Wendell Berry Quotes

If a man farms his land to the waste of the soil or the tress, he destroys not only his own assets but Nature's assets.

Soil erosion is a national menace.

With wrong farming methods, we turn fertile land into desert. Unless we go back to organic farming and save the soil, there is no future.

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.

To see rich land eaten away by erosion, to stand by as continual cultivation on sloping fields wears away the best soil, is enough to make a good farmer sick at heart.

I think if you buy from people who are taking care of the land, you're supporting the future of this country.

We have to stop treating soil like dirt.

Each year some 1,400 square miles of land in Northern China turns into desert …. Civilization can survive the loss of its oil reserves, but it cannot survive the loss of its soil reserves.

Reclaim our environment from those who would destroy it with their predatory economic behavior.

History is largely a record of human struggle to wrest the land from nature, because man relies for sustenance on the products of the soil. So direct, is the relationship between soil erosion, the productivity of the land, and the prosperity of people, that the history of mankind, to a considerable degree at least, may be interpreted in terms of the soil and what has happened to it as the result of human use.

A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has his mind precisely against what is wrong with us... What I am saying is that if we apply our minds directly and competently to the needs of the earth, then we will have begun to make fundamental and necessary changes in our minds. We will begin to understand and to mistrust and to change our wasteful economy, which markets not just the produce of earth, but also the earth's ability to produce.

There is, as yet, no sense of pride in the husbandry of wild plants and animals, no sense of shame in the proprietorship of a sick landscape. We tilt windmills in behalf of conservation in convention halls and editorial offices, but on the back forty we disclaim even owning a lance.

Land is becoming a diminishing resource for agriculture, in spite of a growing understanding that the future of food security will depend upon the sustainable management of land resources as well as the conservation of prime farmland for agriculture.

Our biggest moral debt is to the environment. Take-take-take, nothing given back.

You know that the air and water are being polluted, as is everything we touch and live with, and we go on corrupting the nature that we need. We don't realize we have a commitment to God to take care of nature. To cut down a tree, to waste water when there is so much lack of it, to let buses poison our atmosphere with those noxious fumes from their exhausts, to burn rubbish haphazardly-all that concerns our alliance with God.

It is upsetting that many people don't seem to observe what's happening to the environment, what's happening in terms of global warming, the loss of habitats and wild things.

Make the wrong choices now and future generations will live with a changed climate, depleted resources and without the green space and biodiversity that contribute both to our standard of living and our quality of life

Pollution is a problem, and there's the whole problem of the spoiling of the commons, but we've addressed the pollution problem on a variety of different levels in a variety of ways, and it's worked pretty well.

It drives me crazy to see so much of this planet's life so casually endangered. The first steps are so easy (drive smaller cars, for instance) that it's very hard to understand why we haven't taken them. But I know that this is the issue our generation will be judged by.

Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow. Invasions can be arrested or modified in a manner to keep an area usable either for recreation, science or for wildlife, but the creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible. It follows, then, that any wilderness program is a rearguard action, through which retreats are reduced to a minimum.

The great question of the seventies is, shall we surrender to our surroundings, or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land, and to our water?

The transformation of forests into deserts, fertile earth into sunbaked concrete, and running rivers into silted floodwaters show that only through care for the environment can the livelihoods of those most dependent on it be sustained. We cannot allow economic and environmental concerns to be played off against each other.

The wrecking ball is characteristic of our way with materials. We 'cannot afford' to log a forest selectively, to mine without destroying topography, or to farm without catastrophic soil erosion. A production-oriented economy can indeed live in this way, but only so long as production lasts.

A Sustainable Agriculture does not deplete soils or people.