We’re living, it seems, in the culmination of a long warfare – warfare against human beings, other creatures and the Earth itself.
To accept that there is nothing to do is to despair. It is to become in some fundamental way less than human. Those of us who are protesting are protesting in part for our own sake to keep ourselves whole as human beings.
O Thou, Far off and here, whole and broken, Who in necessity and in bounty wait, Whose truth is light and dark, mute though spoken, By Thy wide grace show me Thy narrow gate.
It is only by understanding the cultural complexity and largeness of the concept of agriculture that we can see the threatening diminishments implied by the term ‘agribusiness.’
We know enough of our own history by now to be aware that people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love. To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.
Not just self-restraint, that old killjoy, but communal restraint.
A change of heart or of values without a practice is only another pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life.
Long live gravity! Long live stupidity, error, and greed in the palaces of fantasy capitalism!
The two great aims of industrialism – replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy – seem close to fulfillment.
When you are new at sheep-raising and your ewe has a lamb, your impulse is to stay there and help it nurse and see to it and all. After a while you know that the best thing you can do is walk out of the barn.
For the true measure of agriculture is not the sophistication of its equipment the size of its income or even the statistics of its productivity but the good health of the land.
To be patient in an emergency is a terrible trial.
A viable neighborhood is a community: and a viable community is made up of neighbors who cherish and protect what they have in common.
Sit and be still until in the time of no rain you hear beneath the dry wind’s commotion in the trees the sound of flowing water among the rocks, a stream unheard before, and you are where breathing is prayer.
Explanation changes whatever is explained into something explainable.
The shoddy work of despair, the pointless work of pride, equally betray Creation. They are wastes of life.
The only time I’ve been arrested was in opposing the Marble Hill nuclear power plant in Indiana. That was in 1979.
The latest technology is not always good for anything except to the producers of the technology.
For any sin, we all suffer. That is why our suffering is endless.
The old and honorable idea of ‘vocation’ is simply that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a kind of good work for which we are particularly fitted.