A Sustainable Agriculture does not deplete soils or people.
Interpretation
Sustainable agriculture promotes the health of the land and the well-being of communities.
Wendell Berry's quote emphasizes the importance of sustainable agricultural practices that maintain soil health and support the people involved in farming. It highlights the necessity of balancing productivity with environmental stewardship and social responsibility to ensure that agriculture serves both current and future generations.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a community meeting about environmental conservation.
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.
Next time you're stunned by a large moon on the horizon, bend over and view it between your legs. The effect goes away entirely.
If you manage to stop the timber industry from cutting this forest, they'll cut that forest. If you stop oil drilling here, they'll go drill there.
The fire is the main comfort of the camp, whether in summer or winter
Biological diversity is messy. It walks, it crawls, it swims, it swoops, it buzzes. But extinction is silent, and it has no voice other than our own.
Joy in looking and comprehending is nature's most beautiful gift.
You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of your grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves.
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