The Unsettling of America

1. America's History is Primarily One of Exploitation, Not Settlement.

One of the peculiarities of the white race’s presence in America is how little intention has been applied to it.

A history of displacement. From the earliest explorers seeking gold to modern industrial expansion, the dominant tendency in American history has been to move on, exploit resources, and displace those who intended to stay put. This pattern began with the dispossession of Native Americans and continued with the systematic overthrow of settled communities and small farmers.

Victims of exploitation. Generation after generation, those who rooted themselves in a place became "redskins," designated victims of ruthless, often officially sanctioned exploitation. The cycle repeats: colonists exploited by empires, independent farmers exploited by industry, leading to modern groups fighting to save their land and way of life against government agencies using their own tax money.

Escape is illusory. The only perceived escape is to join the class of exploiters, becoming specialized and mobile enough to ignore the consequences of one's livelihood. However, this escape is false, as even the most privileged eventually face the pollution and social decay resulting from this exploitive system, which began with the fur trade and now deprives consumers of independent access to necessities.

2. The Fundamental Crisis is a Division Between Exploitation and Nurture.

In order to understand our own time and predicament and the work that is to be done, we would do well to shift the terms and say that we are divided between exploitation and nurture.

Two opposing minds. The exploiter is a specialist focused on efficiency, profit, and quantity, serving institutions and thinking in numbers. The nurturer, like an ideal farmer, is not a specialist, focused on care, health (of land, self, community), carrying capacity, and quality, serving place and thinking in terms of character and condition.

Abuse of nurture. Exploitation involves the perversion and destruction of nurture. Viewing food as a "weapon," as a former Secretary of Agriculture did, represents a cultural catastrophe, destroying the traditional associations of food with care, generosity, and community, and ultimately undermining the sources of food itself.

Character and community. The first casualties of the exploitive revolution are character and community. When these integrities are broken, it becomes inevitable to see the earth as fuel, people as numbers, and food as a weapon, ignoring that character and community, culturally wedded with nature, are essential sources of sustenance.

3. Specialization Fragments Character and Society, Leading to Helplessness.

The disease of the modern character is specialization.

Loss of wholeness. Specialization trains people to do one thing, leading to absurdities like educators with nothing to teach or doctors skilled only in expensive cures. It institutionalizes the disintegration of character functions like workmanship, care, conscience, and responsibility, demanding abdication of personal competences to experts.

Helpless citizens. The average citizen delegates food, health, education, and conservation to specialists, leaving them only two concerns: making money and entertaining themselves. Despite apparent comfort, this citizen is profoundly unhappy and anxious because they are helpless, dependent on a vast, strained system of specialists, unable to provide for themselves or take pride in their work.

Disintegration of community. Under specialization, society becomes intricate but lacks structure, organized but disorderly. The community disintegrates, losing the understanding of relations between materials, principles, ideals, past/present, body/spirit, city/country, etc. This mirrors the individual character's loss of responsible involvement in these relations.

4. Modern Agriculture (Agribusiness) is an Ecological and Cultural Crisis.

That one American farmer can now feed himself and fifty-six other people may be, within the narrow view of the specialist, a triumph of technology; by no stretch of reason can it be considered a triumph of agriculture or of culture.

Technology over husbandry. Agribusiness replaces knowledge with energy, methodology with care, technology with morality. This "accomplishment" is driven by corporations, universities, and government agencies, not farmers, leading to ruinous effects on land and people.

Destructive trends:

• Division of land by machine compatibility, abandoning "marginal" lands.
• Division of farmers into "business-minded" big operators and those forced "out."
• Emphasis on "full production" leading to soil depletion, erosion, and neglect of conservation.
• Specialization and growth aided by "purchased inputs," increasing dependence and vulnerability.

Waste institutionalized. The estrangement of consumer and producer leads to thoughtless eating and farming. Waste is built into the system, squandering topsoil, water, fossil fuel, and human energy through unnecessary processing, packaging, and discarding of organic matter, revealing a crisis of culture, not just supply.

5. The Obsession with a Technological Future Justifies Present Destruction.

The only possible guarantee of the future is responsible behavior in the present.

Yearning for paradise. The modern mind longs for a technological future as a manufactured paradise, where science solves all problems and machines do all work. This yearning drives progress but ignores present responsibilities, perverting the present and diminishing the future.

Colonizing the future. The future is used to justify exploitation, framed as a time reachable only through industrial progress and growth. Dire future shortages are invoked to demand more exploitation now, creating paradoxes like using up future necessities to build an abundant future. The future becomes a colony plundered for present gain.

Absence of people. Visions of future farms, like those from National Geographic or SDSU, depict total control, mechanization, and absence of people from the land, except as remote operators or consumers. This suggests that mechanizing production inevitably mechanizes consumption, turning people into machines and slaves of producers.

6. Our Energy Crisis is Moral, Not Just About Supply.

The energy crisis reduces to a single question: Can we forbear to do anything that we are able to do?

Energy as religion. Energy is life, something humans convert, not create. Its use involves paradox: we have it by losing it, use it by destroying it. Wasteful use, like sewage systems or combustion engines, turns assets into pollutants, while cyclic use, like traditional farming, preserves energy in forms usable again.

Mechanical vs. biological energy. Machine energy is based on finite stockpiles, leading to environmental damage, unrestrained use, and toxic wastes. Biological energy, from living things, is a conceivable pattern, not quantity, preserved in cycles of production, consumption, and return, requiring care and responsibility.

Loss of restraint. The shift to machine energy overpowered biological limits, freeing machines from natural restraints and making them the governing metaphor. This led to a decline in skill, an increase in speed at the expense of care, and the eclipse of continuity by immediate use, resulting in a moral crisis where we harness more power than we can use responsibly.

7. The Disconnection of Body and Earth Leads to Widespread Ill Health.

Connection is health.

Health as wholeness. Health is rooted in wholeness, belonging to a family of words including heal, whole, wholesome, hale, hallow, holy. Bodily health is inseparable from spiritual well-being, cultural order, and the health of the environment; fragmentation is the disease.

Isolation of the body. Assuming the body is separate from the soul or world leads to its isolation, making it an object in conflict with creation. This devalues nurture, confines women to trivialized tasks, and leads to contempt for other bodies (slaves, laborers, animals, earth), resulting in violence against self and others.

Declining health. The human estate declines with nature's estate. Our bodies are wasted, fat, weak, and sickly, like our "marginal" land, because we have less use for them in a specialized economy. Our spirits seek comfort in consumption, detached from the world, while our economy profits from this fragmentation and disease.

8. The Disintegration of the Household Undermines Marriage and Community.

Without the household — not just as a unifying ideal, but as a practical circumstance of mutual dependence and obligation, requiring skill, moral discipline, and work — husband and wife find it less and less possible to imagine and enact their marriage.

Household as bond. The household was the practical bond of marriage, joining sexual energy to constructive work and giving it communal and ecological value. Its disintegration, driven by economic generalization and mobility, weakened vital connections between marriage, community, and the earth.

Isolation of sexuality. The most painful consequence is the isolation of sexuality from household and community functions, making it subject to oversimplifying influences like sexual romance and capitalist economics. It loses its sense of consequence and responsibility, becoming frivolous and destructive.

Fidelity's purpose. Fidelity, not a grim duty but a necessary discipline of sexuality, defines sexual responsibility and moral limits. It preserves devotion against novelty and unites the couple not just to each other, but to the community and the fertility of the earth, embodying a responsible way to live in sexuality and the world.

9. Land-Grant Colleges Betrayed Their Trust, Serving Agribusiness Over Farmers.

Public funds originally voted to provide for “the liberal and practical education” of farmers thus become, by moral default, an educational subsidy given to the farmers’ competitors.

Original intent. The land-grant college acts aimed to promote stable farming communities and a "permanent" agriculture through liberal and practical education for farmers, fostering citizenship and local leadership, and distinguishing agriculture from industry.

Degeneration of purpose. This intention failed due to a shift from public responsibility to utilitarianism and careerism. Education narrowed from "liberal and practical" to "specialized," driven by rootless, career-oriented faculty and an inflated bureaucracy, losing sight of local needs and agricultural values.

Serving agribusiness. The colleges became colleges of "agribusiness," blurring the distinction between agriculture and industry. Research and programs primarily benefit large-scale growers and input companies, displacing farmworkers and family farmers, and justifying non-agricultural services to follow their displaced clientele into cities, representing a betrayal of their founding trust.

10. True Health and Sustainability Lie in Marginal Practices and Local Nurture.

If change is to come, then, it will have to come from the outside.

Orthodoxy's blindness. Orthodox agriculture, rigid and self-protective, ignores evidence that contradicts its internal accounting, dismissing alternatives as impractical or backward. It cannot change from within, requiring change to come from the margins.

Marginal examples. Healthy alternatives exist on the margins:

• Andean agriculture: Diversity, local knowledge, integration of wild margins (hedgerows), long-term sufficiency over profit.
• Organic farms: Large and small scale, crop rotation, manure use, reduced chemicals, comparable yields, lower energy use, greater independence.
• Horse-powered farms: Integration of animals, pastures, diversification, rotation, manure use, local focus, independence from fossil fuels and distant markets.
• The Amish: Community-based, deliberate restriction of machine energy, integrity of family, community, religion, and way of life.

Health as the standard. These marginal practices, often dismissed by the orthodoxy, demonstrate that a permanent, healthy agriculture is possible. The true standard is the health of the land, people, and community, not just productivity or profit. This requires considering all technological possibilities, including "old-fashioned" ones, and valuing local knowledge and nurture over abstract, centralized control.

Last updated: May 20, 2025