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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.

-Wendell Berry

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We Must See That

Wendell Berry

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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.

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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)

It's The Impeded Stream That Sings

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Long Live Gravity! Long Live Stupidity, Error, And Greed In The Palaces Of Fantasy Capitalism!

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

The 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.

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

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

Interdependence

The Problems Are Our Lives. In The "developed" Countries, At Least, The Large Problems Occur Because All Of Us Are Living Either Partly Wrong Or Almost Entirely Wrong. It Was Not Just The Greed Of Corporate Shareholders And The Hubris Of Corporate Executives That Put The Fate Of Prince William Sound Into One Ship; It Was Also Our Demand That Energy Be Cheap And Plentiful.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

The Uplands Of My Home Country In North Central Kentucky Are Sloping And Easily Eroded, Dependent For Safekeeping Upon Year-round Cover Of Perennial Plants.

When Going Back Makes Sense, You Are Going Ahead.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

At Night Make Me One With The Darkness In The Morning Make Me One With The Light.

In This State Of Total Consumerism-which Is To Say A State Of Helpless Dependence On Things And Services And Ideas And Motives That We Have Forgotten How To Provide Ourselves-all Meaningful Contact Between Ourselves And The Earth Is Broken. We Do Not Understand The Earth In Terms Either Of What It Offers Us Or Of What It Requires Of Us, And I Think It Is The Rule That People Inevitably Destroy What They Do Not Understand.

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

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

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

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

Do Not Tax Your Life With Forethought Of Grief.

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

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

If You Can Read And Have More Imagination Than A Doorknob, What Need Do You Have For A 'movie Version' Of A Novel?

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

You Have To Be Able To Imagine Lives That Are Not Yours.

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.

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

Our Obsession With Security Is A Measure Of The Power We Have Granted The Future To Hold Over Us.

No Individual Life Is An End In Itself. One Can Live Fully Only By Participating Fully In The Succession Of The Generations, In Death As Well As In Life. Some Would Say (and I Am One Of Them) That We Can Live Fully Only By Making Ourselves Answerable To The Claims Of Eternity As To Those Of Time.

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

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

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

The Teachers Are Everywhere. What Is Wanted Is A Learner.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The Industrial Mind Is A Mind Without Compunction; It Simply Accepts That People, Ultimately, Will Be Treated As Things And That Things, Ultimately, Will Be Treated As Garbage. (a Defense Of The Family Farm, 1986)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Specialization Is The Great Evil Of Civilization.

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?

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

Invest In The Millenium.

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.

You Mustn’t Wish For Another Life. You Mustn’t Want To Be Somebody Else. What You Must Do Is This: “rejoice Evermore. Pray Without Ceasing. In Everything Give Thanks.” I Am Not All The Way Capable Of So Much, But Those Are The Right Instructions.

The Mind That Is Not Baffled, Is Unemployed

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.

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")

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

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.

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".

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

It Gets Darker And Darker And Darker, And Then Jesus Is Born.

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 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.

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.

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)

There Are Endless Ways To Amuse Oneself And Be Idle, And Most Of Them Lie Outside The Woods. I Assume That When A Man Goes To The Woods He Goes Because He Needs To. I Think He Is Drawn To The Wilderness Much As He Is Drawn To A Woman: It Is, In Its Way, His Opposite. It Is As Far As Possible Unlike His Home Or His Work Or Anything He Will Ever Manufacture. For That Reason He Can Take From It A Solace-an Understanding Of Himself, Of What He Needs And What He Can Do Without-such As He Can Find Nowhere Else.

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

It Is A Horrible Fact That We Can Read In The Daily Paper, Without Interrupting Our Breakfast, Numerical Reckonings Of Death And Destruction That Ought To Break Our Hearts Or Scare Us Out Of Our Wits.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Categorical Condemnation Is The Hatred Of The Mob. It Makes Cowards Brave. And There Is Nothing More Fearful Than A Religious Mob, A Mob Overflowing With Righteousness – As At The Crucifixion And Before And Since. This Can Happen Only After We Have Made A Categorical Refusal To Kindness: To Heretics, Foreigners, Enemies Or Any Other Group Different From Ourselves.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Love Changes, And In Change Is True.

I Believe That The Community - In The Fullest Sense: A Place And All Its Creatures - Is The Smallest Unit Of Health And That To Speak Of The Health Of An Isolated Individual Is A Contradiction In Terms. (pg. 146, Health Is Membership)

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

It Is A Fact That The Entire Kentucky River System, Which The Central Part Of The State Complacently Depends Upon For Its Future Water, Is Deteriorating Rapidly Because Of Strip Mining, Because Of Bad Farming, Because Of Industrial And Agricultural Pollutants, Because Of Urban Sewage. It Is Deteriorating, That Is To Say, Because Almost Nobody Cares, Or Cares To Know, Where Water Comes From, So Long As It Keeps Coming.

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.

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.

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.

A Liberal Education Rests On The Assumption That Nature And Human Nature Do Not Change Very Much Or Very Fast And That One Therefore Needs To Understand The Past.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

If You're A Writer And You Are At All Inclined To Speak As A Christian In Some Way, You Realize Very Quickly That The Conventional Language Is Pretty Much Useless. It Takes A Long Time To Get Past That, Or It Has Taken Me A Long Time. People In Conventional Christianity Have Spoken Lightly And Sometimes Frivolously Of God For A Long Time. It's A Word That Needs To Be Used Sparingly, In My Opinion.

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.

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

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

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.

The Aim Of Industrialization Has Always Been To Replace People With Machines Or Other Technology, To Make The Cost Of Production As Low As Possible, To Sell The Product As High As Possible, And To Move The Wealth Into Fewer And Fewer Hands.

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

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.

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

Unless You Absolutely Have Got To Do It, Don’t Buy Anything New.

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

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")

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.

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

The Earth Is What We All Have In Common.

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.

This Curious Faith Is Predicated On The Notion That We Will Soon Develop Unlimited New Sources Of Energy: Domestic Oil Fields, Shale Oil, Gasified Coal, Nuclear Power, Solar Energy, And So On. This Is Fantastical Because The Basic Cause Of The Energy Crisis Is Not Scarcity: It Is Moral Ignorance And Weakness Of Character. 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 '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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

How Would You Describe The Difference Between Modern War And Modern Industry-between Say, Bombing And Strip Mining, Or Between Chemical Warfare And Chemical Manufacturing? The Difference Seems To Be Only That In War The Victimization Of Humans Is Directly Intentional And In Industry It Is "accepted" As A "trade-off." Were The Catastrophes Of Love Canal, Bhopal, Chernobyl, And The Exxon Valdez Episodes Of War Or Of Peace? They Were In Fact, Peacetime Acts Of Aggression, Intentional To The Extent That The Risks Were Known And Ignored.

There Are Some Things The Arrogant Mind Does Not See; It Is Blinded By Its Vision Of What It Desires.

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

Gathering Places

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.

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.

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

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