of mechanized, industrial agriculture are inaccurate in the long run, his observations about the cultural role of agriculture elicit serious reflection about history and values. Like many of his contemporaries, Berry challenges conventional assumptions about the means and the ends of industrial society; to a degree that sets him apart, however, he does it more from a position of personal experience and observation than of academic authority.
Coming to maturity as a writer in the 1960’s, Berry was of the generation that witnessed and in many ways benefited from post-World War II economic prosperity, but he was among those who found it more appropriate to criticize than to celebrate the direction that American society was taking. As with his friends Wes and Dana Jackson, who are the subjects of his essay “New Roots for Agricultural Research,” the 1960’s were for Berry a period of intense questioning of the manifold problems of political, social, and ecological deterioration, and these issues have continued to occupy him in both his poetry and his essays.
Berry held a Wallace Stegner Writing Fellowship at Stanford University from 1958 to 1969; like his older colleague, Wallace Stegner, he is devoted to the study of the spiritual bond between man and the environment as well as being a proponent of the values of regionalist expression. Berry, again like Stegner, has continually reached for a synthesis of his artistic interests and his civic responsibilities. He has been praised for the directness of his prose, but although he has had a consistent audience among general readers, criticism and scholarship have been slow to recognize the singular quality of his work. The bulk of Berry’s fiction, poetry, and nonfiction writing belongs securely to the category of “pastoral,” which undoubtedly limits its appeal to an audience attuned to modernist sensibilities.
In recalling a memoir by Donald Hall of that author’s boyhood summers on a New Hampshire farm, Berry wonders “how that sort of life escaped us,” and he concludes that attitudes toward the practice of agriculture were overtaken, around midcentury, by a “curious set of assumptions, both personal and public, about ‘progress.”’ These assumptions equated farming with occupational backwardness and branded attachment to the land as anachronistic. Berry’s effort to reverse these notions might be regarded by many as a lost cause, but he raises enough doubts about them to make his essays an indispensable component of contemporary American cultural criticism.
Bibliography
Berry, Wendell. “Writer and Region,” in The Hudson Review. XL (Spring, 1987), pp. 15-30.
Nibbelink, Herman. “Thoreau and Wendell Berry: Bachelor and Husband of Nature,” in The South Atlantic Quarterly. LXXXIV (Spring, 1985), pp. 127-140.
Pevear, Richard. “On the Prose of Wendell Berry,” in The Hudson Review. XXXV (Summer, 1982), pp. 341-347.
Stegner, Wallace. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West, 1954.
Woiwode, Larry. “Wendell Berry: Cultivating the Essay,” in The Washington Post Book World. XII (January 31, 1982), p. 5.