Berry's _The Unsettling of America_.. from 1977! So quotable for today'! He writes of what iit felt important to learn from Pollan's _Omnivore's Dilemma_ ... from the documentary _King Corn_... The all-powerful all-evil Butz Secretary of Ag ends up an old-age home talking to recent college graduats making a film...

The "tech-bros" AI-Salami morons were seen coming in books and song.
"Take the only water left. flush it down the hole, in your culture" --- apologies to Leonard Cohen "The Future"

> ... The automobile-of-the-future, the kitchen-of-the-future, the classroom-of-the-future have long figured more actively in our imaginations, plans, and desires than whatever versions of these things we may currently have. We long ago gave up the wish to have things that were adequate or even excellent; we have preferred instead to have things that were up-to-date. But to be up-to-date is an ambition with built-in panic: our possessions cannot be up-to-date more than momentarily unless we can stop time — or somehow get ahead of it. The only possibility of satisfaction is to be driving now in one’s future automobile.
> It is no doubt impossible to live without thought of the future; hope and vision can live nowhere else. But the only possible guarantee of the future is responsible behavior in the present. When supposed future needs are used to justify misbehavior in the present, as is the tendency with us, then we are both perverting the present and diminishing the future. But the most prolific source of justifications for exploitive behavior has been the future. The exploitive mind characteristically puts itself in charge of the future. The future is a time that cannot conceivably be reached except by industrial progress and economic growth. The future, so full of material blessings, is nevertheless threatened with dire shortages of food, energy, and security unless we exploit the earth even more “freely,” with greater speed and less caution.
#WendellBerry #TheUnsettling