Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of long-term investment in the future by taking action today, symbolized by planting sequoias, which are long-lived trees.
Wendell Berry's quote encourages individuals to think beyond immediate gratification and focus on actions that will yield benefits for future generations. By using the metaphor of planting sequoias, which can take many years to grow but become magnificent and enduring, Berry highlights the significance of making thoughtful investments in both the environment and society that will have lasting impact.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about environmental conservation to inspire action.
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.
I felt a positive yearning toward one bush this afternoon. There was a match found for me at last. I fell in love with a shrub oak.
I drive a hybrid, and we've changed our light bulbs and windows and installed solar panels and geothermal ground source heat pumps and most everything else.
I'm haunted by the thought of what Ray Anderson calls 'tomorrow's child,' asking why we didn't do something on our watch to save sharks and bluefin tuna and squids and coral reefs and the living ocean while there still was time. Well, now is that time.
And as he spoke of understanding, I looked up and saw the rainbow leap with flames of many colors over me.
As a kid, I was going to be a marine biologist or an actor. When I became successful as an actor, I said, 'Well, maybe I can lend a voice to this with an equal passion.' You realize how lucky we are and how destructive we've been and what little regard we have for the natural world.
As every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming in of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization of the Golden Age.
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