There’s nothing under the ground that’s worth more than the little layer of topsoil sitting on top of it.
Interpretation
Topsoil is invaluable for life and nurturing the earth, outweighing the potential riches below it.
Wendell Berry highlights the immense value of topsoil in sustaining life and agriculture, suggesting that the natural resources above ground are far more precious than any material wealth found beneath. This quote serves as a reminder to appreciate and protect our environment, emphasizing that the health of our land is directly linked to our survival and wellbeing as a society.
In practice
During an environmental seminar to emphasize the importance of soil health.
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.
Among the scenes which are deeply impressed on my mind, none exceed in sublimity the primeval [tropical] forests, ... temples filled with the varied productions of the God of Nature. No one can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.
In all my wild mountaineering, I have enjoyed only one avalanche ride; and the start was so sudden, and the end came so soon, I thought but little of the danger that goes with this sort of travel, though one thinks fast at such times.
The stillness of October gold_x000D_ _x000D_ Went out like beauty from a face.
If we pollute the air, water and soil that keep us alive and well, and destroy the biodiversity that allows natural systems to function, no amount of money will save us.
Nothing on earth is so weak and yielding as water, but for breaking down the firm and strong it has no equal.
Of all the trees that grow so fair Old England to adorn,_x000D_ _x000D_ Greater are none beneath the Sun _x000D_ _x000D_ Than Oak, and Ash and Thorn.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.