We have the world to live in on the condition that we will take good care of it.
WENDELL BERRYIf 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.
More Wendell Berry Quotes
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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:
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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.
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Industrial agriculture characteristically proceeds by single solutions to single problems: If you want the most money from your land this year, grow the crops for which the market price is highest.
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The only time I’ve been arrested was in opposing the Marble Hill nuclear power plant in Indiana. That was in 1979.
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We cannot comprehend what comprehends us.
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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.
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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.
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To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.
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The fertility cycle is a cycle entirely of living creatures passing again and again through birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay.
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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.
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I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief…
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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.
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For any sin, we all suffer. That is why our suffering is endless.
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This, I thought, is what is meant by ‘thy will be done’ in the Lord’s Prayer, which I had prayed time and again without thinking about it.
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The primary motive for good care and good use of the land-community is always going to be affection, which is too often lacking.
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If we can’t afford to take good care of the land that feeds us, we’re in an insurmountable mess.
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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.
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To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.
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The atmosphere, the earth, the water and the water cycle – those things are good gifts.
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There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places.
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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.
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Whether we or our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
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It means that your will and God’s will may not be the same. It means there’s a good possibility that you won’t get what you pray for. It means that in spite of your prayers you are going to suffer.
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For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
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Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes.
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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.
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