num_pages: 845
description: In celebration of Berrys extraordinary six-decade-long career Library of America presents a two-volume edition of his essays selected by the author and his longtime editor Jack Shoemaker which reveals as never before the evolution of Berrys thoughts and concerns as a farmer neighbor citizen teacher activist and ecological philosopher. This first volume includes the whole of Berrys now classic book The Unsettling of America (1970) and thirty-two essays from eight collections published from 1969 to 1990: The Long-Legged House (1969) The Hidden Wound (1970) A Continuous Harmony (1972) Recollected Essays: 19691980 (1981) The Gift of Good Land (1981) Standing by Words (1983) Home Economics (1987) and What Are People For? (1990).In The Unsettling of America Berry explores how and why even in our modern global economy locally adapted farming is essential to the flourishing of culture to healthy living and stable communities and ultimately to our survival as a species. In his 1995 Afterword to the Third Edition included here Berry notes with mounting urgency that his argument about the long-term ecological and human costs of industrial agriculture has not had the happy fate of being proved wrong.Other essays in this volume include his early autobiographical pieces The Long-Legged House and A Native Hill the indispensable Think Little Writer and Region Preserving Wildness The Work of Local Culture and the still provocative Why I am Not Going to Buy a Computer in which he posits his standards for embracing a new technology including: It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists and this includes family and community relationships.
language: English
title: Essays, 1969-1990
publisher: Library of America