The Unsettling of America

 Wendell Berry

In this 1977 publication, Berry describes and bemoans the state of agriculture in the US, which had gone through much transformation in the previous 20-30 years, and makes a number of dubious claims about the impact on society of these changes.

THE PROBLEM:

Many family farms have disappeared and others have consolidated and grown in order to not disappear.  Those remaining largely shifted from balanced farms holding a range of both animals and plants to farms that produce a single crop.  With the loss of animals, the farmers had to turn from manure-based fertilizer to chemical fertilizer, and with the loss of plant diversity, crops became more susceptible to pests, therefore requiring chemical pesticide.  Farmers have had to pay much more up-front than previously, and many have gone into increasing debt as a result.

Besides dependence on these chemicals, farmers have also become reliant on the petro-chemical industry for gasoline needed to power tilling, planting, harvesting, etc.  Politicians, government policy and the land-grant college system have encouraged this.

The topsoil on the farms has suffered and farming communities have dissolved as former farmers and their children have moved to urban areas and into non-farming professions, or at worse, become unemployed and unemployable, becoming "wards of the state".  As more people move off farms, and farms become larger and less community-based, more people have lost connection to the source of the food they consume.  The values that farming communities held when communities were healthy have been eroded away, and replaced with a lack of morality that characterizes urban life.

THE SOLUTION:

Basically, something of a return to the small family farm system would alleviate most of these problems.  Some farmers do practice an alternative to chemical-based monoculture farming and have been successful.  Their farms raise animals whose manure is used to fertilize plants, practice crop rotation, and use nitrogen-fixing legumes to further enhance soil health.  Growing a variety of crops provides natural pest control.

MY IMPRESSIONS

Great read with tons of ideas to consider, many of which are easily dismissable (like how superior the morals, the character, and the utility of rural people are compared to urban people), but many of which are trending and accepted even today (health benefits of whole-wheat over white bread, among others).  The discussion around soil health improvement did encourage me to start saving kitchen scraps for composting in a new tumbler composter, which I ordered promptly after finishing this book.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

 Paulo Freire

Background:  I purchased this book during the summer break between years one and two of teaching high school in Mississippi, but never fully read cover-to-cover until the current spring season of 2022.  This book embodies a few different areas of interest that have waned or waxed in the last twenty years of my life, but overall offers me very little benefit in my life of today:

1) The work of a Latin American thinker: less interesting to me today than before

2) Societal analysis before, during, and after revolution: much less interesting to me today than before

3) Pedagogy/education: of interest to me now, but shifting more to early childhood education rather than adult education

Impression:  Twenty years ago I was very interested in the prospect of educating and empowering people that feel powerless and trapped, and of course, the fulfillment of this would balance out disparities in society still today.  However, Freire really only focuses on these powerless classes of people that are actively and directly being kept down.  Instead of rote-memorization-based education, he proposes a process to define the exact elements responsible for maintaining people in this subordinated state (through a "problem-posing" education), having dialogue with the people to determine ways to overcome these barriers, and taking action to alleviate the solution.  In order to achieve Freire's pedagogical goals, a revolution must occur, and he spends considerable time explaining this.  This is fine for a post-colonial, newly independent third world nation in the 1950s or 1960s, but is not applicable to the US in 2022.

Conclusion:  This books deals with actual pedagogy very little, despite its title, and instead uses quite difficult language and complicated ideas to attempt to explain and justify a mind-set shift and subsequent action needed by oppressed people to overcome their situation of oppression.  The fact that Freire at some point attempted to implement his ideas in Guinea-Bissau and failed miserably, for me, supports the opinion that his ideas are probably too complicated or too impractical to actually be implemented, despite his repeated emphasis that a solution requires both theory and action.