The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.
Interpretation
Caring for the Earth is a fundamental responsibility that brings joy and hope through nurturing its conservation and renewal.
Wendell Berry's quote emphasizes the profound responsibility humanity has towards the Earth, viewing it as both an ancient obligation and a source of joy. He suggests that the act of cherishing and renewing our natural environment is not only essential for our survival but also constitutes our greatest hope for the future, highlighting a deep interconnectedness between humanity and nature.
In practice
During a speech at a climate summit to emphasize the importance of environmental protection.
We weren't allowing our hopes to become expectations. Expectations are tempting, pleasant, maybe necessary. They are scary too, once you have had some experience. They are not necessarily and not always a bucket of smoke, but they can be and are even likely to be.
The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.
A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
WE ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY - I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.
Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.
We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.
Cats, no less liquid than their shadows, offer no angles to the wind. They slip, diminished, neat, through loopholes less than themselves.
It's a moral question about whether we have the right to exterminate species.
The loneliness you get by the sea is personal and alive. It doesn't subdue you and make you feel abject. It's stimulating loneliness.
In the wintertime, in the snow country, citrus fruit was so rare, and if you got one, it was better than ambrosia.
I always see gardening as escape, as peace really. If you are angry or troubled, nothing provides the same solace as nurturing the soil.
One cannot look at the sea without wishing for the wings of a swallow.
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