Wendell Berry Quotes

Our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction of humanity's use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it's not the laws of nature

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

We have an economy that tells us it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can't print life to bail out a planet.

We have spent the best part of the past century enthusiastically testing the world to utter destruction; not looking closely enough at the long-term impact our actions will have.

In the current economic situation, the temptation for the more dynamic economies is that of chasing after advantageous alliances that, nevertheless, can have harmful effects for poorer states, prolonging situations of extreme mass poverty of men and women and using up the earth's natural resources, entrusted to man by God the Creator-as Genesis says-that he might cultivate and protect it.

Premise Eight: The needs of the natural world are more important than the needs of the economic system.

Concern for the fate of the great rivers of the earth must lead us to reflect soberly on the model of development which our society is pursuing. A purely economic and technological understanding of progress, to the extent that it fails to acknowledge its intrinsic limitations and to take into consideration the integral good of humanity, will inevitably provoke negative consequences for individuals, peoples and creation itself.

Development requires modification and transformation of the environment... the planet's capacity to support its people us being irreversibly reduced by the destruction and degradation of the biosphere and the need to understand the problem and take corrective action is becoming urgent.

There is no economic imperative that will condemn us to deplete our vital resource base, but neither is there an invisible hand that will prevent us from doing so.

The essential role of the environment is still marginal in discussions about poverty. While we continue to debate these initiatives, environmental degradation, including the loss of biodiversity and topsoil, accelerates, causing development efforts to falter.

There are definitely recurring themes in humanity's relationship with our environment. The biggest is probably adaptation, because humans are incredibly good at adapting to new environments in relatively short periods of time. The ancestors of Homo sapiens started leaving Africa over one million years ago, moving from warm, tropical climates into the freezing wilderness of Europe and the desert ecosystems of the Middle East.

We cannot choose between [economic] growth and sustainability - we must have both

All our efforts to defeat poverty and pursue sustainable development will be in vain if environmental degradation and natural resource depletion continue unabated.

In this new millennium it is more important to defend the rights of the Mother Earth to guarantee human rights.

Around the world, we see the results of exploitation which destroys much without taking future generations into account. Protecting the world's forests; stemming desertification and erosion; avoiding the spread of toxic substances harmful to man, animals and plants; protecting the atmosphere; all these can be accomplished only through active and wise cooperation, without borders or political power plays.

I believe in a sound, strong environmental policy that protects the health of our people and a wise stewardship of our nation's natural resources.

Even bigger machines, entailing even bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting ever greater violence against the environment, do not represent progress: they are a denial of wisdom. Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the nonviolent, the elegant and beautiful.

Environmentalists and clean energy champions should stop telling people that we are working for "sustainability," which nobody understands.

An unspoiled river is a very rare thing in this Nation today. Their flow and vitality have been harnessed by dams and too often they have been turned into open sewers by communities and by industries. It makes us all very fearful that all rivers will go this way unless somebody acts now to try to balance our river development.

We're a part of nature. As we destroy nature, we destroy ourselves. It's a selfish thing to want to protect nature.

When the forest is destroyed, when the river is dammed, when the biodiversity is stolen, when fields are waterlogged or turned saline because of economic activities, it is a question of survival for these people. So our environmental movements have been justice movements.

Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he's been given. But up to now he hasn't been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life's become extinct, the climate's ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day.

The long fight to save wild beauty represents democracy at its best. It requires citizens to practice the hardest of virtues--self-restraint. Why cannot I take as many trout as I want from a stream? Why cannot I bring home from the woods a rare wildflower? Because if I do, everybody in this democracy should be able to do the same. My act will be multiplied endlessly. To provide protection for wildlife and wild beauty, everyone has to deny himself proportionately. Special privilege and conservation are ever at odds.