Quote

When there are enough people on the land to use it but not enough to husband it, then the wildness of the soil that we call fertility begins to diminish, and the soil itself begins to flee from us in water and wind.

Wendell Berry

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Wendell Berry
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: August 5
Author
Farmer
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Henry County
Kentucky
Wendell Berry
Wendell Erdman Berry
Use
Diminish
Enough
Soil
People
Begins
Husband
Wind
Land
Fertility
Call
Wildness
Water
Flee

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Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
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Without animals, something essential is removed from the minds of the farmers.
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To love anything good, at any cost, is a bargain.
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The road is a word, conceived elsewhere and laid across the country in the wound prepared for it: a word made concrete and thrust among us.
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Waking up from a dream of violence is much the same as waking up from a dream of love. You must go on living your life.
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Corn and bean people, I'm afraid, have extremely specialized minds.
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We're living, it seems, in the culmination of a long warfare - warfare against human beings, other creatures and the Earth itself.
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The cloud is free only to go with the wind. The rain is free only in falling.
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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.
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To me, an economy that sees the life of a community or a place as expendable, and reckons its value only in terms of money, is not acceptable because it is not realistic. I am thinking as I believe we must think if we wish to discuss the best uses of people, places, and things, and if we wish to give affection some standing in our thoughts.
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We cannot hope to be secure when our government has declared, by its readiness to act alone, its willingness to be everybody's enemy.
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A viable neighborhood is a community: and a viable community is made up of neighbors who cherish and protect what they have in common.
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If I was freer than I had ever been in my life, I was not yet entirely free, for I still hung on to an idea that had been set deep in me by all my schooling so far: I was a bright boy and I ought to make something out of myself... something else that would be a cut or two above my humble origins.
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If conservationists will attempt to resume responsibility for their need to eat, they will be led back fairly directly to all their previous concerns for the welfare of nature.
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I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods.
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The poem is important, but not more than the people whose survival it serves.
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In Kentucky, we're destroying mountains, including their soils and forests, in order to get at the coal. In other words, we're destroying a permanent value in order to get at an almost inconceivably transient value. That coal has a value only if and when it is burnt. And after it is burnt, it is a pollutant and a waste-a burden.
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American agriculture is badly in need of diversity. Another threat to the food system of course is the likelihood that petroleum is not going to get any cheaper.
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