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The Reason To Preserve Wilderness Is That We Need It. We Need Wilderness Of All Kinds, Large And Small, Public And Private. Wee Need To Go Now And Again Into Places Where Our Work Is Disallowed, Where Our Hopes And Plans Have No Standing. We Need To Come Into The Presence Of The Unqualified And Mysterious Formality Of Creation.

-Wendell Berry

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The Reason To Preserve

Wendell Berry

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The Reason To Preserve Wilderness Is That We Need It. We Need Wilderness Of All Kinds, Large And Small, Public And Private. Wee Need To Go Now And Again Into Places Where Our Work Is Disallowed, Where Our Hopes And Plans Have No Standing. We Need To Come Into The Presence Of The Unqualified And Mysterious Formality Of Creation.

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When You Are New At Sheep-raising And Your Ewe Has A Lamb, Your Impulse Is To Stay There And Help It Nurse And See To It And All. After A While You Know That The Best Thing You Can Do Is Walk Out Of The Barn.

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

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.

I Could Die In Peace, I Think, If The World Was Beautiful. To Know It's Being Ruined Is Hard.

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

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.

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.

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

If They Had Only Themselves To Consider, Lovers Would Not Need To Marry, But They Must Think Of Others And Of Other Things. They Say Their Vows To The Community As Much As To One Another, And The Community Gathers Around Them To Hear And To Wish Them Well, On Their Behalf And Its Own. It Gathers Around Them Because It Understands How Necessary, How Joyful, And How Fearful This Joining Is. These Lovers, Pledging Themselves To One Another "until Death," Are Giving Themselves Away, And They Are Joined By This As No Law Or Contract Could Join Them.

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.

What Would Be The Point Of Being Personally Whole In A Dismembered Society, Or Personally Healthy In A Land Scalped, Eroded And Poisoned, Or Personally Free In A World Entirely Controlled By The Government Or Enlightened By Television?

Always In The Big Woods When You Leave Familiar Ground And Step Off Alone Into A New Place There Will Be, Along With The Feelings Of Curiosity And Excitement, A Little Nagging Of Dread. It Is The Ancient Fear Of The Unknown, And It Is Your First Bond With The Wilderness You Are Going Into.

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

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.

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.

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.

Can We Actually Suppose That We Are Wasting, Polluting, And Making Ugly This Beautiful Land For The Sake Of Patriotism And The Love Of God? Perhaps Some Of Us Would Like To Think So, But In Fact This Destruction Is Taking Place Because We Have Allowed Ourselves To Believe, And To Live, A Mated Pair Of Economic Lies: That Nothing Has A Value That Is Not Assigned To It By The Market; And That The Economic Life Of Our Communities Can Safely Be Handed Over To The Great Corporations.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

A Proper Community, We Should Remember Also, Is A Commonwealth: A Place, A Resource, An Economy. It Answers The Needs, Practical As Well As Social And Spiritual, Of Its Members - Among Them The Need To Need One Another. The Answer To The Present Alignment Of Political Power With Wealth Is The Restoration Of The Identity Of Community And Economy. (pg. 63, "racism And The Economy")

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.

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

The Reason To Preserve Wilderness Is That We Need It. We Need Wilderness Of All Kinds, Large And Small, Public And Private. Wee Need To Go Now And Again Into Places Where Our Work Is Disallowed, Where Our Hopes And Plans Have No Standing. We Need To Come Into The Presence Of The Unqualified And Mysterious Formality Of Creation.

The Question Before Me, Now That I Am Old, Is Not How To Be Dead, Which I Know From Enough Practice, But How To Be Alive, As These Worn Hills Still Tell, And Some Paintings Of Paul Cezanne, And This Mere Singing Wren, Who Thinks He's Alive Forever, This Instant, And May Be.

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

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

The Country Where He Lives Is Haunted By The Ghost Of An Old Forest. In The Cleared Fields Where He Gardens And Pastures His Horses It Stood Once, And Will Return. There Will Be A Resurrection Of The Wild. Already It Stands In Wait At The Pasture Fences.

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

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.

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.

We Are Alive Within Mystery, By Miracle... We Have More Than We Can Know. We Know More Than We Can Say.

To Be Patient In An Emergency Is A Terrible Trial.

There Are No Unsacred Places; There Are Only Sacred Places And Desecrated Places.

Gathering Places

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.

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.

The Sense Of It May Come With Watching A Flock Of Cedar Waxwings Eating Wild Grapes In The Top Of The Woods On A November Afternoon. Everything They Do Is Leisurely. They Pick The Grapes With A Curious Deliberation, Comb Their Feathers, Converse In High Windy Whistles. Now And Then One Will Fly Out And Back In A Sort Of Dancing Flight Full Of Whimsical Flutters And Turns. They Are Like Farmers Loafing In Their Own Fields On Sunday. Though They Have No Sundays, Their Days Are Full Of Sabbaths.

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.

We Have Become Blind To The Alternatives To Violence.

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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)

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.

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

We Are Living Even Now Among Punishments And Ruins.

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.

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

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...

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

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

... 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.

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

We Live The Given Life, And Not The Planned.

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

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

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".

Rural Poverty Happens Because People Aren't Being Paid To Take Adequate Care Of Their Places. There's Lots Of Work To Do Here. And You Can't Afford To Pay Anybody To Do It! If You Depress The Price Of The Products Of The Place Below A Certain Level, People Can't Afford To Maintain It. And That's The Rural Dilemma.

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.

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

Tomorrow May Never Come

When Going Back Makes Sense, You Are Going Ahead.

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.

Do Not Tax Your Life With Forethought Of Grief.

The 'environmental Crisis' Has Happened Because The Human Household Or Economy Is In Conflict At Almost Every Point With The Household Of Nature. We Have Built Our Household On The Assumption That The Natural Household Is Simple And Can Be Simply Used. We Have Assumed Increasingly Over The Last Five Hundred Years That Nature Is Merely A Supply Of 'raw Materials,' And That We May Safely Possess Those Materials By Taking Them.... And So We Will Be Wrong If We Attempt To Correct What We Perceive As 'environmental' Problems Without Correcting The Economic Oversimplification That Caused Them.

Despite Its Protests To The Contrary, Modern Christianity Has Become Willy-nilly The Religion Of The State And The Economic Status Quo. Because It Has Been So Exclusively Dedicated To Incanting Anemic Souls Into Heaven, It Has Been Made The Tool Of Much Earthly Villainy. It Has, For The Most Part, Stood Silently By While A Predatory Economy Has Ravaged The World, Destroyed Its Natural Beauty And Health, Divided And Plundered Its Human Communities And Households.

People Who Blame The Bible For The Modern Destruction Of Nature Have Failed To See Its Delight In The Variety And Individuality Of Creatures And Its Insistence Upon Their Holiness. But That Delight-in, Say, The Final Chapters Of Job Or The 104th Psalm-is Far More Useful To The Cause Of Conservation Than The Undifferentiating Abstractions Of Science... Reverence Gives Standing To Creatures, And To Our Perception Of Them, Just As The Law Gives Standing To A Citizen.

Eating With The Fullest Pleasure - Pleasure, That Is, That Does Not Depend On Ignorance - Is Perhaps The Profoundest Enactment Of Our Connection With The World. In This Pleasure We Experience Our Dependence And Our Gratitude, For We Are Living In A Mystery, From Creatures We Did Not Make And Powers We Cannot Comprehend.

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.

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

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.

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.

I Like The Way That The History Of The Tree Shapes The Tree. There's No Distinction Between The Tree And Its History. You Can Lose Yourself In That Thought.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

A Sustainable Agriculture Does Not Deplete Soils Or People.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Invest In The Millenium.

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

I Finally Knew... Why Christ's Prayer In The Garden Could Not Be Granted. He Had Been Seeded And Birthed Into Human Flesh. He Was One Of Us. Once He Had Become Mortal, He Could Not Become Immortal Except By Dying. That He Prayed The Prayer At All Showed How Human He Was. That He Knew It Could Not Be Granted Showed His Divinity; That He Prayed It Anyhow Showed His Mortality, His Mortal Love Of Life That His Death Made Immortal.

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

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

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

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.

Let Us Have The Candor To Acknowledge That What We Call "the Economy" Or "the Free Market" Is Less And Less Distinguishable From Warfare.

The Cloud Is Free Only To Go With The Wind. The Rain Is Free Only In Falling.

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

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

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

What I Stand For Is What I Stand On.

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.

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 Teachers Are Everywhere. What Is Wanted Is A Learner.

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

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.

The Chance You Had Is The Life You've Got. You Can Make Complaints About What People, Including You, Make Of Their Lives After They Have Got Them, And About What People Make Of Other People's Lives, ...but You Mustn't Wish For Another Life. You Mustn't Want To Be Somebody Else.

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.

The Law Is Meant To Work For Justice. But People Who Know Themselves Know That, At Some Point, Justice Had Better Be Mitigated By Mercy. And You Don't Get To Mercy By A Legal Principle. You Get To Mercy By Way Of Imagination, Sympathy, Tenderness Of Heart - Which Are Not Weaknesses.

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.

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

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.

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)

You Can't Know Where Life Will Take You, But You Can Commit To A Direction

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.

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

We Seem To Know That International Wars Tend Not To Stop With Their Formal "peace Treaties." We Seem Not To Have Thought Enough About The Difference Between The Large Official Events Of Political And Military History And Their Overflow Both Into Recognized Effects And Into The Lives Of Unofficial People Who Suffer Them.

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

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.

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.

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

The Old And Honorable Idea Of 'vocation' Is Simply That We Each Are Called, By God, Or By Our Gifts, Or By Our Preference, To A Kind Of Good Work For Which We Are Particularly Fitted.

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.

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.

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.

Love Changes, And In Change Is True.

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)

Under The Pavement The Dirt Is Dreaming Of Grass.

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

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.

Without Animals, Something Essential Is Removed From The Minds Of The Farmers.

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.

People Use Drugs, Legal And Illegal, Because Their Lives Are Intolerably Painful Or Dull. They Hate Their Work And Find No Rest In Their Leisure. They Are Estranged From Their Families And Their Neighbors. It Should Tell Us Something That In Healthy Societies Drug Use Is Celebrative, Convivial, And Occasional, Whereas Among Us It Is Lonely, Shameful, And Addictive. We Need Drugs, Apparently, Because We Have Lost Each Other.

The Paramount Doctrine Of The Economic And Technological Euphoria Of Recent Decades Has Been That Everything Depends On Innovation. It Was Understood As Desirable, And Even Necessary, That We Should Go On And On From One Technological Innovation To The Next, Which Would Cause The Economy To "grow" And Make Everything Better And Better. This Of Course Implied At Every Point A Hatred Of The Past, Of All Things Inherited And Free. All Things Superceded In Our Progress Of Innovations, Whatever Their Value Might Have Been, Were Discounted As Of No Value At All.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

And If We Ask What Are The Cultural Resources That Can Inform And Sustain A Proper Creaturely And Stewardly Awareness Of The Lives In A Farmer's Keeping, I Believe That We Will Find Them Gathered Under The Heading Of Husbandry.

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.

If The Devil Doesn't Exist... How Do You Explain That Some People Are A Lot Worse Than They're Smart Enough To Be?

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

Finally From The Crease Of The Ravine I Am Following, There Begins To Come The Trickling And Splashing Of Water. There Is A Great Restfulness In The Sounds These Small Streams Make; They Are Going Down As Fast As They Can, But Their Sound Seem Leisurely And Idle, As If Produced Like Gemstones With The Greatest Patience And Care.

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.

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.

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

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.

In Living In The World By His Own Will And Skill, The Stupidest Peasant Or Tribesman Is More Competent Than The Most Intelligent Worker Or Technician Or Intellectual In A Society Of Specialists.

The Language That Reveals Also Obscures.

During The Last 17 Years... I Have Been Working At The Restoration Of A Once Exhausted Hillside. Its Scars Are Now Healed Over, Though Still Visible, And This Year It Has Provided Abundant Pasture, More Than In Any Year Since We Have Owned It. But To Make It As Good As It Is Now Has Taken 17 Years. If I Had Been A Millionaire Or If My Family Had Been Starving, It Would Still Have Taken 17 Years. It Can Be Better Than It Is Now, But That Will Take Longer. For It To Live Fully In Its Own Responsibility, As It Did Before Bad Use Ran It Down, May Take Hundreds Of Years.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

What Can't Be Helped Must Be Endured.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Only By Restoring The Broken Connections Can We Be Healed. Connection Is Health.

Interdependence

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.

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.

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.

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.

Prayer Is Like Lying Awake At Night, Afraid, With Your Head Under The Cover, Hearing Only The Beating Of Your Own Heart. It Is Like A Bird That Has Blundered Down The Flue And Is Caught Indoors And Flutters At The Windowpanes. It Is Like Standing A Long Time On A Cold Day, Knocking At A Shut Door.

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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

In Order To Survive, A Plurality Of True Communities Would Require Not Egalitarianism And Tolerance But Knowledge, An Understanding Of The Necessity Of Local Differences, And Respect. Respect, I Think, Always Implies Imagination - The Ability To See One Another, Across Our Inevitable Differences, As Living Souls.

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?

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.

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

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

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