We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children. (Actually appearing as "a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children" in _The Unforeseen Wilderness: An Essay on Kentucky’s Red River Gorge_, published 1971)

Wendell Berry

We can fight the global economy with a strong local economy.

Wendell Berry

economy fighting strong

At home the great delight is to see the clover and grass now growing on places that were bare when we came. These small healings of the ground are my model accomplishment-everything else I do must aspire to that. While I was at that work the world gained with every move I made, and I harmed nothing.

Wendell Berry

healing home moving

Far from making peace, wars invariably serve as classrooms and laboratories where men and techniques and states of mind are prepared for the next war.

Wendell Berry

mind men war

To me, an economy that sees the life of a community or a place as expendable, and reckons its value only in terms of money, is not acceptable because it is not realistic. I am thinking as I believe we must think if we wish to discuss the best uses of people, places, and things, and if we wish to give affection some standing in our thoughts.

Wendell Berry

believe people thinking

It is a fact that the entire Kentucky River system, which the central part of the state complacently depends upon for its future water, is deteriorating rapidly because of strip mining, because of bad farming, because of industrial and agricultural pollutants, because of urban sewage. It is deteriorating, that is to say, because almost nobody cares, or cares to know, where water comes from, so long as it keeps coming.

Wendell Berry

kentucky rivers long

We have forgotten that Vietnam, and Iraq resent being invaded and know the ground better than we do.

Wendell Berry

vietnam iraq forgotten

People who blame the Bible for the modern destruction of nature have failed to see its delight in the variety and individuality of creatures and its insistence upon their holiness. But that delight-in, say, the final chapters of Job or the 104th Psalm-is far more useful to the cause of conservation than the undifferentiating abstractions of science... Reverence gives standing to creatures, and to our perception of them, just as the law gives standing to a citizen.

Wendell Berry

law animal jobs

Monsanto doesn't care about feeding the world. We have to think about the wage slavery of migrant workers and salary slavery of those who are desperately unhappy.

Wendell Berry

freedom unhappy thinking

A farmer's market is worth more than everything I've written.

Wendell Berry

farmers written family

We have become blind to the alternatives to violence.

Wendell Berry

alternatives violence blind

There are not enough rich and powerful people to consume the whole world; for that, the rich and powerful need the help of countless ordinary people.

Wendell Berry

powerful ordinary people

The assumption is that people so ignorant and thoughtless and silly and greedy may simply call upon the Army Corps of Engineers in order to receive a clean and abundant supply of water from reservoirs in the mountains. A much likelier outcome is that they will be drinking an ever stronger mixture of sewage and mine acid and mud and cropspray and various other defecations of the industrial paradise.

Wendell Berry

army drinking silly

The answers to the human problems of ecology are to be found in economy. And the answers to the problems of economy are to be found in culture and character. To fail to see this is to go on dividing the world falsely between guilty producers and innocent consumers.

Wendell Berry

answers character culture

We can grow good wheat and make good bread only if we understand that we do not live by bread alone.

Wendell Berry

wheat live-by bread

But in fact as knowledge expands globally it is being lost locally. This is the paramount truth of the modern history of rural places everywhere in the world. And it is the gravest problem of land use: Modern humans typically are using places whose nature they have never known and whose history they have forgotten; thus ignorant, they almost necessarily abuse what they use.

Wendell Berry

ignorant abuse land

We will instead have to measure our economy by the health of the ecosystems and human communities where we do our work.

Wendell Berry

environmental ecosystems community

Do not tax your life with forethought of grief.

Wendell Berry

forethought taxes grief

A protest meeting on the issue of environmental abuse is not a convocation of accusers, it is a convocation of the guilty. The realization ought to clear the smog of self-righteousness that has always conventionally hovered over these occasions, and let us see the work that is to be done.

Wendell Berry

abuse issues self

There are some things the arrogant mind does not see; it is blinded by its vision of what it desires.

Wendell Berry

vision mind desire

We are now, measurably, reducing the availability of these life-supporting goods which we can think of (though only on the conditions of good health and good care) as self-renewing or "sustainable." We are also destroying rapidly the supplies of the fossil fuels, which are limited and not renewable, and on which we have become totally dependent.

Wendell Berry

availability self thinking