Wendell Berry Quotes

On Earth Day, we celebrate all the gifts the world and nature make available to us. We recognize our complete dependence on its bounty. And we acknowledge the need for good stewardship to preserve its fruits for future generations.

People can live in nature, and they won't necessarily destroy it.

It's not that hard to imagine the natural world recovering it's health in our absence: it's more difficult, and more necessary, to imagine it recovering its health in our presence.

People must feel that the natural world is important and valuable and beautiful and wonderful and an amazement and a pleasure.

Our conservation laws are based on static ideas about nature—not landscapes that are rapidly changing because of something humans did.

Our Earth is talking to us, and we must listen to it and decipher its message if we want to survive.

The protection of biodiversity and, therefore, of endangered species is an issue to which I attach a great deal of importance.

The big goal - and it sounds crazy - is to save as much life on Earth as possible.

We are now heading down a centuries-long path toward increasing the productivity of our natural capital - the resource systems upon which we depend to live - instead of our human capital.

The continued existence of wildlife and wilderness is important to the quality of life of humans.

I realize the answer is not to create wilderness and walk away.

Protecting Americans from harm goes beyond police and national defense. It's imperative that we not destroy the commons, the physical environment on which we rely.

We have the world to live in on the condition that we will take good care of it. And to take good care of it, we have to know it. And to know it and to be willing to take care of it, we have to love it.

A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.

Because we're not in harmony with the environment, we're destroying the environment that supports us.

The latest revelation - from no Mount Sinai, Sermon on the Mount or Bo tree - is the outcry of mute things themselves that we must heed by curbing our powers over creation, lest we perish together on a wasteland of what that creation once was.

If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food, either.

It is a wonderful honor to receive the Audubon Medal from the National Audubon Society, which for more than a century has fought tirelessly to protect and preserve our natural resources and environment for future generations.

I believe the accepted model of capitalism that demands endless growth deserves the blame for the destruction of nature, and it should be displaced. Failing that, I try to work with those companies and help them change the way they think about our resources.

Raising awareness on the most pressing environmental issues of our time is more important than ever.

Genetic design is something we can use to fight the lack of sustainability we humans are forcing on the earth's environment.

I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.

If nature were a bank, they would have already rescued it.

Governments at all levels and the whole society should act more vigorously to protect the land our lives depend on.

We owe it to each other - and to our children and grandchildren - to leave our planet in a better state than when we found it.