Reply #157: fortune of the land

[humus]

To put the bounty and the health of our land, our only commonwealth,
into the hands of people who do not live on it and share its fate will
always be an error. For whatever determines the fortune of the land
determines also the fortune of the people.
--Wendell Berry

They claim this Mother Earth of ours for their own and fence their
neighbors away from them... They compel the natural earth to produce more
excessively and when it fails, they force it to take medicine to produce
more. This is evil.
--Sitting Bull 1877

It takes a rich land to support a democracy. Every time you see a dust
cloud, or a muddy stream, a field scarred by erosion or a channel
choked with silt, you are witnessing the passing of democracy. The crop
called man can wither like any other.
--Sterling North

When the land begins to be regarded, not as the primary source of
wealth, but as the plaything of gentlemen already rich, the economy of the
country is in questionable, if not dangerous condition.
--Gerald W. Johnson


Community isn't a sentiment. It has to do with necessity, with people
needing each other. If you allow the larger industrial system to
remove the pattern of needs, which is the force holding people together, you
lose the community.
--Wendell Berry


Not all landscapes should be inhabited by human beings, but each of us
is enriched to the extent that we can belong to, and participate in, a
well-ordered human community integrated into the natural landscape of a
particular place.
-- William Vitek



It is appallingly obvious that our technology exceeds our humanity.
-- Albert Einstein


The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress
depends on the unreasonable man.
-- George Bernard Shaw

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite
of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
-- Niels Bohr


How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your Tee Vee;
kill your own beef; build your own cabin and piss off the front porch
whenever you bloody well feel like it.
-- Ed Abbey


To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves.
-Mahatma Gandhi