Hey friends,
Raise your hand if you’ve ever stared at your computer in the middle of a workday, twenty tabs open in your browser and a symphony of alerts vying for your attention, and had some variation of the thought I should quit my job and become a hermit/witch/recluse/forrager in the woods.
Personally, I tend to assert that I’m only in tech until I’ve saved up enough money to become a goat farmer in the Swiss Alps (never mind the stringencies of Swiss citizenship and Alpine land ownership). Have I ever milked or cared for a goat? No. But it’s in my DNA. Surely I could figure it out. The idea of a life tethered to the land around me, not a computer, just feels charming.
Of course, it wouldn’t be easy. There are very practical reasons our society has shifted toward knowledge work. Economic ones, too. Living off the land is grueling. It’s dangerous. It’s risky.
And yet…
Perhaps it’s because of his recent passing– or perhaps it’s because I spent a recent weekend at my cabin in the woods, where my time was split between tending to the yard and reading– but I’ve been thinking about the work of Wendell Berry recently. As I’ve been mulling over my hircine Alpine dreams, his thesis, as presented in The Unsettling of America, keeps coming back to me.
Berry wrote The Unsettling of America between 1974 and 1977 in response to what he describes as a decline in American farming disguised as a boom.
About this time period, he writes,
The big farmers were getting bigger with the help of inflated land prices and borrowed money, and the foreign demand for American farm products was strong, so from the official point of view the situation looked good. The big were supposed to get bigger. [...]
That the situation was not good—for farms or farmers or rural communities or nature or the general public—was even then evident to any experienced observer who would turn aside from the preconceptions of “agribusiness” and look at the marks of deterioration that were plainly visible. And now, almost a decade later, it is evident to everyone that, at least for farmers and rural communities, the situation is catastrophic: Farmers are losing their farms, some are killing themselves, some in the madness of despair are killing other people, and rural economy and rural life are gravely stricken.
Beyond my own restlessness with knowledge work, I think this– taken just from the preface of the book– is one of the underpinnings I’ve been wrestling with. Since I’ve had any perception of economics or policy, I’ve been in the front row watching an economy grow and grow and grow in a way that ensures the big get bigger, while small communities and individuals who are already starting from behind face an uphill battle that’s only getting steeper. What Berry describes in the agricultural sector of the late 70s, we see across industries now (and only worsening in agriculture, I might add).
Over the course of the book, Berry makes a compelling case that how a culture interacts with the land it inhabits is a reflection of the very soul of its people.
Tracing his thesis across the arc of The Unsettling of America, we see that the shifts in agriculture reflect a move toward conquest as an economic mentality in which the ends justify the means. This type of utilitarianism leads to a degradation in the health of the entire agricultural ecosystem composed of soil, plants, animals, bodies, households, and communities. The degradation of one component for the gain of another is not true growth, he argues.
As these ecosystems splinter, people are displaced, and cultural practices are abandoned for the sake of efficiency, specialization, and profit– often, survival.
Deeper specialization and the drive to maximize yield and efficiency cause the ecosystem to break down, harming our cultural legacy, the health of our environment, and our personal well-being. In this way, scale becomes a moral challenge, not a matter of simple economics, and it creates problems that have innumerable downstream consequences.
The only possible guarantee of the future is responsible behavior in the present.
A single trip to the grocery store in 2026 proves Berry’s argument. Whether you eat meat or not, take a look at the price of ground beef. At the time of writing, it’s about $8 or $9 per pound at Kroger. Around peak COVID, when our supply chain management infrastructure was fractured and grocery prices rose across the board, it was about $4.75 per pound. Twenty years ago, $2.20 per pound.
Why? Is this just standard inflation?
Inflation certainly plays a role, but it’s not the main culprit here. Across the US, cattle herds are shrinking. Drought, rising operating costs, disease, and parasites threaten farmers' ability to keep cattle at all, let alone keep them healthy enough to grow and sell. An incompetent federal government on a thoughtless deregulation spree in the current presidency is part of the failure here, but the droughts, soil health, and rising costs that continue to plague us were already set in motion when Wendell Berry was writing The Unsettling of America, as more control over agricultural practices and land management was outsourced to factory farming and companies like Monsanto, which often used degraded soil health and pollution as a competitive advantage rather than a problem to be mitigated.
In a highly centralized and industrialized food-supply system there can be no small disaster.
The warning signs have been visible all around us. We’ve not listened.
As knowledge workers in today’s economy, we’re in our own version of the ethical conundrums of factory farming. You can’t sit through a company meeting or mindlessly scroll LinkedIn without having petitions for efficiency and scale and the pursuit of profit heaped upon you in indiscriminate platitudes and mandates. The AI boom, like the agricultural boom Berry responded to, looks like success on the surface, but it primarily keeps wealth accruing among the wealthy, with little consideration for the long-term consequences it creates.
Economic and technological shifts, like large-scale agricultural practices, are not inherently good or bad on their own. But the trade-offs that we make– we accept and normalize– suck the nutrients from our soil and our culture. Outsourcing indigenous land management and inherited practices to economies of scale has driven our agricultural legacy to a point of devastating instability. What will happen if we outsource critical thinking and the role of small, localized businesses to data centers and oligarchs?
While cautious, I’m not entirely pessimistic. I still believe in humanity. I still believe in art. And as all-encroaching as capitalism can be, the human tendency to be defiant persists. Personal gardening is approaching all-time highs in popularity. Despite an anti-science government and minimal support, regenerative farming practices have grown 360% in the last ten years. And have you seen town halls in rural communities with proposed data centers? Our communities show up and prove that preserving our landscape and way of life is not a purely partisan issue.
We’re approaching the tipping point where book clubs, personal blogs, and scrappy art projects become the rebellious, celebrated acts they deserve to be.
So, go be rebellious. Go hug a tree. Buy from an old man at a farmer’s market. Read a book.
Until next time,
Blake
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Reflection is resistance