The world is not given by our fathers but borrowed from our children.
Interpretation
Our actions today impact future generations, and we must care for the world we leave them.
This quote by Wendell Berry emphasizes the responsibility we have towards future generations. It suggests that the Earth and its resources are not solely ours to exploit; rather, we are custodians of the world for the sake of those who will come after us. By framing the world as something borrowed from our children, Berry urges us to adopt a mindset of stewardship and to make choices that promote sustainability and kindness, ensuring that we leave behind a healthy planet.
In practice
In a speech about climate change, Mayor Smith quoted Wendell Berry to emphasize the importance of protecting our environment for future generations.
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.
When grown people speak of the innocence of children, they dont really know what they mean. Pressed, they will go a step further and say, Well, ignorance then. The child is neither. There is no crime which a boy of eleven had not envisaged long ago. His only innocence is, he may not be old enough to desire the fruits of it...his ignorance is, he does not know how to commit it...
America rests on shared values rather than shared ethnicity.
My heart, to put it more simply, got nostalgic for the present. Always a bad sign.
The hatred and contempt for men, women and children that was manifested in the Shoah was a crime against God and against humanity.
The only journey is the one within.
We are the first species capable of self-annihilation.
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