The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural & Agricultural
In this collection of essays, continuing the argument begun withThe Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry  writes of the importance of good farming to a healthy culture. By health he means not the mere absence of  disease, but the operation of a balanced, nondestructive way of life; his essays on the Amish people of  Pennsylvania and Ohio offer a model. "An economy of waste," Berry writes, "is  incompatible with a healthy environment"--an environment that operates in balance, within bounds.  Arguing for the primacy of family-based, local economies, and for the exercise of intelligence, reverence,   and community values, Berry crafts a prose idyll celebrating the pastoral existence.