Roderick Nash Wilderness and the American Mind Yale University Press, 1973. Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America- Culture and Agriculture depicts a society in cultural depravity, because it has lost all conception of the unity of all and instead sees the world as fragments. The rich cultural reflections of awareness of the interconnections among man and land, value and work, body and soul, health and wholeness has been sacrificed in the name of a radically simplified culture whose placement of value rests with the machine.
Man is turned into a specialist and the land is turned into a production machine.
Work has lost all value and is termed beneath human dignity. Body and soul are divided with the body considered an encumbrance. This ensures the presence of responsibility and leads to morality, a building block of culture. The specialist mentality always overcomes the nurturer because the nurturer doesn't just produce a single commodity but also produces responsibility, character and culture, which is not considered efficient in the specialist way of thinking, since the specialty defines where the value is placed. This mentality, with its narrow focus on quantitative production and exploitation of land, turns the farmer into just another specialist.