Wendell Berry wrote this book in 1977 in response 
to the agribusiness takeover of and the loss of 
family farms and farming communities. While he has 
a lot to say in detailing the resulting 
destruction of ecosystems, his real focus is to examine 
how the country-to-city migration(our farmland is now 
in the hands of only 5 percent of the people) has
resulted in a radical simplification of mind and character: that is,

1)the person's values are now imposed on him from the 
outside,  2)he has substituted simple dutifulness 
for complex responsibility,  3)he has replaced complexities 
of attitude and know-how by a fragmentary task learned 
quickly by rote (as in the "specialist"),  4)his thinking 
is now not determined by responsibility but
 by financial 
accountability.

The author relates this downward spiral of mind and 
character that has occurred in the agricultural system 
to the downward spiral of our culture. He stresses a 
"unified " system. If a culture is to survive, the
relationships within it must be cooperative rather 
than competitive, analogous to agriculture which cannot 
live long at the expense of its soil or its work force; 
in a natural system the competitions among species 
must be limited if all are to survive.

It seems to me that this author is expressing many of 
the tenets of what is now Permaculture. His work consists 
more of stated opinion (well thought out and well expressed)
than it does compiled studies and examples. He points out
the lack of studies showing the differences in cost 
effectiveness between polyculture (and other indigenous 
and family farm practices) and big commercial agriculture. 
He gives several
 examples of Amish farms and their
practices. There may well be more studies available now 
than there was at the time of his writing.

His view of the use of energy is a division between 
machine-derived energy (energy goes in as fuel and 
comes out as waste, which he calls production and 
consumption), and biological energy (which, in 
addition to production and consumption, includes 
return). The use of biological energy requires that 
all bodies (plant, animal, and human) join in a 
kind of energy community. “Return” means that the 
bodies do not consume in the sense of using up. 
They do not produce waste. They are not divided 
from each other by greedy or individualistic 
efforts to produce and consume large quantities 
of energy, much less to store large quantities of it. 
“Return” means that what they take in, they change 
into a form necessary for its use by a living body 
of another kind. The bodies (plant,
 animal, and human) 
are linked in complex patterns of energy exchange. 
The principle of return requires more responsibility 
and care than that required by production and 
consumption alone.

The author stresses that agriculture is a cultural 
endeavor and its study has to include people as 
opposed to a discipline of specialties (soil,plant, 
animals, machines, chemicals). Loosed from any 
moral standard or limit, the machine replaced the 
Wheel of Life.  The Wheel of Life, rather than 
turning in place as in cycles, began to roll on 
the "highway of progress" toward an ever receding 
horizon. The idea of “return” (cycles) disappeared 
from agriculture (as in turning waste into useful 
energy and preserving the integrity of the life 
cycle) as it has from American culture (as in being 
as attentive to decay as to growth, using cooperation 
rather than competition, aspiring to diversity to 
create something new).
  This may well be an 
oversimplification of the author’s message but he 
continually makes the point that, being estranged from 
the land, we lose the integrity of families, community, 
religion and way of life and we arrive at our mainstream 
American life of distraction, haste, aimlessness, 
violence, and disintegration.