Background Image

...

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.

-Wendell Berry

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

In Kentucky, We're Destroying

Wendell Berry

...

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.

Views: 83358

Topic

More From Wendell Berry

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.

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.

This Is A Book About Heaven. I Know It Now. It Floats Among Us Like A Cloud And Is The Realest Thing We Know And The Least To Be Captured, The Least To Be Possessed By Anybody For Himself. It Is Like A Grain Of Mustard Seed, Which You Cannot See Among The Crumbs Of Earth Where It Lies. It Is Like The Reflection Of The Trees On The Water.

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.

The Only Sustainable City - And This, To Me, Is The Indispensable Ideal And Goal - Is A City In Balance With Its Countryside.

We Are Living In The Most Destructive And, Hence, The Most Stupid Period Of The History Of Our Species.

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.

Eating Is An Agricultural Act. Eating Ends The Annual Drama Of The Food Economy That Begins With Planting And Birth. Most Eaters, However, Are No Longer Aware That This Is True. They Think Of Food As An Agricultural Product, Perhaps, But They Do Not Think Of Themselves As Participants In Agriculture. They Think Of Themselves As 'consumers.'

All We Can Do To Prepare Rightly For Tomorrow Is To Do The Right Thing Today.

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.

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 World Is So Full And Abundant It Is Like A Pregnant Woman Carrying A Child In One Arm And Leading Another By The Hand. Every Puddle In The Lane Is Ringed With Sipping Butterflied That Fly Up In Flutter When You Walk Past In The Late Morning On Your Way To Get The Mail.

Professional Standards, The Standards Of Ambition And Selfishness, Are Always Sliding Downward Toward Expense, Ostentation, And Mediocrity. They Tend Always To Narrow The Ground Of Judgment. But Amateur Standards, The Standards Of Love, Are Always Straining Upward Toward The Humble And The Best. They Enlarge The Ground Of Judgment. The Context Of Love Is The World.

But Our Waste Problem Is Not The Fault Only Of Producers. It Is The Fault Of An Economy That Is Wasteful From Top To Bottom-a Symbiosis Of An Unlimited Greed At The Top And A Lazy, Passive, And Self-indulgent Consumptiveness At The Bottom-and All Of Us Are Involved In It.

When Going Back Makes Sense, You Are Going Ahead.

Give Your Approval To All You Cannot Understand.

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

Sabbath Observance Invites Us To Stop. It Invites Us To Rest. It Asks Us To Notice That While We Rest, The World Continues Without Our Help. It Invites Us To Delight In The World's Beauty And Abundance.

It's Mighty Hard Right Now To Think Of Anything That's Precious That Isn't Endangered. There Are No Sacred And Unsacred Places; There Are Only Sacred And Desecrated Places. My Belief Is That The World And Our Life In It Are Conditional Gifts.

The Assumption Is That People So Ignorant And Thoughtless And Silly And Greedy May Simply Call Upon The Army Corps Of Engineers In Order To Receive A Clean And Abundant Supply Of Water From Reservoirs In The Mountains. A Much Likelier Outcome Is That They Will Be Drinking An Ever Stronger Mixture Of Sewage And Mine Acid And Mud And Cropspray And Various Other Defecations Of The Industrial Paradise.

Let Me Say And Not Mourn: The World Lives In The Death Of Speech And Sings There.

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.

For The True Measure Of Agriculture Is Not The Sophistication Of Its Equipment The Size Of Its Income Or Even The Statistics Of Its Productivity But The Good Health Of The Land.

To Go In The Dark With A Light Is To Know The Light. To Know The Dark, Go Dark. Go Without Sight, And Find That The Dark, Too, Blooms And Sings, And Is Traveled By Dark Feet And Dark Wings.

The World Is Whole Beyond Human Knowing.

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.

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.

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.

What Could Be More Superstitious Than The Idea That Money Brings Forth Food?

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

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

The Soil Under The Grass Is Dreaming Of A Young Forest, And Under The Pavement The Soil Is Dreaming Of Grass.

It Is Understood That Nonhuman Creatures Adapt To Their Places Or They Don't Live. And For Some Reason That I Can't Figure Out, Even The Biologists Have Excused Our Own Species From That Obligation. I Think There's Going To Be A Biological Penalty To Be Paid For That Eventually.

There Comes . . . A Longing Never To Travel Again Except On Foot.

It Is To Be Broken. It Is To Be Torn Open. It Is Not To Be Reached And Come To Rest In Ever. I Turn Against You, I Break From You, I Turn To You. We Hurt, And Are Hurt, And Have Each Other For Healing. It Is Healing. It Is Never Whole.

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

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.

I Think The Issues Of Identity Mostly Are Poppycock. We Are What We Have Done, Which Includes Our Promises, Includes Our Hopes, But Promises First.

To Work Without Pleasure Or Affection, To Make A Product That Is Not Both Useful And Beautiful, Is To Dishonor God, Nature, The Thing That Is Made, And Whomever It Is Made For.

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

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.

To Defend What We Love We Need A Particularizing Language, For We Love What We Particularly Know.

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")

Charity Even For One Person Does Not Make Sense Except In Terms Of An Effort To Love All Creation In Response To The Creator's Love For It.

Eaters Must Understand That Eating Takes Place Inescapably In The World, That It Is Inescapably An Agricultural Act, And That How We Eat Determines, To A Considerable Extent, How The World Is Used.

People Are Always Talking About The First Church. The Real First Church Was That Gaggle Of People Who Followed Jesus Around. We Don't Know Anything About Them. But He Apparently Didn't Ask Them What Creed They Subscribed To, Or What Their Sexual Preference Was, Or Any Of That. He Fed Them. He Healed Them. He Forgave Them. He Is Clear About Sin, But He Was Also For Forgiveness.

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.

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

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.

We Do Not Need To Plan Or Devise A "world Of The Future"; If We Take Care Of The World Of The Present, The Future Will Have Received Full Justice From Us. A Good Future Is Implicit In The Soils, Forests, Grasslands, Marshes, Deserts, Mountains, Rivers, Lakes, And Oceans That We Have Now, And In The Good Things Of Human Culture That We Have Now; The Only Valid "futurology" Available To Us Is To Take Care Of Those Things. We Have No Need To Contrive And Dabble At "the Future Of The Human Race"; We Have The Same Pressing Need That We Have Always Had - To Love, Care For, And Teach Our Children.

So, Friends, Every Day Do Something That Won't Compute...give Your Approval To All You Cannot Understand...ask The Questions That Have No Answers. Put Your Faith In Two Inches Of Humus That Will Build Under The Trees Every Thousand Years...laugh. Be Joyful Though You Have Considered All The Facts....practice Resurrection.

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

The Economy Is Still Substantially That Of The Fur Trade, Still Based On The Same General Kinds Of Commercial Items: Technology, Weapons, Ornaments, Novelties, And Drugs. The One Great Difference Is That By Now The Revolution Has Deprived The Mass Of Consumers Of Any Independent Access To The Staples Of Life: Clothing, Shelter, Food, Even Water. Air Access Remains The Only Necessity That The Average User Can Still Get For Himself, And The Revolution Has Imposed A Heavy Tax On That By Way Of Pollution. Commercial Conquest Is Far More Thorough And Final Than Military Defeat.

Nobody Can Discover The World For Somebody Else. Only When We Discover It For Ourselves Does It Become Common Ground And A Common Bond And We Cease To Be Alone.

I Don't Think I Had Even Begun To Have An Idea Where I Was Going, But Wherever It Was, That Was Where I Wanted To Go.

You're Making The Grant Of Affection, Forbearance, Mercy, Out Of Your Own Experience And, Of Course, Out Of Cultural Tradition. You're Saying, To Use The Well-worn Analogy, If I Love My Children, That Puts Me Under Obligation To Assume That Other People Love Theirs.

We Can Say Without Exaggeration That The Present National Ambition Of The United States Is Unemployment. People Live For Quitting Time, For Weekends, For Vacations, And For Retirement; Moreover, This Ambition Seems To Be Classless, As True In The Executive Suites As On The Assembly Lines. One Works Not Because The Work Is Necessary, Valuable, Useful To A Desirable End, Or Because One Loves To Do It, But Only To Be Able To Quit - A Condition That A Saner Time Would Regard As Infernal, A Condemnation.

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.

O Thou, Far Off And Here, Whole And Broken, Who In Necessity And In Bounty Wait, Whose Truth Is Light And Dark, Mute Though Spoken, By Thy Wide Grace Show Me Thy Narrow Gate.

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.

Thinking Is The Most Overrated Human Activity.

The Difference Between A Path And A Road Is Not Only The Obvious One. A Path Is Little More Than A Habit That Comes With Knowledge Of A Place. It Is A Sort Of Ritual Of Familiarity. As A Form, It Is A Form Of Contact With A Known Landscape. It Is Not Destructive. It Is The Perfect Adaptation, Through Experience And Familiarity, Of Movement To Place; It Obeys The Natural Contours; Such Obstacles As It Meets It Goes Around.

... It Is Not A Crisis Of Our Environs Or Surroundings; It Is A Crisis Of Our Lives As Individuals, As Family Members, As Community Members, And As Citizens. We Have An 'environmental Crisis' Because We Have Consented To An Economy In Which By Eating, Drinking, Working, Resting, Traveling, And Enjoying Ourselves We Are Destroying The Natural, God-given World.

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

Action Can Only Be Understood In Relation To Place; Only By Staying In Place Can The Imagination Conceive Or Understand Action In Terms Of Consequence, Of Cause And Effect. The Meaning Of Action In Time Is Inseparable From Its Meaning In Place.

We're Living, It Seems, In The Culmination Of A Long Warfare - Warfare Against Human Beings, Other Creatures And The Earth Itself.

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

To Be Patient In An Emergency Is A Terrible Trial.

To Go In The Dark With A Light Is To Know The Light. To Know The Dark, Go Dark.

Under The Rule Of The "free Market" Ideology, We Have Gone Through Two Decades Of An Energy Crisis Without An Effective Energy Policy. Because Of An Easy And Thoughtless Reliance On Imported Oil, We Have No Adequate Policy For The Conservation Of Gasoline And Other Petroleum Products. We Have No Adequate Policy For The Development Or Use Of Other, Less Harmful Forms Of Energy. We Have No Adequate System Of Public Transportation.

If We Do Not Serve What Coheres And Endures, We Serve What Disintegrates And Destroys.

Only The Action That Is Moved By Love For The Good At Hand Has The Hope Of Being Responsible And Generous.

To Be Sane In A Mad Time Is Bad For The Brain, Worse For The Heart.

Once Plants And Animals Were Raised Together On The Same Farm - Which Therefore Neither Produced Unmanageable Surpluses Of Manure, To Be Wasted And To Pollute The Water Supply, Nor Depended On Such Quantities Of Commercial Fertilizer. The Genius Of American Farm Experts Is Very Well Demonstrated Here: They Can Take A Solution And Divide It Neatly Into Two Problems.

Our Land Passes In And Out Of Our Bodies Just As Our Bodies Pass In And Out Of Our Land

Humans, Like All Other Creatures, Must Make A Difference; Otherwise, They Cannot Live. But Unlike Other Creatures, Humans Must Make A Choice As To The Kind And Scale Of Difference They Make. If They Choose To Make Too Small A Difference, They Diminish Their Humanity. If They Choose To Make Too Great A Difference, They Diminish Nature, And Narrow Their Subsequent Choices; Ultimately, They Diminish Or Destroy Themselves. Nature, Then, Is Not Only Our Source But Also Our Limit And Measure.

It Would Not Do For The Consumer To Know That The Hamburger She Is Eating Came From A Steer Who Spent Much Of His Life Standing Deep In His Own Excrement In A Feedlot, Helping To Pollute The Local Streams. Or That The Calf That Yielded The Veal Cutlet On Her Plate Spent Its Life In A Box In Which It Did Not Have Room To Turn Around.

When The Mind's An Empty Room The Clear Days Come.

With Its Array Of Gadgets And Machines, All Powered By Energies That Are Destructive Of Land Or Air Or Water, And Connected To Work, Market, School, Recreation, Etc., By Gasoline Engines, The Modern Home Is A Veritable Factory Of Waste And Destruction. It Is The Mainstay Of The Economy Of Money. But Within The Economies Of Energy And Nature, It Is A Catastrophe. It Takes In The World's Goods And Converts Them Into Garbage, Sewage, And Noxious Fumes-for None Of Which Have We Found A Use.

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.

When Despair For The World Grows In Me And I Wake In The Night At The Least Sound In Fear Of What My Life And My Children's Lives May Be, I Go And Lie Down Where The Wood Drake Rests In His Beauty On The Water, And The Great Heron Feeds. I Come Into The Peace Of Wild Things Who Do Not Tax Their Lives With Forethought Of Grief. 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.

If You Eat, You Are Involved In Agriculture.

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

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

One Of The Strongest Of Contemporary Conventions Is That Of Comparing To Thoreau Every Writer Who Has Been As Far Out Of The House As The Mailbox.

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.

Geese Appear High Over Us, / Pass, And The Sky Closes. Abandon, / As In Love Or Sleep, Holds Them To Their Way, Clear / In The Ancient Faith: What We Need / Is Here. And We Pray, Not / For New Earth Or Heaven, But To Be / Quiet In Heart, And In Eye, / Clear. What We Need Is Here.

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

Our Destruction Of Nature Is Not Just Bad Stewardship, Or Stupid Economics, Or A Betrayal Of Family Responsibility; It Is The Most Horrid Blasphemy. It Is Flinging God's Gifts Into His Face, As If They Were Of No Worth Beyond That Assigned To Them By Our Destruction Of Them.

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

The Consumer Wants Food To Be As Cheap As Possible. The Producer Wants It To Be As Expensive As Possible. Both Want It To Involve As Little Labor As Possible. And So The Standards Of Cheapness And Convenience, Which Are Irresistibly Simplifying And Therefore Inevitably Exploitive, Have Been Substituted For The Standard Of Health (of Both People And Land), Which Would Enforce Consideration Of Essential Complexities.

The Life We Want Is Not Merely The One We Have Chosen And Made. It Is The One We Must Be Choosing And Making

The Worst Example Of Rural Poverty Is That Of Migrant Farm Workers. They Have No Permanent Jobs, So They Have No Equity In The Places Where They Work. They're Not Shareholders, Let Alone Entrepreneurs. They're Not Small Farmers, They're Not Market Gardeners, They're Just Temporary - Uprooted, Isolated, Easily Exploitable People.

Good Farmers, Who Take Seriously Their Duties As Stewards Of Creation And Of Their Land's Inheritors, Contribute To The Welfare Of Society In More Ways Than Society Usually Acknowledges, Or Even Knows. These Farmers Produce Valuable Goods, Of Course; But They Also Conserve Soil, They Conserve Water, They Conserve Wildlife, They Conserve Open Space, They Conserve Scenery.

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.

We Clasp The Hands Of Those Who Go Before Us, And The Hands Of Those Who Come After Us; We Enter The Little Circle Of Each Other's Arms, And The Larger Circle Of Lovers Whose Hands Are Joined In A Dance, And The Larger Circle Of All Creatures, Passing In And Out Of Life, Who Move Also In A Dance, To A Music So Subtle And Vast That No Ear Hears It Except In Fragments.

Invest In The Millennium. Plant Sequoias.

We Learn From Our Gardens To Deal With The Most Urgent Question Of The Time: How Much Is Enough?

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.

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

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

I Would Consider Myself Simply A Critic Of The Market Economy. My Standard Isn't Primarily Political. First Of All, It's Ecological. And Then I Get To Matters That Are Social And Cultural.

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.

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.

If The Crop Of Any One Year Was All, A Man Would Have To Cut His Throat Every Time It Hailed.

Properly Speaking, Global Thinking Is Not Possible... Look At One Of Those Photographs Of Half The Earth Taken From Outer Space, And See If You Recognize Your Neighborhood. The Right Local Questions And Answers Will Be The Right Global Ones. The Amish Question, What Will This Do To Our Community? Tends Toward The Right Answer For The World.

Battle With Unconditioned Breath The Unconditioned Air. Shun Electric Wire. Communicate Slowly. Live A Three-dimensional Life; Stay Away From Screens.

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

If We Are Serious About Peace, Then We Must Work For It As Ardently, Seriously, Continuously, Carefully, And Bravely As We Have Ever Prepared For War.

Under The Pavement The Dirt Is Dreaming Of Grass.

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 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.

Love Changes, And In Change Is True.

It's Impossible To Contemplate The Life Of Soil Very Long Without Seeing Its Analogy To The Life Of The Spirit.

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 Walked Always In Beauty, It Seemed To Me. We Walked And Looked About, Or Stood And Looked. Sometimes, Less Often, We Would Sit Down. We Did Not Often Speak. The Place Spoke For Us And Was A Kind Of Speech. We Spoke To Each Other In The Things We Saw.

Especially Among Christians In Positions Of Wealth And Power, The Idea Of Reading The Gospels And Keeping Jesus' Commandments As Stated Therein Has Been Replaced By A Curious Process Of Logic. According To This Process, People First Declare Themselves To Be Followers Of Christ, And Then They Assume That Whatever They Say Or Do Merits The Adjective "christian".

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.

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

To Accept That There Is Nothing To Do Is To Despair. It Is To Become In Some Fundamental Way Less Than Human. Those Of Us Who Are Protesting Are Protesting In Part For Our Own Sake To Keep Ourselves Whole As Human Beings.

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.

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

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.

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 Who Does Not Ask To Much Become The Promise Of His Land. His Marriage Married To His Place, He Waits And Does Not Stray.

A Good Community Insures Itself By Trust, By Good Faith And Good Will, By Mutual Help. A Good Community, In Other Words, Is A Good Local Economy.

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.

Returning From The Wilderness A Man Becomes A Restorer Of Order, A Preserver. He Sees The Truth, Recognizes His True Heir, Honors His Forbears And His Heritage, And Gives His Blessing To His Successors. He Embodies The Passing Of Human Time, Living And Dying Within The Human Limits Of Grief And Joy.

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.

To Me, An Economy That Sees The Life Of A Community Or A Place As Expendable, And Reckons Its Value Only In Terms Of Money, Is Not Acceptable Because It Is Not Realistic. I Am Thinking As I Believe We Must Think If We Wish To Discuss The Best Uses Of People, Places, And Things, And If We Wish To Give Affection Some Standing In Our Thoughts.

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.

Be Joyful Because It Is Humanly Possible.

To Love Anything Good, At Any Cost, Is A Bargain.

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

We Are Living Even Now Among Punishments And Ruins.

We Need To Confront Honestly The Issue Of Scale... You May Need A Large Corporation To Run An Airline Or To Manufacture Cars, But You Don't Need A Large Corporation To Raise A Chicken Or A Hog. You Don't Need A Large Corporation To Process Local Food Or Local Timber And Market It Locally.

The Most Alarming Sign Of The State Of Our Society Now Is That Our Leaders Have The Courage To Sacrifice The Lives Of Young People In War But Have Not The Courage To Tell Us That We Must Be Less Greedy And Wasteful.

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.

There Are Moments When The Heart Is Generous, And Then It Knows That For Better Or Worse Our Lives Are Woven Together Here, One With One Another And With The Place And All The Living Things.

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

The Living Can't Quit Living Because The World Has Turned Terrible And People They Love And Need Are Killed. They Can't Because They Don't. The Light That Shines Into Darkness And Never Goes Out Calls Them On Into Life. It Calls Them Back Again Into The Great Room. It Calls Them Into Their Bodies And Into The World, Into Whatever The World Will Require. It Calls Them Into Work And Pleasure, Goodness And Beauty, And The Company Of Other Loved Ones.

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?

As I Understand It, I Am Being Paid Only For My Work In Arranging The Words; My Property Is That Arrangement. The Thoughts In This Book, On The Contrary, Are Not Mine. They Came Freely To Me, And I Give Them Freely Away. I Have No "intellectual Property," And I Think That All Claimants To Such Property Are Theives.

Invest In The Millenium.

Having Hope Is Hard; Harder When You Get Older.

American Agriculture Is Badly In Need Of Diversity. Another Threat To The Food System Of Course Is The Likelihood That Petroleum Is Not Going To Get Any Cheaper.

The Passive American Consumer, Sitting Down To A Meal Of Pre-prepared Food, Confronts Inert, Anonymous Substances That Have Been Processed, Dyed, Breaded, Sauced, Gravied, Ground, Pulped, Strained, Blended, Prettified, And Sanitized Beyond Resemblance To Any Part Of Any Creature That Ever Lived. The Products Of Nature And Agriculture Have Been Made, To All Appearances, The Products Of Industry. Both Eater And Eaten Are Thus In Exile From Biological Reality.

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.

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

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.

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

History Overflows Time. Love Overflows The Allowance Of The World. All The Vessels Overflow, And No End Or Limit Stays Put. Every Shakable Thing Has Got To Be Shaken. In A Sense, Nothing That Was Ever Lost In Port William Ever Has Been Replaced. In Another Sense, Nothing Is Ever Lost, And We Are Compacted Together Forever, Even By Our Failures, Our Regrets, And Our Longings.

The Securest Guarantee Of The Long-term Good Health Of Both Farmland And City Is, I Believe, Locally Produced Food.

To Define Knowledge As Merely Empirical Is To Limit One's Ability To Know; It Enfeebles One's Ability To Feel And Think.

A Change Of Heart Or Of Values Without A Practice Is Only Another Pointless Luxury Of A Passively Consumptive Way Of Life.

Analogies Have Tied Things Together For Me, Personally. The Fundamental One For Me Is The Analogy Between Your Relationship To Your Spouse And Your Relationship To Your Place. Both Need To Be A Settled Commitment And Both Involve Continuous Learning And Adjusting.

The World, Which God Looked At And Found Entirely Good, We Find None Too Good To Pollute Entirely And Destroy Piecemeal.

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... What I Am Saying Is That If We Apply Our Minds Directly And Competently To The Needs Of The Earth, Then We Will Have Begun To Make Fundamental And Necessary Changes In Our Minds. We Will Begin To Understand And To Mistrust And To Change Our Wasteful Economy, Which Markets Not Just The Produce Of Earth, But Also The Earth's Ability To Produce.

It's The Impeded Stream That Sings

The Rule, Acknowledged Or Not, Seems To Be That If We Have Great Power We Must Use It. We Would Use A Steam Shovel To Pick Up A Dime. We Have Experts Who Can Prove There Is No Other Way To Do It.

It Is No More Possible To Live In The Future Than It Is To Live In The Past. If Life Is Not Now, It Is Never.

The Fertility Cycle Is A Cycle Entirely Of Living Creatures Passing Again And Again Through Birth, Growth, Maturity, Death, And Decay.

Sit And Be Still Until In The Time Of No Rain You Hear Beneath The Dry Wind's Commotion In The Trees The Sound Of Flowing Water Among The Rocks, A Stream Unheard Before, And You Are Where Breathing Is Prayer.

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.

I Would Like You To Show Me, If You Can, Where The Line Can Be Drawn Between An Organism And It's Environment. The Environment Is In You. It's Passing Through You. You're Breathing It In And Out. You And Every Other Creature.

I Go Among Trees And Sit Still. All My Stirring Becomes Quiet Around Me Like Circles On Water. My Tasks Lie In Their Places Where I Left Them, Asleep Like Cattle... Then What I Am Afraid Of Comes. I Live For A While In Its Sight. What I Fear In It Leaves It, And The Fear Of It Leaves Me. It Sings, And I Hear Its Song.

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.

A Sustainable Agriculture Does Not Deplete Soils Or People.

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.

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...

If Conservationists Will Attempt To Resume Responsibility For Their Need To Eat, They Will Be Led Back Fairly Directly To All Their Previous Concerns For The Welfare Of Nature.

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")

We Are Far More Concerned About The Desecration Of The Flag Than We Are About The Desecration Of Our Land.

When The Self Is Ones Exclusive Subject And Limit, Reference And Measure, One Has No Choice But To Make A World Of Words.

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

And Having Thoughtlessly Polluted Our Streams And Rivers, We Have Seen In Recent Years A Rapidly Growing Market For Bottled Drinking Water. I Am Sure That Some Will Say That A Rapidly Growing Market For Water Is "good For The Economy," And Most Of Us Are Still Affluent Enough To Pay The Cost. Nevertheless, It Is A Considerable Cost That We Are Now Paying For Drinkable Water, Which We Once Had In Plentiful Supply At Little Cost Or None At All. And The Increasing Of The Cost Suggests That The Time May Come When The Cost Will Be Unaffordable.

Our Most Serious Problem, Perhaps, Is That We Have Become A Nation Of Fantasists. We Believe, Apparently, In The Infinite Availability Of Finite Resources.

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

Why I Am Not Going To Buy A Computer

Living Without Expectations Is Hard But, When You Can Do It, Good. Living Without Hope Is Harder, And That Is Bad. You Have Got To Have Hope, And You Must'nt Shirk It. Love, After All, Hopeth All Things. But Maybe You Must Learn, And It Is Hard Learning, Not To Hope Out Loud, Especially For Other People. You Must Not Let Your Hope Turn Into Expectation.

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.

Don't Pray For The Rain To Stop; Pray For Good Luck Fishing When The River Floods.

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.

But The Sower Going Forth To Sow Sets Foot Into Time To Come, The Seeds Falling On His Own Place. He Has Prepared A Way For His Life To Come To Him, If It Will. Like A Tree, He Has Given Roots To The Earth, And Stands Free.

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

Novelty Is A New Kind Of Loneliness.

The Language That Reveals Also Obscures.

The Two Great Aims Of Industrialism — Replacement Of People By Technology And Concentration Of Wealth Into The Hands Of A Small Plutocracy — Seem Close To Fulfillment.

What I Stand For Is What I Stand On.

...i Was A Young Man. I Hardly Knew What I Knew, Let Alone What I Was Going To Know.

To The Extent That We Consume, In Our Present Circumstances, We Are Guilty. To The Extent That We Guilty Consumers Are Conservationists, We Are Absurd. But What Can We Do? Must We Go On Writing Letters To Politicians And Donating To Conservation Organizations Until The Majority Of Our Fellow Citizens Agree With Us? Or Can We Do Something Directly To Solve Our Share Of The Problem? I Am A Conservationist. I Believe Wholeheartedly In Putting Pressure On The Politicians And In Maintaining The Conservation Organizations.

Odd As I Am Sure It Will Appear To Some, I Can Think Of No Better Form Of Personal Involvement In The Cure Of The Environment Than That Of Gardening. A Person Who Is Growing A Garden, If He Is Growing It Organically, Is Improving A Piece Of The World. He Is Producing Something To Eat, Which Makes Him Somewhat Independent Of The Grocery Business, But He Is Also Enlarging, For Himself, The Meaning Of Food And The Pleasure Of Eating.

We Still (sometimes) Remember That We Cannot Be Free If Our Minds And Voices Are Controlled By Someone Else. But We Have Neglected To Understand That We Cannot Be Free If Our Food And Its Sources Are Controlled By Someone Else. The Condition Of The Passive Consumer Of Food Is Not A Democratic Condition. One Reason To Eat Responsibly Is To Live Free. (pg. 323, The Pleasures Of Eating)

I’ve Been Thinking About That Question About What City People Can Do. The Main Thing Is To Realize That Country People Can’t Invent A Better Agriculture By Ourselves. Industrial Agriculture Wasn’t Invented By Us, And We Can’t Uninvent It. We’ll Need Some Help With That.

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.

The Two Ideas, Justice And Vocation, Are Inseparable.... It Is By Way Of The Principle And Practice Of Vocation That Sanctity And Reverence Enter Into The Human Economy. It Was Thus Possible For Traditional Cultures To Conceive That "to Work Is To Pray." (pg. 258, The Idea Of A Local Economy)

An Art That Heals And Protects Its Subject Is A Geography Of Scars.

The Ecological Principle In Agriculture Is To Connect The Genius Of The Place, To Fit The Farming To The Farm.

It May Be That When We No Longer Know What To Do, We Have Come To Our Real Work, And That When We No Longer Know Which Way To Go, We Have Begun Our Real Journey.

Trending Author

Bernhard Schlink

James Whitcomb Riley

Category