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Outdoors We Are Confronted Everywhere With Wonders; We See That The Miraculous Is Not Extraordinary, But The Common Mode Of Existence. It Is Our Daily Bread.

-Wendell Berry

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Outdoors We Are Confronted

Wendell Berry

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Outdoors We Are Confronted Everywhere With Wonders; We See That The Miraculous Is Not Extraordinary, But The Common Mode Of Existence. It Is Our Daily Bread.

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The Connections Between People And Land Are Dangerously Oversimplified And Mainly Technological.

I Think Of The Old Slavery, And Of The Way The Economy Has Now Improved Upon It. The New Slavery Has Improved Upon The Old By Giving The New Slaves The Illusion That They Are Free. The Economy Does Not Take People's Freedom By Force, Which Would Be Against Its Principles, For It Is Very Humane. It Buys Their Freedom, Pays For It, And Then Persuades Its Money Back Again With Shoddy Goods And The Promise Of Freedom. "buy A Car," It Says, "and Be Free. Buy A Boat And Be Free." Is This Not The Raw Material Of Bad Dreams? Or Is It Maybe The Very Nightmare Itself?

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.

Individualism Is Going Around These Days In Uniform, Handing Out The Party Line On Individualism.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Discussion About Food Doesn't Make Any Sense Without Discussion At The Same Time Of Land, Land Use, Land Policy, Fertility Maintenance, And Farm Infrastructure Maintenance.

They Will Grow, Deliver, And Cook Your Food For You And (just Like Your Mother) Beg You To Eat It. That They Do Not Yet Offer To Insert It, Pre-chewed, Into Your Mouth Is Only Because They Have Found No Profitable Way To Do So.

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

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

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

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.

Love The Quick Profit, The Annual Raise, Vacation With Pay. Want More Of Everything Ready-made. Be Afraid To Know Your Neighbors And To Die. And You Will Have A Window In Your Head. Not Even Your Future Will Be A Mystery Any More. Your Mind Will Be Punched In A Card And Shut Away In A Little Drawer. When They Want You To Buy Something They Will Call You. When They Want You To Die For Profit They Will Let You Know.

The Great Enemy Of Freedom Is The Alignment Of Political Power With Wealth. This Alignment Destroys The Commonwealth - That Is, The Natural Wealth Of Localities And The Local Economies Of Household, Neighborhood, And Community - And So Destroys Democracy, Of Which The Commonwealth Is The Foundation And Practical Means.

In The Loss Of Skill, We Lose Stewardship; In Losing Stewardship We Lose Fellowship; We Become Outcasts From The Great Neighborhood Of Creation. It Is Possible - As Our Experience In This Good Land Shows - To Exile Ourselves From Creation, And To Ally Ourselves With The Principle Of Destruction - Which Is, Ultimately, The Principle Of Nonentity. It Is To Be Willing In General For Being To Not-be. And Once We Have Allied Ourselves With That Principle, We Are Foolish To Think That We Can Control The Results. (pg. 303, The Gift Of Good Land)

Perhaps All The Good That Ever Has Come Here Has Come Because People Prayed It Into The World.

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.

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.

The Surface Of The Quieted River, As I Think Now, Is Like A Window Looking Into Another World That Is Like This One Except That It Is Quiet. Its Quietness Makes It Seem Perfect. The Ripples Are Like The Slates Of A Blind Of A Shutter Through Which We See Imperfectly What Is Perfect. Though That Other World Can Be Seen Only Momentarily, It Looks Everlasting. As The Ripples Become More Agitated, The Window Darkens And The Other World Is Hidden.the Surface Of The River Is Like A Living Soul, Which Is Easy To Disturb, Is Often Disturbed, But, Growing Calm, Shows What It Was, Is, And Will Be.

You Cannot Affirm The Power Plant And Condemn The Smokestack, Or Affirm The Smoke And Condemn The Cough

Akin To The Idea That Time Is Money Is The Concept, Less Spoken But As Commonly Assumed, That We May Be Adequately Represented By Money. The Giving Of Money Has Thus Become Our Characteristic Virtue. But To Give Is Not To Do. The Money Is Given In Lieu Of Action, Thought, Care, Time.

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.

A Tree Forms Itself In Answer To Its Place And The Light. Explain It How You Will, The Only Thing Explainable Will Be Your Explanation.” Sabbaths 1999 Iv

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.

They Learned To Have A Very High Opinion Of God And A Very Low Opinion Of His Works—although They Could Tell You That This World Had Been Made By God Himself. What They Didn’t See Was That It Is Beautiful, And That Some Of The Greatest Beauties Are The Briefest.

It Is Not From Ourselves That We Learn To Be Better Than We Are.

For A Time I Rest In The Grace Of The World, And Am Free.

However Destructive May Be The Policies Of The Government And The Methods And Products Of The Corporations, The Root Of The Problem Is Always Found To Be Found In Private Life. We Must Learn To See That Every Problem That Concerns Us As Conservationists Always Leads Straight To The Question Of How We Live. The World Is Being Destroyed, No Doubt About It, By The Greed Of The Rich And Powerful. It Is Also Being Destroyed By Popular Demand.

The Name Of Our Proper Connection To The Earth Is 'good Work,' For Good Work Involves Much Giving Of Honor. It Honors The Source Of Its Materials; It Honors The Place Where It Is Done; It Honors The Art By Which It Is Done; It Honors The Thing That It Makes And The User Of The Made Thing.

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

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.

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.

You Have Been Given Questions To Which You Cannot Be Given Answers. You Will Have To Live Them Out - Perhaps A Little At A Time.' And How Long Is That Going To Take?' I Don't Know. As Long As You Live, Perhaps.' That Could Be A Long Time.' I Will Tell You A Further Mystery,' He Said. 'it May Take Longer.

We Had Entered An Era Of Limitlessness, Or The Illusion Thereof, And This In Itself Is A Sort Of Wonder. My Grandfather Lived A Life Of Limits, Both Suffered And Strictly Observed, In A World Of Limits. I Learned Much Of That World From Him And Others, And Then I Changed; I Entered The World Of Labor-saving Machines And Of Limitless Cheap Fossil Fuel. It Would Take Me Years Of Reading, Thought, And Experience To Learn Again That In This World Limits Are Not Only Inescapable But Indispensable.

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.

Eating Is An Agricultural Act.

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.

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.

A Community Is The Mental And Spiritual Condition Of Knowing That The Place Is Shared, And That The People Who Share The Place Define And Limit The Possibilities Of Each Other's Lives. It Is The Knowledge That People Have Of Each Other, Their Concern For Each Other, Their Trust In Each Other, The Freedom With Which They Come And Go Among Themselves.

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.

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.

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.

To Be Patient In An Emergency Is A Terrible Trial.

The Grower Of Trees, The Gardener, The Man Born To Farming, Whose Hands Reach Into The Ground And Sprout, To Him The Soil Is A Divine Drug. He Enters Into Death Yearly, And Comes Back Rejoicing. He Has Seen The Light Lie Down In The Dung Heap, And Rise Again In The Corn.

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.

If You Start A Conversation With The Assumption That You Are Right Or That You Must Win, Obviously It Is Difficult To Talk.

I Don't Think It Is Enough Appreciated How Much An Outdoor Book The Bible Is. It Is A "hypaethral Book," Such As Thoreau Talked About - A Book Open To The Sky. It Is Best Read And Understood Outdoors, And The Farther Outdoors The Better. Or That Has Been My Experience Of It. Passages That Within Walls Seem Improbable Or Incredible, Outdoors Seem Merely Natural. This Is Because Outdoors We Are Confronted Everywhere With Wonders; We See That The Miraculous Is Not Extraordinary But The Common Mode Of Existence. It Is Our Daily Bread.

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.

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.

We Must Learn To Acknowledge That The Creation Is Full Of Mystery; We Will Never Entirely Understand It. We Must Abandon Arrogance And Stand In Awe. We Must Recover The Sense Of The Majesty Of Creation, And The Ability To Be Worshipful In Its Presence. For I Do Not Doubt That It Is Only On The Condition Of Humility And Reverence Before The World That Our Species Will Be Able To Remain In It.

The Past Is Our Definition. We May Strive With Good Reason To Escape It, Or To Escape What Is Bad In It. But We Will Escape It Only By Adding Something Better To It.

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.

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)

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

We Enter Solitude, In Which Also We Lose Loneliness. True Solitude Is Found In The Wild Places, Where One Is Without Human Obligation. One’s Inner Voices Become Audible. One Feels The Attraction Of One’s Most Intimate Sources. In Consequence, One Responds More Clearly To Other Lives. The More Coherent One Becomes Within Oneself As A Creature, The More Fully One Enters Into The Communion Of All Creatures.

There Are Lots Of Bad Things That Can Happen To A Food Economy That's Both Extensive And Centralized. There's No Substitute For Petroleum. To Have A Growth Economy Based On A Declining Fuel Supply Is Bound To Be Stressful.

These Are People Who Are Capable Of Devotion, Public Devotion, To Justice. They Meant What They Said And Every Day That Passes, They Mean It More.

There Is Much Good Work To Be Done By Every One Of Us And We Must Begin To Do It.

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 More Artificial A Human Environment Becomes, The More The Word ‘natural’ Becomes A Term Of Value.

What Leads To Peace Is Not Violence But Peaceableness, Which Is Not Passivity, But An Alert, Informed, Practiced, And Active State Of Being.

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 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.

How Joyful To Be Together, Alone As When We First Were Joined In Our Little House By The River Long Ago, Except That Now We Know Each Other, As We Did Not Then; And Now Instead Of Two Stories Fumbling To Meet, We Belong To One Story That The Two, Joining, Made. And Now We Touch Each Other With The Tenderness Of Mortals, Who Know Themselves

We Cannot Comprehend What Comprehends Us.

... 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.

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.

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.

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

Creation Is Thus God's Presence In Creatures. The Greek Orthodox Theologian Philip Sherrard Has Written That "creation Is Nothing Less Than The Manifestation Of God's Hidden Being." This Means That We And All Other Creatures Live By A Sanctity That Is Inexpressibly Intimate, For To Every Creature, The Gift Of Life Is A Portion Of The Breath And Spirit Of God. (pg. 308, Christianity And The Survival Of Creation)

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

The Mercy Of The World Is You Don't Know What's Going To Happen.

Tomorrow May Never Come

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

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

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.

We Clasp The Hands Of Those Who Go Before Us.

It Was A Country . . . That He And His People Had Known How To Use And Abuse, But Not How To Preserve.

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

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.

The Ability To Speak Exactly Is Intimately Related To The Ability To Know Exactly.

Urban Conservationists May Feel Entitled To Be Unconcerned About Food Production Because They Are Not Farmers. But They Can't Be Let Off So Easily, For They Are All Farming By Proxy.

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

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.

If We Are To Have A Culture As Resilient And Competent In The Face Of Necessity As It Needs To Be, Then It Must Somehow Involve Within Itself A Ceremonious Generosity Toward The Wilderness Of Natural Force And Instinct. The Farm Must Yield A Place To The Forest, Not As A Wood Lot, Or Even As A Necessary Agricultural Principle But As A Sacred Grove - A Place Where The Creation Is Let Alone, To Serve As Instruction, Example, Refuge; A Place For People To Go, Free Of Work And Presumption, To Let Themselves Alone. (pg. 125, The Body And The Earth)

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

Food Production

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

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)

Like The Water Of A Deep Stream, Love Is Always Too Much. We Did Not Make It. Though We Drink Till We Burst, We Cannot Have It All, Or Want It All. In Its Abundance It Survives Our Thirst. In The Evening We Come Down To The Shore To Drink Our Fill, And Sleep, While It Flows Through The Regions Of The Dark. It Does Not Hold Us, Except We Keep Returning To Its Rich Waters Thirsty. We Enter, Willing To Die, Into The Commonwealth Of Its Joy.

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.

For Any Sin, We All Suffer. That Is Why Our Suffering Is Endless.

A Sustainable Agriculture Does Not Deplete Soils Or People.

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.

The Issue Here Really Is Not Whether International Trade Shall Be Free But Whether Or Not It Makes Any Sense For A Country - Or, For That Matter, A Region - To Destroy Its Own Capacity To Produce Its Own Food. How Can A Government, Entrusted With The Safety And Health Of Its People, Conscientiously Barter Away In The Name Of An Economic Idea That People's Ability To Feed Itself? And If People Lose Their Ability To Feed Themselves, How Can They Be Said To Be Free?

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

As Industrial Technology Advances And Enlarges, And In The Process Assumes Greater Social, Economic, And Political Force, It Carries People Away From Where They Belong By History, Culture, Deeds, Association, And Affection.

I Dislike The Thought That Some Animal Has Been Made Miserable To Feed Me. If I Am Going To Eat Meat, I Want It To Be From An Animal That Has Lived A Pleasant, Uncrowded Life Outdoors, On Bountiful Pasture, With Good Water Nearby And Trees For Shade.

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)

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.

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

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

If You Establish, Or Reestablish, Local Economies On The Right Scale And With The Right Standard, Then Politics Would Come Right As A Matter Of Course. I Don't Know What You'd Call The Result - Probably Not Capitalism Or Socialism.

It Is Only By Understanding The Cultural Complexity And Largeness Of The Concept Of Agriculture That We Can See The Threatening Diminishments Implied By The Term 'agribusiness.'

The Soil Is The Great Connector Of Lives, The Source And Destination Of All. It Is The Healer And Restorer And Resurrector, By Which Disease Passes Into Health, Age Into Youth, Death Into Life. Without Proper Care For It We Can Have No Community, Because Without Proper Care For It We Can Have No Life.

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

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.

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.

There Is A Religious Principle: Love Thy Neighbour As Thyself. But It's Also An Economic Asset. If You've Got A Neighbour, You've Got Help, And This Implies Another Limit. If You Want To Have Neighbours, You Can't Have A Limitless Growth Economy. You Have To Prefer To Have A Neighbour Rather Than To Own Your Neighbour Farm.

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.

The Freedom Of Affluence Opposes And Contradicts The Freedom Of Community Life.

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.

If You Don't Know Where You Are, You Don't Know Who You Are.

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.

Annual Plants Are Nature's Emergency Medical Service, Seeded In Sounds And Scars To Hold The Land Until The Perennial Cover Is Re-established.

The Miraculous Is Not Extraordinary But The Common Mode Of Existence. It Is Our Daily Bread. Whoever Really Has Considered The Lilies Of The Field Or The Birds Of The Air And Pondered The Improbability Of Their Existence In This Warm World Within The Cold And Empty Stellar Distances Will Hardly Balk At The Turning Of Water Into Wine Which Was, After All, A Very Small Miracle. We Forget The Greater And Still Continuing Miracle By Which Water (with Soil And Sunlight) Is Turned Into Grapes.

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

Not Just Self-restraint, That Old Killjoy, But Communal Restraint.

Ask The Questions That Have No Answers. Invest In The Millenium. Plant Sequoias.

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.

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

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

A Man's Life Is Always Dealing With Permanence, That Is The Most Dangerous Kind Of Irresponsibility Is To Think Of Your Doings As Temporary.

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.

You Cannot Devalue The Body And Value The Soul Or Value Anything Else.

Outdoors We Are Confronted Everywhere With Wonders; We See That The Miraculous Is Not Extraordinary, But The Common Mode Of Existence. It Is Our Daily Bread.

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.

We Can Make Ourselves Whole Only By Accepting Our Partiality, By Living Within Our Limits, By Being Humans Not By Trying To Be Gods.

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

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

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.

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.

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

It Is Impossible To Prefigure The Salvation Of The World In The Same Language By Which The World Has Been Dismembered And Defaced.

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.

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 Are Going To Have To Gather Up The Fragments Of Knowledge And Responsibilities That Have Been Turned Over To Governments, Corporations, And Specialists, And Put Those Fragments Back Together Again In Our Own Minds And In Our Families And Household And Neighborhoods.

Under The Discipline Of Unity, Knowledge And Morality Come Together. No Longer Can We Have That Paltry 'objective' Knowledge So Prized By The Academic Specialists. To Know Anything At All Becomes A Moral Predicament. Aware That There Is No Such Thing As A Specialized Effect, One Becomes Responsible For Judgments As Well As Facts. Aware That As An Agricultural Scientist He Had 'one Great Subject,' Sir Albert Howard Could No Longer Ask, What Can I Do With What I Know? Without At The Same Time Asking, How Can I Be Responsible For What I Know?

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

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.

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.

An Economy Genuinely Local And Neighborly Offers To Localities A Measure Of Security That They Cannot Derive From A National Or A Global Economy Controlled By People Who, By Principle, Have No Local Commitment.

I Come Into The Peace Of Wild Things Who Do Not Tax Their Lives With Forethought Of Grief.... For A Time I Rest In The Grace Of The World, And Am Free.

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

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

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.

The World Is Whole Beyond Human Knowing.

Do Not Tax Your Life With Forethought Of Grief.

The Primary Motive For Good Care And Good Use Of The Land-community Is Always Going To Be Affection, Which Is Too Often Lacking.

The Poem Is Important, But Not More Than The People Whose Survival It Serves.

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

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.

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

Protest That Endures, I Think, Is Moved By A Hope Far More Modest Than That Of Public Success: Namely, The Hope Of Preserving Qualities In One's Own Heart And Spirit That Would Be Destroyed By Acquiescence.

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.

The Line That Connects The Bombing Of Civilian Populations To The Mountain Removed By Strip Mining ... To The Tortured Prisoner Seems To Run Pretty Straight. We're Living, It Seems, In The Culmination Of A Long Warfare - Warfare Against Human Beings, Other Creatures And The Earth Itself.

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.

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

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.

Whether We And Our Politicians Know It Or Not, Nature Is Party To All Our Deals And Decisions, And She Has More Votes, A Longer Memory, And A Sterner Sense Of Justice Than We Do.

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.

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

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.

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

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

When You Are Old You Can Look Back And See Yourself When You Are Young. It Is Almost Like Looking Down From Heaven. And You See Yourself As A Young Woman, Just A Big Girl Really, Half Awake To The World. You See Yourself Happy, Holding In Your Arms A Good, Decent, Gentle, Beloved Young Man With The Blood Keen In His Veins, Who Before Long Is Going To Disappear, Just Disappear, Into A Storm Of Hate And Flying Metal And Fire. And You Just Don't Know It.

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

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.

Our Model Citizen Is A Sophisticate Who, Before Puberty, Understands How To Produce A Baby, But Who At The Age Of Thirty Will Not Know How To Produce A Potato

The Latest Technology Is Not Always Good For Anything Except To The Producers Of The Technology.

Latest Technology

The Religion And The Environmentalism Of The Highly Industrialized Countries Are At Bottom A Sham, Because They Make It Their Business To Fight Against Something That They Do Not Really Wish To Destroy. We All Live By Robbing Nature, But Our Standard Of Living Demands That The Robbery Shall Continue. We Must Achieve The Character And Acquire The Skills To Live Much Poorer Than We Do.

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.

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

We Can Grow Good Wheat And Make Good Bread Only If We Understand That We Do Not Live By Bread Alone.

Under The Pavement The Dirt Is Dreaming Of Grass.

Sometimes I Knew In All My Mind And Heart Why I Had Done What I Had Done, And I Welcomed The Sacrifice. But There Were Times Too When I Lived In A Desert And Felt No Joy And Saw No Hope And Could Not Remember My Old Feelings. Then I Lived By Faith Alone, Faith Without Hope. What Good Did I Get From It? I Got To Have Love In My Heart.

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

You Don't Need To Be Told Some Things. You Can Sometimes Tell More By A Man's Silence And The Set Of His Head Than By What He Says.

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.

To Hear Of A Thousand Deaths In War Is Terrible, And We 'know' That It Is. But As It Registers On Our Hearts, It Is Not More Terrible Than One Death Fully Imagined.

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

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 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.

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.

Beware The Machinery Of Longevity. When A Man's Life Is Over The Decent Thing Is For Him To Die. The Forest Does Not Withhold Itself From Death. What It Gives Up It Takes Back.

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.

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.

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

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.

True Solitude Is Found In The Wild Places, Where One Is Without Human Obligation. One's Inner Voices Become Audible... In Consequence, One Responds More Clearly To Other Lives.

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.

To Think Better, To Think Like The Best Humans, We Are Probably Going To Have To Learn Again To Judge A Person's Intelligence, Not By The Ability To Recite Facts, But By The Good Order Or Harmoniousness Of His Or Her Surroundings. We Must Suspect That Any Statistical Justification Of Ugliness And Violence Is A Revelation Of Stupidity. (pg.192-193, People, Land, And Community)

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.

If One Accepts The 24th And 104th Psalms As Scriptural Norms, Then Surface Mining And Other Forms Of Earth Destruction Are Perversions. If We Take The Gospels Seriously, How Can We Not See Industrial Warfare - With Its Inevitable Massacre Of Innocents - As A Most Shocking Perversion? By The Standard Of All Scriptures, Neglect Of The Poor, Of Widows And Orphans, Of The Sick, The Homeless, The Insane, Is An Abominable Perversion.

Widows And Orphans

We Have Become Blind To The Alternatives To Violence.

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.

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.

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

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

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