“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.”

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:

To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.

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.

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.

The two great aims of industrialism – replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy – seem close to fulfillment.

Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.

My belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.

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.

We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true.

We’re all complicit in the things we may be trying to oppose. I’m complicit in the things that I’m trying to oppose.

For any sin, we all suffer. That is why our suffering is endless.

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.

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.

To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.

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.

The only time I’ve been arrested was in opposing the Marble Hill nuclear power plant in Indiana. That was in 1979.