But a man with a machine and inadequate culture – such as I was when I made my pond – is a pestilence. He shakes more than he can hold.
Why do the health of the body and the health of the earth decline together?
People who thus set their lives against destruction have necessarily confronted in themselves the absurdity that they have recognized in their society.
Young lovers see a vision of the world redeemed by love.
The strangest of all the doctrines of the cult of competition, in which admittedly there must be losers as well as winners, is that the result of competition is inevitably good for everybody, that altruistic ends may be met by a system without altruistic motives or altruistic means.
But this is not the story of a life. It is the story of lives, knit together, overlapping in succession, rising again from grave after grave.
Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed. Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is. We lose our health – and create profitable diseases and dependences – by failing to see the direct connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving.
It is well established among us that you may hold up your head in polite society with a public lie in your mouth or other people’s money in your pocket or innocent blood on your hands, but not with dishwater on your hands or mud on your shoes.
She thought the human condition was a calculated insult to her personally, the fault of certain people in particular. If she wasn’t the president of the United States, or Mrs. Rockefeller, or at least happy, it was somebody else’s fault, not hers. Her stinger was always out.
For agrarians, the correct response is to stand confidently on our fundamental premise, which is both democratic and ecological: the land is a gift of immeasurable value. If it is a gift, then it is a gift to all the living in all time. To withhold it from some is finally to destroy it for all. For a few powerful people to own or control it all, or decide its fate, is wrong.
This is the justice that we are learning from the ecologists: you cannot damage what you are dependent upon without damaging yourself.
Uncle Burley said hills always looked blue when you were far away from them. That was a pretty color for hills; the little houses and barns and fields looked so neat and quiet tucked against them. It made you want to be close to them. But he said that when you got close they were like the hills you’d left, and when you looked back your own hills were blue and you wanted to go back again. He said he reckoned a man could wear himself out going back and forth.
Scared for health, afraid of death, bored, dissatisfied, vengeful, greedy, ignorant, and gullible – these are the qualities of the ideal consumer. Can we imagine a way of education that would turn passive consumers into active and informed critics, capable of using their own minds in their own defense?
What I am sure of is that we have lost the old apprehension of Nature as a being accessible to imagination, linking Heaven and Earth, making and informing the incarnate creation, and requiring of humanity an obedience at once worshipful, ethical, and economic.
He stands under them, looks up, sees, knows, and knows that he does not know.
There should be no relenting in our efforts to influence politics and politicians. But in the name of honesty and sanity we must recognize the limits of politics.
Tell you,” he said, “there ain’t a way in this world to know what a human creature is going to do next.
I see all that we have ruined in order to have, all that was owned for a lifetime to be destroyed forever. Where are the sleeps that escape such dreams?
And there is no use in saying that if we can invent the nuclear bomb and fly to the moon, we can solve hunger and related problems of land use. Epic feats of engineering require only a few brilliant technicians and a lot of money. But feeding a world of people year to year for a long time requires cultures of husbandry fitted to the nature of millions of unique small places – precisely the kind of cultures that industrialism has purposely disvalued, uprooted, and destroyed.
CONCERNED AS HE is that the usable be put to use, that there be no waste, still there is nothing utilitarian or mechanistic about Mr. Lapp’s farm – or his mind. His aim, it seems, is not that the place should be put to the fullest use, but that it should have the most abundant life.