Wendell Berry Quotes

The peoples of the Andes believe in the concept of 'living well' instead of wanting to 'live better' by consuming more, regardless of the cost to our neighbors and our environment.

The first rule of sustainability is to align with natural forces, or at least not try to defy them.

The only thing that can save us as a species is seeing how we're not thinking about future generations in the way we live.

We need to have a culture that says 'the less energy you can use to be comfortable, the better off you are and the better you should feel about yourself'.

Nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy.

The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.

Energy and time are finite resources; conserving them is very important.

No society has ever yet been able to handle the temptations of technology to mastery, to waste, to exuberance, to exploration and exploitation... We have to learn to cherish this earth and cherish it as something that's fragile, that's only one, it's all we have... We have to use our scientific knowledge to correct the dangers that have come from science and technology.

We depend on the gifts of nature, but these gifts must be received with gratitude and not exploited or abused

We share this planet, our home, with millions of species. Justice and sustainability both demand that we do not use more resources than we need.

Water has always been a large part of my life, so for me now, being a father with another child on the way, I'm just teaching some of the small things I've been able to learn - and passing that onto the younger generation. Small things like turning your faucet off when you brush your teeth, not taking a 30-minute shower when you really don't need to. So I want to teach the younger generation to spread the message and make a difference. I'm almost more excited to do this than I was to swim.

Respect Mother Earth and her giving ways or trade away our children's days.

Conservation of our resources is the fundamental question before this nation, and that our first and greatest task is to set our house in order and begin to live within our means.

Sustainability is living on nature's income rather than living on its capital.

Christians, of all people, should not be destroyers. We should treat nature with an overwhelming respect. We may cut down a tree to build a house, or to make a fire to keep the family warm. But we should not cut down the tree just to cut down the tree. We may, if necessary, bark the cork tree in order to have the use of the bark. But what we should not do is to bark the tree simply for the sake of doing so, and let it dry and stand there a dead skeleton in the wind. To do so is not to treat the tree with integrity.

The word which gives the key to the national vice is waste. And people who are wasteful are not wise, neither can they remain young and vigorous. In order to transmute energy to higher and more subtle levels one must first conserve it.

Economic localization is the key to sustaining biological and cultural diversity - to sustaining life itself. The sooner we shift towards the local, the sooner we will begin healing our planet, our communities and ourselves.

A culture that values production over life values the wrong things, because it will produce things at the expense of living beings, human or otherwise.

Our identity includes our natural world, how we move through it, how we interact with it and how it sustains us.

The throwaway economy that has been evolving over the last half-century is an aberration, now itself headed for the junk heap of history.

I believe in thrift as I believe in freedom, but I don't support the plutocratic hostility to taxation, regulation, and protections of land, water, and air.

I have little space from the suffering of elephants right now. I wake up with it and go to sleep with it. The plight of animals in shelters, of kids used for labor for the metals in our electronics and endless other things, the fate of our water supply to dye our blue jeans and water our lawns, the sad painful life of conventionally raised meat...For me, I am working to not contribute to this. I really don't want to hurt others for my benefit.

To the extent that we consume, in our present circumstances, we are guilty. To the extent that we guilty consumers are conservationists, we are absurd. But what can we do? Must we go on writing letters to politicians and donating to conservation organizations until the majority of our fellow citizens agree with us? Or can we do something directly to solve our share of the problem? I am a conservationist. I believe wholeheartedly in putting pressure on the politicians and in maintaining the conservation organizations.

People ask: Why should I care about the ocean? Because the ocean is the cornerstone of earth's life support system, it shapes climate and weather. It holds most of life on earth. 97% of earth's water is there. It's the blue heart of the planet - we should take care of our heart. It's what makes life possible for us. We still have a really good chance to make things better than they are. They won't get better unless we take the action and inspire others to do the same thing. No one is without power. Everybody has the capacity to do something.

Faced with the widespread destruction of the environment, people everywhere are coming to understand that we cannot continue to use the goods of the earth as we have in the past ... [A] new ecological awareness is beginning to emerge which rather than being downplayed, ought to be encouraged to develop into concrete programs and initiatives.