Conference to consider Wendell Berry's "Unsettling of America"
31 March 2013
This week, some of the nation’s top names in movements promoting sustainable environmental and agricultural practices will gather in Kentucky to assess the building influence of the book.Three and a half decades after its publication, “it is remarkable how current and relevant the book is in its critique of industrial culture and in its proposals for a better way forward,” said Norman Wirzba, professor of theology, ecology and rural life at Duke Divinity School.
Berry’s daughter, Mary Berry, an organizer of the conference on “From Unsettling to Resettling,” said that when her father wrote the book, he had barely any allies outside his family.
“And now look,” said Berry, who, like her 78-year-old father, operates a farm in Henry County, Ky. “Good people have this on their minds everywhere.”
People are far more concerned now about supporting local food markets, knowing what’s in their food and preserving the land, Mary Berry said. Still, at the same time, the losses in family farms and topsoil continue.