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A Protest Meeting On The Issue Of Environmental Abuse Is Not A Convocation Of Accusers, It Is A Convocation Of The Guilty. The Realization Ought To Clear The Smog Of Self-righteousness That Has Always Conventionally Hovered Over These Occasions, And Let Us See The Work That Is To Be Done.

-Wendell Berry

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A Protest Meeting On

Wendell Berry

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A Protest Meeting On The Issue Of Environmental Abuse Is Not A Convocation Of Accusers, It Is A Convocation Of The Guilty. The Realization Ought To Clear The Smog Of Self-righteousness That Has Always Conventionally Hovered Over These Occasions, And Let Us See The Work That Is To Be Done.

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If A Healthy Soil Is Full Of Death, It Is Also Full Of Life: Worms, Fungi, Microorganisms Of All Kinds ... Given Only The Health Of The Soil, Nothing That Dies Is Dead For Very Long.

In Kentucky, We're Destroying Mountains, Including Their Soils And Forests, In Order To Get At The Coal. In Other Words, We're Destroying A Permanent Value In Order To Get At An Almost Inconceivably Transient Value. That Coal Has A Value Only If And When It Is Burnt. And After It Is Burnt, It Is A Pollutant And A Waste-a Burden.

So Friends, Every Day Do Something That Won't Compute.

The Music, While It Lasted, Brought A New World Into Being.

We Don't Know How To Use Energy Or What To Use It For. And We Cannot Restrain Ourselves. Our Time Is Characterized As Much By The Abuse And Waste Of Human Energy As It Is By The Abuse And Waste Of Fossil Fuel Energy.

The Care Of The Earth Is Our Most Ancient And Most Worthy, And After All Our Most Pleasing Responsibility. To Cherish What Remains Of It And To Foster Its Renewal Is Our Only Hope.

From The Union Of Power And Money, From The Union Of Power And Secrecy, From The Union Of Government And Science, From The Union Of Government And Art, From The Union Of Science And Money, From The Union Of Ambition And Ignorance, From The Union Of Genius And War, From The Union Of Outer Space And Inner Vacuity, The Mad Farmer Walks Quietly Away.

The Wrecking Ball Is Characteristic Of Our Way With Materials. We 'cannot Afford' To Log A Forest Selectively, To Mine Without Destroying Topography, Or To Farm Without Catastrophic Soil Erosion. A Production-oriented Economy Can Indeed Live In This Way, But Only So Long As Production Lasts.

A Man With A Machine And Inadequate Culture Is A Pestilence.

We Can Fight The Global Economy With A Strong Local Economy.

There’s Nothing Under The Ground That’s Worth More Than The Little Layer Of Topsoil Sitting On Top Of It.

We Do Need A 'new Economy,' But One That Is Founded On Thrift And Care, On Saving And Conserving, Not On Excess And Waste. An Economy Based On Waste Is Inherently And Hopelessly Violent, And War Is Its Inevitable By-product. We Need A Peaceable Economy.

Hunger Is A Powerful Persuader If It Happens, And It's Conceivable That It Could Happen. Country People Have Always Known This.

We Cannot Hope To Be Secure When Our Government Has Declared, By Its Readiness To Act Alone, Its Willingness To Be Everybody's Enemy.

Perhaps It Is To Prepare To Hear Some Day The Music Of The Spheres That I Am Always Turning My Ears To The Music Of Streams. There Is Indeed A Music In Streams, But It Is Not For The Hurried. It Has To Be Loitered By And Imagined. Or Imagined Toward, For It Is Hardly For Men At All. Nature Has A Patient Ear. To Her The Slowest Funeral March Sounds Like A Jig. She Is Satisfied To Have The Notes Drawn Out To The Lengths Of Days Or Weeks Or Months. Small Variations Are Acceptable To Her, Modulations As Leisurely As The Opening Of A Flower.

History Leaves No Doubt That Among Of The Most Regrettable Crimes Committed By Human Beings Have Been Committed By Those Human Beings Who Thought Of Themselves As Civilized. What, We Must Ask, Does Our Civilization Possess That Is Worth Defending? One Thing Worth Defending, I Suggest, Is The Imperative To Imagine The Lives Of Beings Who Are Not Ourselves And Are Not Like Ourselves: Animals, Plants, Gods, Spirits, People Of Other Countries, Other Races, People Of The Other Sex, Places And Enemies.

Today, Local Economies Are Being Destroyed By The 'pluralistic,' Displaced, Global Economy, Which Has No Respect For What Works In A Locality. The Global Economy Is Built On The Principle That One Place Can Be Exploited, Even Destroyed, For The Sake Of Another Place.

There's A World Of Difference . . . Between That Information To Which We Now Presumably Have Access By Way Of Computers, Libraries, And The Rest Of It, Great Stockpiles Of Data, And The Knowledge That People Have In Their Bones By Which They Do Good Work And Live Good Lives.

It Is Therefore Absurd To Approach The Subject Of Health Piecemeal With A Departmentalized Band Of Specialists. A Medical Doctor Uninterested In Nutrition, In Agriculture, In The Wholesomeness Of Mind And Spirit Is As Absurd As A Farmer Who Is Uninterested In Health. Our Fragmentation Of This Subject Cannot Be Our Cure, Because It Is Our Disease. The Body Cannot Be Whole Alone. Persons Cannot Be Whole Alone. It Is Wrong To Think That Bodily Health Is Compatible With Spiritual Confusion Or Cultural Disorder, Or With Polluted Air And Water Or Impoverished Soil.

A Person Who Undertakes To Grow A Garden At Home, By Practices That Will Preserve Rather Than Exploit The Economy Of The Soil, Has His Mind Precisely Against What Is Wrong With Us.

If We Represent Knowledge As A Tree, We Know That Things That Are Divided Are Yet Connected. We Know That To Observe The Divisions And Ignore The Connections Is To Destroy The Tree.

And So There Would Always Be More To Remember That Could No Longer Be Seen...our History Is Always Returning To A Little Patch Of Weeds And Saplings With An Old Chimney Sticking Up By Itself...and Here I Look Ahead To The Resting Of My Case: I Love The House That Belonged To The Chimney, Holding It Bright In Memory, And Love The Saplings And The Weeds.

The Answers To The Human Problems Of Ecology Are To Be Found In Economy. And The Answers To The Problems Of Economy Are To Be Found In Culture And Character. To Fail To See This Is To Go On Dividing The World Falsely Between Guilty Producers And Innocent Consumers.

People Talk About "job Creation," As If That Had Ever Been The Aim The Industrial Economy. The Aim Was To Replace People With Machines.

New Grief, When It Came, You Could Feel Filling The Air. It Took Up All The Room There Was. The Place Itself, The Whole Place, Became A Reminder Of The Absence Of The Hurt Or The Dead Or The Missing One. I Don't Believe That Grief Passes Away. It Has Its Time And Place Forever. More Time Is Added To It; It Becomes A Story Within A Story. But Grief And Griever Alike Endure.

And So You Have A Life That You Are Living Only Now, Now And Now And Now, Gone Before You Can Speak Of It, And You Must Be Thankful For Living Day By Day, Moment By Moment A Life In The Breath And Pulse And Living Light Of The Present

It Surely Is Far Better To Be Disliked By Somebody You Don't Love Than By Somebody You Do. Even So, I Mind. Even So, Failing To Love Somebody Is A Failure.

The Road Is A Word, Conceived Elsewhere And Laid Across The Country In The Wound Prepared For It: A Word Made Concrete And Thrust Among Us.

To Husband Is To Use With Care, To Keep, To Save, To Make Last, To Conserve. Old Usage Tells Us That There Is A Husbandry Also Of The Land, Of The Soil, Of The Domestic Plants And Animals. And So It Appears That Most And Perhaps All Of Industrial Agriculture's Manifest Failures Are The Result Of An Attempt To Make The Land Produce Without Husbandry.

The Mercy Of The World Is Time. Time Does Not Stop For Love, But It Does Not Stop For Death And Grief, Either.

We Have Lived Our Lives By The Assumption That What Was Good For Us Would Be Good For The World. We Have Been Wrong. We Must Change Our Lives So That It Will Be Possible To Live By The Contrary Assumption, That What Is Good For The World Will Be Good For Us. And That Requires That We Make The Effort To Know The World And Learn What Is Good For It.

Community, Then, Is An Indispensable Term In Any Discussion Of The Connection Between People And Land. A Healthy Community Is A Form That Includes All The Local Things That Are Connected By The Larger, Ultimately Mysterious Form Of The Creation. In Speaking Of Community, Then, We Are Speaking Of A Complex Connection Not Only Among Human Beings Or Between Humans And Their Homeland But Also Between Human Economy And Nature, Between Forest Or Prairie And Field Or Orchard, And Between Troublesome Creatures And Pleasant Ones. All Neighbors Are Included.

To Be Patient In An Emergency Is A Terrible Trial.

It's Kind Of Alarming For Me To Realize That, When I'm Writing Stories About Times I Remember, It's Already Historical Fiction.

If You Grow A Garden You Are Going To Shed Some Sweat, And You Are Going To Spend Some Time Bent Over; You Will Experience Some Aches And Pains. But It Is In The Willingness To Accept This Discomfort That We Strike The Most Telling Blow Against The Power Plants And What They Represent.

Rats And Roaches Live By Competition Under The Laws Of Supply And Demand; It Is The Privilege Of Human Beings To Live Under The Laws Of Justice And Mercy.

We Have Neglected The Truth That A Good Farmer Is A Craftsman Of The Highest Order, A Kind Of Artist.

People Are Fed By The Food Industry, Which Pays No Attention To Health, And Are Treated By The Health Industry, Which Pays No Attention To Food.

I See That The Life Of This Place Is Always Emerging Beyond Expectation Or Prediction Or Typicality, That It Is Unique, Given To The World Minute By Minute, Only Once, Never To Be Repeated. And This Is When I See That This Life Is A Miracle, Absolutely Worth Having, Absolutely Worth Saving. We Are Alive Within Mystery, By Miracle.

We Don't Have A Right To Ask Whether We're Going To Succeed Or Not. The Only Question We Have A Right To Ask Is What's The Right Thing To Do? What Does This Earth Require Of Us If We Want To Continue To Live On It?

It Is Possible, I Think, To Say That... A Christian Agriculture [is] Formed Upon The Understanding That It Is Sinful For People To Misuse Or Destroy What They Did Not Make. The Creation Is A Unique, Irreplaceable Gift, Therefore To Be Used With Humility, Respect, And Skill.

The Damages Of Our Present Agriculture All Come From The Determination To Use The Life Of The Soil As If It Were An Extractable Resource Like Coal.

We Have The World To Live In On The Condition That We Will Take Good Care Of It. And To Take Good Care Of It We Have To Know It. And To Know It And To Be Willing To Take Care Of It, We Have To Love It.

Thinking Is The Most Overrated Human Activity.

Healing Is Impossible In Loneliness; It Is The Opposite Of Loneliness. Conviviality Is Healing. To Be Healed We Must Come With All The Other Creatures To The Feast Of Creation. (pg.99, "the Body And The Earth")

We Cannot Know The Whole Truth, Which Belongs To God Alone, But Our Task Nevertheless Is To Seek To Know What Is True.

How Do We Submit? By Not Being Radical Enough. Or By Not Being Thorough Enough, Which Is The Same Thing.

People Need To Feed Themselves, Next They Need To Feed Their Own Communities.

It Would Take Me Years Of Reading, Thought, And Experience To Learn Again That In This World Limits Are Not Only Inescapable But Indispensable.

When You Have Large-scale Legitimated Violence In A Place That Is Divided As Profoundly And Bitterly As Kentucky Was, The Legitimate Violence Can Cause Illegitimate Violence, A Terrible Local Heartlessness And Cruelty That Feeds On Itself And Goes On And On.

That We Should Have An Agriculture Based As Much On Petroleum As The Soil-that We Need Petroleum Exactly As Much As We Need Food And Must Have It Before We Can Eat-may Seem Absurd. It Is Absurd. It Is Nevertheless True.

Don't Own So Much Clutter That You Will Be Relieved To See Your House Catch Fire.

It Is, Of Course, One Of The Miracles Of Science That The Germs That Used To Be In Our Food Have Been Replaced By Poisons.

It Is The Man Who Can Think Of No Alternative To His Enslavement Who Is Truly A Slave.

Do Unto Those Downstream As You Would Have Those Upstream Do Unto You.

So It Is That The Life Force May Take Possession Of A Man-- So That In The End He May Be Possessed By Something Greater, No Longer At All Belonging To Himself.

I Believe Until Fairly Recently Our Destructions Of Nature Were More Or Less Unwitting -- The By-products, So To Speak, Of Our Ignorance Or Weakness Or Depravity. It Is Our Present Principled And Elaborately Rationalized Rape And Plunder Of The Natural World That Is A New Thing Under The Sun.

In The Dark Of The Moon, In Flying Snow, In The Dead Of Winter, War Spreading, Families Dying, The World In Danger, I Walk The Rocky Hillside, Sowing Clover.

To Have Good Farming Or Good Land Use Of Any Kind, You Have Got To Have Limits. Capitalism Doesn't Acknowledge Limits.

Be Like The Fox Who Makes More Tracks Than Necessary, Some In The Wrong Direction. Practice Resurrection.

It May Be That When We No Longer Know... Which Way To Go We Have Begun Our Real Journey. The Mind That Is Not Baffled Is Not Employed. The Impeded Stream Is The One That Sings.

[all The Ancient Wisdom] Tells Us That Work Is Necessary To Us, As Much A Part Of Our Condition As Mortality; That Good Work Is Our Salvation And Our Joy; That Shoddy Or Dishonest Or Self-serving Work Is Our Curse And Our Doom. We Have Tried To Escape The Sweat And Sorrow Promised In Genesis - Only To Find That, In Order To Do So, We Must Forswear Love And Excellence, Health And Joy. (pg. 44, "the Unsettling Of America")

The River Is Of The Earth And It Is Free. It Is Rigorously Embanked And Bound, And Yet It Is Free. To Hell With Restraint, It Says, I Have Got To Be Going. It Will Grind Out Its Dams. It Will Go Over Or Around Them. They Will Become Pieces.

We Have Become Blind To The Alternatives To Violence.

We Weren't Allowing Our Hopes To Become Expectations. Expectations Are Tempting, Pleasant, Maybe Necessary. They Are Scary Too, Once You Have Had Some Experience. They Are Not Necessarily And Not Always A Bucket Of Smoke, But They Can Be And Are Even Likely To Be.

You Can Best Serve Civilization By Being Against What Usually Passes For It.

All Right, Every Day Ain't Going To Be The Best Day Of Your Life, Don't Worry About That. If You Stick To It You Hold The Possibility Open That You Will Have Better Days.

He Never Complained. He Seemed To Have No Instinct For The Making Much Of Oneself That Complaining Requires.

There Is No Sense And No Sanity In Objecting To The Desecration Of The Flag While Tolerating And Justifying And Encouraging As A Daily Business The Desecration Of The Country For Which It Stands.

In Losing Stewardship We Lose Fellowship; We Become Outcasts From The Great Neighborhood Of Creation.

Our Children No Longer Learn How To Read The Great Book Of Nature From Their Own Direct Experience, Or How To Interact Creatively With The Seasonal Transformations Of The Planet. They Seldom Learn Where Their Water Come From Or Where It Goes. We No Longer Coordinate Our Human Celebration With The Great Liturgy Of The Heavens.

It Is Easy For Me To Imagine That The Next Great Division Of The World Will Be Between People Who Wish To Live As Creatures And People Who Wish To Live As Machines.

A Teacher's Major Contribution May Pop Out Anonymously In The Life Of Some Ex-student's Grandchild. A Teacher, Finally, Has Nothing To Go On But Faith, A Student Nothing To Offer In Return But Testimony.

But Love, Sooner Or Later, Forces Us Out Of Time...of All That We Feel And Do, All The Virtues And All The Sins, Love Alone Crowds Us At Last Over The Edge Of The World. For Love Is Always More Than A Little Strange Here...it Is In The World, But Is Not Altogether Of It. It Is Of Eternity. It Takes Us There When It Most Holds Us Here.

But The Only Possible Guarantee Of The Future Is Responsible Behavior In The Present.

One Of The Most Important Resources That A Garden Makes Available For Use, Is The Gardener's Own Body. A Garden Gives The Body The Dignity Of Working In Its Own Support. It Is A Way Of Rejoining The Human Race.

This, I Thought, Is What Is Meant By 'thy Will Be Done' In The Lord's Prayer, Which I Had Prayed Time And Again Without Thinking About It. It Means That Your Will And God's Will May Not Be The Same. It Means There's A Good Possibility That You Won't Get What You Pray For. It Means That In Spite Of Your Prayers You Are Going To Suffer.

We Cannot Know The Whole Truth, Which Belongs To God Alone, But Our Task Nevertheless Is To Seek To Know What Is True. And If We Offend Gravely Enough Against What We Know To Be True, As By Failing Badly Enough To Deal Affectionately And Responsibly With Our Land And Our Neighbors, Truth Will Retaliate With Ugliness, Poverty, And Disease.

Every Day You Have Less Reason Not To Give Yourself Away.

An Agrarian Mind Begins With The Love Of Fields And Ramifies In Good Farming, Good Cooking & Good Eating

A Farmer's Market Is Worth More Than Everything I've Written.

And The World Cannot Be Discovered By A Journey Of Miles, No Matter How Long, But Only By A Spiritual Journey, A Journey Of One Inch, Very Arduous And Humbling And Joyful, By Which We Arrive At The Ground At Our Own Feet, And Learn To Be At Home.

Better Than Any Argument Is To Rise At Dawn And Pick Dew-wet Red Berries In A Cup.

If We Are Looking For Insurance Against Want And Oppression, We Will Find It Only In Our Neighbors' Prosperity And Goodwill And, Beyond That, In The Good Health Of Our Worldly Places, Our Homelands. If We Were Sincerely Looking For A Place Of Safety, For Real Security And Success, Then We Would Begin To Turn To Our Communities - And Not The Communities Simply Of Our Human Neighbors But Also Of The Water, Earth, And Air, The Plants And Animals, All The Creatures With Whom Our Local Life Is Shared. (pg. 59, "racism And The Economy")

I Have Always Loved A Window, Especially An Open One.

In Health The Flesh Is Graced, The Holy Enters The World.

The Only Time I've Been Arrested Was In Opposing The Marble Hill Nuclear Power Plant In Indiana. That Was In 1979.

The Hierarchy Of Power Is Not The Same As The Hierarchy Of Value. A Good Human Is Higher Than The Animals On Both Scales; An Evil Human Is High On The Scale Of Power, But At The Very Bottom Of The Scale Of Values.

Commercial Conquest Is Far More Thorough And Final Than Military Defeat.

We Have Made It Our Overriding Ambition To Escape Work, And As A Consequence Have Debased Work Until It Is Only Fit To Escape From. We Have Debased The Products Of Work And Have Been, In Turn, Debased By Them. (pg. 43, "the Unsettling Of America")

Explanation Changes Whatever Is Explained Into Something Explainable.

It Is Better To Buy From A Small, Privately Owned Local Store Than From A Chain Store. It Is Better To Buy A Good Product Than A Bad One. Do Not Buy Anything You Don't Need. Do As Much As You Can For Yourself. If You Cannot Do Something For Yourself, See If You Have A Neighbor Who Can Do It For You. Do Everything You Can To See That Your Money Stays As Long As Possible In The Local Community.

The Earth Is What We All Have In Common.

Beauty . . . Cannot Be Interpreted. It Is Not An Empirically Verifiable Fact; It Is Not A Quantity.

When You Take Away The Subsistence Economy, Then Your Farm Population Is Seriously Exposed To The Vagaries Of The Larger Economy. As It Used To Be, The Subsistence Economy Carried People Through The Hard Times, And What You Might Call The Housewife's Economy Of Cream And Eggs Often Held These Farms And Their Families Together.

We Are Now, Measurably, Reducing The Availability Of These Life-supporting Goods Which We Can Think Of (though Only On The Conditions Of Good Health And Good Care) As Self-renewing Or "sustainable." We Are Also Destroying Rapidly The Supplies Of The Fossil Fuels, Which Are Limited And Not Renewable, And On Which We Have Become Totally Dependent.

Invest In The Millennium. Plant Sequoias. Say That Your Main Crop Is The Forest That You Did Not Plant, That You Will Not Live To Harvest. Say That The Leaves Are Harvested When They Have Rotted Into The Mold. Call That Profit. Prophesy Such Returns. Put Your Faith In The Two Inches Of Humus That Will Build Under The Trees Every Thousand Years.

We Know Enough Of Our Own History By Now To Be Aware That People Exploit What They Have Merely Concluded To Be Of Value, But They Defend What They Love. To Defend What We Love We Need A Particularizing Language, For We Love What We Particularly Know.

Supporters Of The War Are Constantly Asking Those Who Oppose It: Why Don't You Deplore The Wrongs And Atrocities Committed By The Other Side? The Answer, So Far As I Am Concerned, Is That I Do Deplore The Wrongs And Atrocities Committed By The Other Side. But I Am Responsible For The Wrongs And Atrocities Committed By Our Side. And I Am No Longer Able To Participate In The Assumption That Atrocities Committed By Remote Control Are Less Objectionable Than Those Committed At Arm's Length. I Am Most Concerned With American Obstacles To Peace Because I Am An American.

Atrocities Committed

The Promoters Of The Global Economy...see Nothing Odd Or Difficult About Unlimited Economic Growth Or Unlimited Consumption In A Limited World.

We Must Waste Less. We Must Do More For Ourselves And For Each Other. It Is Either That Or Continue Merely To Think And Talk About Changes That We Are Inviting Catastrophe To Make. The Great Obstacle Is Simply This: The Conviction That We Cannot Change Because We Are Dependant On What Is Wrong. But That Is The Addict's Excuse, And We Know That It Will Not Do.

I Am Speaking Of The Life Of A Man Who Knows That The World Is Not Given By His Fathers, But Borrowed From His Children; Who Has Undertaken To Cherish It And Do It No Damage, Not Because He Is Duty-bound, But Because He Loves The World And Loves His Children...

Because By Definition They Lack Any Sense Of Mutuality Or Wholeness, Our Specializations Subsist On Conflict With One Another. The Rule Is Never To Cooperate, But Rather To Follow One's Own Interest As Far As Possible. Checks And Balances Are All Applied Externally, By Opposition, Never By Self-restraint. Labor, Management, The Military, The Government, Etc., Never Forbear Until Their Excesses Arouse Enough Opposition To Force Them To Do So.

A Sustainable Agriculture Is One Which Depletes Neither The People Nor The Land.

And I Knew That The Spirit That Had Gone Forth To Shape The World And Make It Live Was Still Alive In It. I Just Had No Doubt. I Could See That I Lived In The Created World, And It Was Still Being Created. I Would Be Part Of It Forever. There Was No Escape. The Spirit That Made It Was In It, Shaping It And Reshaping It, Sometimes Lying At Rest, Sometimes Standing Up And Shaking Itself, Like A Muddy Horse, And Letting The Pieces Fly.

Soil Is Not Usually Lost In Slabs Or Heaps Of Magnificent Tonnage. It Is Lost A Little At A Time Over Millions Of Acres By The Careless Acts Of Millions Of People. It Cannot Be Saved By Heroic Feats Of Gigantic Technology, But Only By Millions Of Small Acts And Restraints, Conditioned By Small Fidelities, Skills, And Desires. Soil Loss Is Ultimately A Cultural Problem; It Will Be Corrected Only By Cultural Solutions.

When Despair For The World Grows In Me... I Come Into The Presence Of Still Water. And I Feel Above Me The Day-blind Stars Waiting With Their Light. For A Time I Rest In The Grace Of The World, And Am Free.

I Dream Of A Quiet Man / Who Explains Nothing And Defends Nothing, But Only Knows / Where The Rarest Wildflowers / Are Blooming, And Who Goes, / And Finds That He Is Smiling / Not By His Own Will.

The Shoddy Work Of Despair, The Pointless Work Of Pride, Equally Betray Creation. They Are Wastes Of Life.

The River And The Garden Have Been The Foundations Of My Economy Here. Of The Two I Have Liked The River Best. It Is Wonderful To Have The Duty Of Being On The River The First And Last Thing Every Day. I Have Loved It Even In The Rain. Sometimes I Have Loved It Most In The Rain.

Why Should Conservationists Have A Positive Interest In... Farming? There Are Lots Of Reasons, But The Plainest Is: Conservationists Eat.

To Be Interested In Food But Not In Food Production Is Clearly Absurd.

Food Production

We Will Instead Have To Measure Our Economy By The Health Of The Ecosystems And Human Communities Where We Do Our Work.

Only By Restoring The Broken Connections Can We Be Healed. Connection Is Health. And What Our Society Does Its Best To Disguise From Us Is How Ordinary, How Commonly Attainable, Health Is. We Lose Our Health -- And Create Profitable Diseases And Dependencies -- By Failing To See The Direct Connections Between Living And Eating, Eating And Working, Working And Loving.

The Form Of A Poem Is Invisible. A Poem Is Not An "object." This Is Hard To Accept In A Mechanical Age.

When Going Back Makes Sense, You Are Going Ahead.

This New War, Like The Previous One, Would Be A Test Of The Power Of Machines Against People And Places; Whatever Its Causes And Justifications, It Would Make The World Worse. This Was True Of That New War, And It Has Been True Of Every New War Since... I Knew Too That This New War Was Not Even New But Was Only The Old One Come Again. And What Caused It? It Was Caused, I Thought, By People Failing To Love One Another, Failing To Love Their Enemies.

I Began To Know My Story Then. Like Everybody's, It Was Going To Be The Story Of Living In The Absence Of The Dead. What Is The Thread That Holds It All Together? Grief, I Thought For A While. And Grief Is There Sure Enough, Just About All The Way Through. From The Time I Was A Girl I Have Never Been Far From It. But Grief Is Not A Force And Has No Power To Hold. You Only Bear It. Love Is What Carries You, For It Is Always There, Even In The Dark, Or Most In The Dark, But Shining Out At Times Like Gold Stitches In A Piece Of Embroidery.

Some Of The Best Things I Have Ever Thought Of I Have Thought Of During Bad Sermons.

But In Its De Facto Alliance With Caesar, Christianity Connives Directly In The Murder Of Creation. For In These Days, Caesar Is No Longer A Mere Destroyer Of Armies, Cities, And Nations. He Is A Contradicter Of The Fundamental Miracle Of Life.

We Must See That It Is Foolish, Sinful And Suicidal To Destroy The Health Of Nature For The Sake Of An Economy That Is Really Not An Economy At All But Merely A Financial System, One That Is Unnatural, Undemocratic, Sacrilegious, And Ephemeral.

A Viable Neighborhood Is A Community: And A Viable Community Is Made Up Of Neighbors Who Cherish And Protect What They Have In Common.

A Teacher's Major Contribution May Pop Out Anonymuosly In The Life Of Some Ex-student's Grandchild.

A Proper Education Enables Young People To Put Their Lives In Order, Which Means Knowing What Things Are More Important Than Other Things; It Means Putting First Things First.

My Label Is Just "good Farming", Which Isn't Something You Can Put On A T-shirt.

The Presence Of The Present Has Become Insistent, Undeniable, And I Dare Not Look Away.

If I Was Freer Than I Had Ever Been In My Life, I Was Not Yet Entirely Free, For I Still Hung On To An Idea That Had Been Set Deep In Me By All My Schooling So Far: I Was A Bright Boy And I Ought To Make Something Out Of Myself... Something Else That Would Be A Cut Or Two Above My Humble Origins.

As I Age In The World It Will Rise And Spread, And Be For This Place Horizon And Orison, The Voice Of Its Winds. I Have Made Myself A Dream To Dream Of Its Rising, That Has Gentled My Nights. Let Me Desire And Wish Well The Life These Trees May Live When I No Longer Rise In The Mornings To Be Pleased With The Green Of Them Shining, And Their Shadows On The Ground, And The Sound Of The Wind In Them.

All Goes Back To The Earth, And So I Do Not Desire Pride Of Excess Or Power, But The Contentments Made By Men Who Have Had Little: The Fisherman's Silence Receiving The River's Grace, The Gardener's Musing On Rows.

Where Is Our Comfort But In The Free, Uninvolved, Finally Mysterious Beauty And Grace Of This World That We Did Not Make, That Has No Price? Where Is Our Sanity But There? Where Is Our Pleasure But In Working And Resting Kindly In The Presence Of This World? (pg. 215, Economy And Pleasure)

To Cherish What Remains Of The Earth And To Foster Its Renewal Is Our Only Legitimate Hope Of Survival.

To Treat Life As Less Than A Miracle Is To Give Up On It.

Obviously, If Christianity Is Going To Survive As More Than A Respecter And Comforter Of Profitable Inquiries, Then Christians, Regardless Of Their Organizations, Are Going To Have To Interest Themselves In Economy-which Is To Say, In Nature And In Work. They Are Going To Have To Give Workable Answers To Those Who Say We Cannot Live Without This Economy That Is Destroying Us And Our World, Who See The Murder Of Creation As The Only Way Of Life.

Those Who Say Islam Is A Warlike Religion Must Ask If Christianity Has Been As Well.

There Are Two Laws That We Had Better Take To Be Absolute. The First Is That As We Cannot Exempt Ourselves From Living In This World, Then If We Wish To Live, We Cannot Exempt Ourselves From Using The World. If We Cannot Exempt Ourselves From Use, Then We Must Deal With The Issues Raised By Use. And So The Second Law Is That If We Want To Continue Living, We Cannot Exempt Use From Care.

Never Forget: We Are Alive Within Mysteries.

The Most Insistent And Formidable Concern Of Agriculture, Wherever It Is Taken Seriously, Is The Distinct Individuality Of Every Farm, Every Field On Every Farm, Every Farm Family, And Every Creature On Every Farm.

This Massive Ascendancy Of Corporate Power Over Democratic Process Is Probably The Most Ominous Development Since The End Of World War Ii, And For The Most Part "the Free World" Seems To Be Regarding It As Merely Normal.

I Prayed Like A Man Walking In A Forest At Night, Feeling His Way With His Hands, At Each Step Fearing To Fall Into Pure Bottomlessness Forever. Prayer Is Like Lying Awake At Night, Afraid, With Your Head Under The Cover, Hearing Only The Beating Of Your Own Heart.

Young Lovers See A Vision Of The World Redeemed By Love. That Is The Truest Thing They Ever See, For Without It Life Is Death.

Willing To Die You Give Up Your Will; Keep Still, Until Moved By What Moves All Else, You Move.

For Want Of A Pilate Of Their Own, Some Christians Would Accept A Constantine Or Whomever Might Be The Current Incarnation Of Caesar.

We Could Say That The Human Race Is A Great Coauthorship In Which We Are Collaborating With God And Nature In The Making Of Ourselves And One Another. From This There Is No Escape. We May Collaborate Either Well Or Poorly Or We May Refuse To Collaborate, But Even To Refuse To Collaborate Is To Exert An Influence And To Affect The Quality Of The Product. This Is Only A Way Of Saying That By Ourselves We Have No Meaning And No Dignity; By Ourselves We Are Outside The Human Definition, Outside Our Identity.

A Corporation, Essentially, Is A Pile Of Money To Which A Number Of Persons Have Sold Their Moral Allegiance.

Reverence Makes It Possible To Be Whole, Though Ignorant. It Is The Wholeness Of Understanding.

I Have This Love For Mattie. It Was Formed In Me As He Himself Was Formed. It Has His Shape, You Might Say. He Fits It. He Fits Into It As He Fits Into His Clothes. He Will Always Fit Into It. When He Gets Out Of The Car And I Meet Him And Hug Him, There He Is, Him Himself, Something Of My Very Own Forever, And My Love For Him Goes All Around Him Just As It Did When He Was A Baby And A Little Boy And A Young Man Grown.

The Pleasure Of Eating Should Be An Extensive Pleasure, Not That Of The Mere Gourmet. People Who Know The Garden In Which Their Vegetables Have Grown And Know That The Garden Is Healthy Will Remember The Beauty Of The Growing Plants, Perhaps In The Dewy First Light Of Morning When Gardens Are At Their Best. Such A Memory Involves Itself With The Food And Is One Of The Pleasures Of Eating. (pg. 326, The Pleasures Of Eating)

As Long As We Insist On Relating To It Strictly On Our Own Terms-as Strange To Us Or Subject To Us-the Wilderness Is Alien, Threatening, Fearful. We Have No Choice Then But To Become Its Exploiters, And To Lose, By Consequence, Our Place In It. It Is Only When, By Humility, Openness, Generosity, Courage, We Make Ourselves Able To Relate To It On Its Terms That It Ceases To Be Alien.

Want Of Imagination Makes Things Unreal Enough To Be Destroyed. By Imagination I Mean Knowledge And Love. I Mean Compassion. People Of Power Kill Children, The Old Send The Young To Die, Because They Have No Imagination. They Have Power. Can You Have Power And Imagination At The Same Time? Can You Kill People You Don’t Know And Have Compassion For Them At The Same Time?

I Hear From Readers A Good Deal, And I Try To Answer Every Letter. I Think, Because Of My Commitment To Issues Of Conservation And Good Agriculture And Peaceableness, They Find Something Hopeful In My Work.

...and We Pray, Not For New Earth Or Heaven, But To Be Quiet In Heart, And In Eye Clear. What We Need Is Here.

My Wish Simply Is To Live My Life As Fully As I Can. In Both Our Work And Our Leisure, I Think, We Should Be So Employed. And In Our Time This Means That We Must Save Ourselves From The Products That We Are Asked To Buy In Order, Ultimately, To Replace Ourselves.

Education In The True Sense, Of Course, Is An Enablement To Serve-both The Living Human Community In Its Natural Household Or Neighborhood And The Precious Cultural Possessions That The Living Community Inherits Or Should Inherit.

No Matter How Much One May Love The World As A Whole, One Can Live Fully In It Only By Living Responsibly In Some Small Part Of It. Where We Live And Who We Live There With Define The Terms Of Our Relationship To The World And To Humanity. We Thus Come Again To The Paradox That One Can Become Whole Only By The Responsible Acceptance Of One's Partiality.

The "developed" Nations Had Given To The "free Market" The Status Of A God, And Were Sacrificing To It Their Farmers, Farmlands, And Communities, Their Forests, Wetlands, And Prairies, Their Ecosystems And Watersheds. They Had Accepted Universal Pollution And Global Warming As Normal Costs Of Doing Business.

No Wonder So Many Sermons Are Devoted Exclusively To "spiritual" Subjects. If One Is Living By The Tithes Of History's Most Destructive Economy, Then The Disembodiment Of The Soul Becomes The Chief Of Worldly Conveniences.

Waking Up From A Dream Of Violence Is Much The Same As Waking Up From A Dream Of Love. You Must Go On Living Your Life.

If, On The Other Hand, Conservationists Are Willing To Insist On Having The Best Food, Produced In The Best Way, As Close To Their Homes As Possible, And If They Are Willing To Learn To Judge The Quality Of Food And Food Production, Then They Are Going To Give Economic Support To An Entirely Different Kind Of Land Use In An Entirely Different Landscape. This Landscape Will Have A Higher Ratio Of Caretakers To Acres, Of Care To Use. It Will Be At Once More Domestic And More Wild Than The Industrial Landscape.

Monsanto Doesn't Care About Feeding The World. We Have To Think About The Wage Slavery Of Migrant Workers And Salary Slavery Of Those Who Are Desperately Unhappy.

You Cannot Save The Land Apart From The People, Or The People Apart From The Land.

The More Local And Settled A Culture, The Better It Stays Put, The Less The Damage. It Is The Foreigner Whose Road Of Excess Leads To A Desert... A Man With A Machine And Inadequate Culture... Is A Pestilence. He Shakes More Than He Can Hold.

To Live, We Must Daily Break The Body And Shed The Blood Of Creation. When We Do This Knowingly, Lovingly, Skillfully, Reverently, It Is A Sacrament. When We Do It Ignorantly, Greedily, Clumsily, Destructively, It Is A Desecration. In Such Desecration We Condemn Ourselves To Spiritual And Moral Loneliness, And Others To Want.

When I Rise Up, Let Me Rise Up Joyful Like A Bird. When I Fall, Let Me Fall Without Regret Like A Leaf.

The People Who Benefit From This State Of Affairs Have Been At Pains To Convince Us That The Agricultural Practices And Policies That Have Almost Annihilated The Farming Population Have Greatly Benefited The Population Of Food Consumers. But More And More Consumers Are Now Becoming Aware That Our Supposed Abundance Of Cheap And Healthful Food Is To A Considerable Extent Illusory.

You've Got To Reach Towards A Better Language, And You're Not Going To Make It Up From Scratch; You've Got To Reach Back Into The Tradition. Western Tradition Is Not As Impoverished As A Lot Of People Would Like To Think, But You'd Have To Go Back Before The Industrial Revolution; You May Have To Go Back Farther Than That. Of Course, The Bible Has A Perfectly Adequate Language, But It's Suffered A Lot Of Thoughtless Wear.

Without Prosperous Local Economies, The People Have No Power And The Land No Voice.

Unexpected Wonders Happen, Not On Schedule, Or When You Expect Or Want Them To Happen, But If You Keep Hanging Around, They Do Happen.

After A While, Though The Grief Did Not Go Away From Us, It Grew Quiet. What Had Seemed A Storm Wailing Through The Entire Darkness Seemed To Come In At Last And Lie Down.

We Clasp The Hands Of Those Who Go Before Us.

The Language That Reveals Also Obscures.

I Thought, He Must Forebear To Reveal His Power And Glory By Presenting Himself As Himself, And Must Be Present Only In The Ordinary Miracle Of The Existence Of His Creatures. Those Who Wish To See Him Must See Him In The Poor, The Hungry, The Hurt, The Wordless Creatures, The Groaning And Travailing Beautiful World.

At The Window He Sits And Looks Out, Musing On The River, A Little Brown Hen Duck Paddling Upstream Among The Windwaves Close To The Far Bank. What He Has Understood Lies Behind Him Like A Road In The Woods. He Is A Wilderness Looking Out At The Wild.

It Is Wrong To Condemn People For Doing A Thing And Then Offer No Alternative But Failure. A Person Could Get Mad About That.

We Live Beyond Words, As Also We Live Beyond Computation And Beyond Theory.

We Conservatives Bemoan The Decline In Values That Has Besieged Our Society. Why Then Should We Not Abhor The Lack Of Morality Involved In Discharging Untested Chemicals Into The Air, Ground, And Water To Alter And Harm, To Whatever Degree, Human Life And Wildlife? As A Conservative, I Do Abhor It.

Any Religion Has To Have A Practice. When You Let It Go So Far From Practice That It Just Becomes A Matter Of Talk Something Bad Happens.

Physical Health Doesn't Exist Apart From The Health Of Other Things. Health Ultimately Involves The Community, And The Community Ultimately Involves The Place And Natural Life Of That Place, So That Real Health Is Harmony With The World.

I Am Not Bound For Any Public Place, But For Ground Of My Own Where I Have Planted Vines And Orchard Trees, And In The Heat Of The Day Climbed Up Into The Healing Shadow Of The Woods.

The World Is Not Given By Our Fathers But Borrowed From Our Children.

Violence Breeds Violence. Acts Of Violence Committed In "justice" Or In Affirmation Of "rights" Or In Defense Of "peace" Do Not End Violence. They Prepare And Justify Its Continuation.

But We Can Do Nothing For The Human Future That We Will Not Do For The Human Present. For The Amelioration Of The Future Condition Of Our Kind We Must Look, Not To The Wealth Or The Genius Of The Coming Generations, But To The Quality Of The Disciplines And Attitudes That We Are Preparing Now For Their Use.

Invest In The Millennium. Plant Sequoias. Say That Your Main Crop Is The Forest That You Did Not Plant, That You Will Not Live To Harvest.

Again I Resume The Long Lesson: How Small A Thing Can Be Pleasing, How Little In This Hard World It Takes To Satisfy The Mind And Bring It To Its Rest.

When Humans Act Like Animals, They Become The Most Dangerous Of Animals To Themselves And Other Humans, And This Is Because Of Another Critical Difference Between Humans And Animals: Whereas Animals Are Usually Restrained By The Limits Of Physical Appetites, Humans Have Mental Appetites That Can Be Far More Gross And Capacious Than Physical Ones. Only Humans Squander And Hoard, Murder And Pillage Because Of Notions.

A Significant Part Of The Pleasure Of Eating Is In One’s Accurate Consciousness Of The Lives And The World From Which Food Comes.

Some Nights In The Midst Of This Loneliness I Swung Among The Scattered Stars At The End Of The Thin Thread Of Faith Alone.

You Can't Live Entirely Alone. You Have To Have Some Kind Of A Support System.

Support Systems

To Be Well Used, Creatures And Places Must Be Used Sympathetically, Just As They Must Be Known Sympathetically To Be Well Known...the "animal Scientist" To Whom It Is Of No Concern Whether Or Not Animals Suffer Will Almost Inevitably Aid And Abet The Destruction Of The Decent Old Ideal Of Animal Husbandry And, As A Consequence, Increase The Suffering Of Animals. I Hope That My Country May Be Delivered From The Remote, Cold Abstractions Of University Science.

The Constructions Of Language, Which Is To Say The Constructions Of Thought, Are Formed Within Experience, Not The Other Way Around.

We Have Forgotten That Vietnam, And Iraq Resent Being Invaded And Know The Ground Better Than We Do.

The Good Of The Whole Of Creation, The World And All Its Creatures Together, Is Never A Consideration Because It Is Never Thought Of; Our Culture Now Simply Lacks The Means For Thinking Of It.

The Acquisition Of Knowledge Always Involves The Revelation Of Ignorance-almost Is The Revelation Of Ignorance.

Love Is What Carries You, For It Is Always There, Even In The Dark, Or Most In The Dark, But Shining Out At Times Like Gold Stitches In A Piece Of Embroidery.

So, Friends, Every Day Do Something That Won't Compute. Love The Lord. Love The World. Work For Nothing. Take All That You Have And Be Poor. Love Someone Who Does Not Deserve It. Denounce The Government And Embrace The Flag. Hope To Live In That Free Republic For Which It Stands.

Much Of Our Waste Problem Is To Be Accounted For By The Intentional Flimsiness And Unrepairability Of The Labor-savers And Gadgets That We Have Become Addicted To.

Praise Ignorance, For What Man Has Not Encountered He Has Not Destroyed.

The Most Available Example Of How Poetry Works For A Poet Is Yourself, And Yet You'll Probably Be The Last One To Know Exactly How You're Serving The Art And How The Art Is Serving You.

Our Politics And Science Have Never Mastered The Fact That People Need More Than To Understand Their Obligation To One Another And To The Earth; They Need Also The Feeling Of Such Obligation, And The Feeling Can Come Only Within The Patterns Of Familiarity. A Nation Of Urban Nomads, Such As We Have Become, May Simply Be Unable To Be Enough Disturbed By Its Destruction Of The Ecological Health Of The Land, Because The People's Dependence On The Land, Though It Has Been Expounded To Them Over And Over Again In General Terms, Is Not Immediate To Their Feelings.

We Need Better Government, No Doubt About It. But We Also Need Better Minds, Better Friendships, Better Marriages, Better Communities.

Condemnation By Category Is The Lowest Form Of Hatred, For It Is Cold-hearted And Abstract, Lacking Even The Courage Of A Personal Hatred.

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Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

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