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The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry

The book's earnest environmental message resonated with me, and I share the author's sincere concern about our nation losing the "glue" of agricultural and village life (something which bonded us as a nation for centuries, but is now long gone after decades of urbanization, centralization, regulation and sociocultural atomization). 

At the same time I was concerned with a lack of rigor in the book, both in the case of various unsubstantiated and/or incorrect facts and statistics in this book [an example: "It is estimated that it now costs (by erosion) two bushels of Iowa topsoil to grow one bushel of corn" something that if true would suggest that by 2020 there would be no topsoil left in the entire state], as well as the general Malthusian lens the author uses to perceive reality. 

The embarrassing thing about Malthusianism: at some point the author has to look at the scoreboard and admit his predictions of doom never happened. You can't always just push things out into the future and excuse being wrong by claiming, "I'm still right, I'm just a little early. We're still doomed, just wait!" By that logic Thomas Malthus himself would be "not wrong, just early" in calling for horrendous famines and widespread starvation in late 18th Century England (which never happened, not even close). 

Even a book as sincere and earnest as this one has to be held to some standard of rigor and logic, otherwise we give away ammunition to an anti-environmentalist opposition, who can point out the unwarranted statistics and the garden-variety Malthusianism and declare an easy victory.

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