If we can't afford to take good care of the land that feeds us, we're in an insurmountable mess.
Interpretation
Neglecting the environment jeopardizes our survival and future well-being.
Wendell Berry's quote emphasizes the critical relationship between humanity and the land, highlighting that without proper stewardship of our natural resources, we risk creating irreparable harm to ourselves and the planet. It serves as a warning that neglecting our responsibility to care for the environment could lead to dire consequences that are not easily reversed.
In practice
This quote can be used in discussions surrounding environmental conservation efforts.
We weren't allowing our hopes to become expectations. Expectations are tempting, pleasant, maybe necessary. They are scary too, once you have had some experience. They are not necessarily and not always a bucket of smoke, but they can be and are even likely to be.
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.
A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
WE ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY - I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.
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.
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.
Climate change respects no borders.
Despite all I have seen and experienced, I still get the same simple thrill out of glimpsing a tiny patch of snow in a high mountain gully and feel the same urge to climb towards it.
Oh, this is the joy of the rose;_x000D_ _x000D_ That it blows,_x000D_ _x000D_ And goes.
The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.
The unexplainable thing in nature that makes me feel the world is big fat beyond my understanding β to understand maybe by trying to put it into form. To find the feeling of infinity on the horizon line or just over the next hill.
In the environmental movement, every time you lose a battle it's for good, but our victories always seem to be temporary and we keep fighting them over and over again.
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