A Sustainable Agriculture does not deplete soils or people.
Interpretation
Sustainable agriculture promotes the health of the land and the well-being of communities.
Wendell Berry's quote emphasizes the importance of sustainable agricultural practices that maintain soil health and support the people involved in farming. It highlights the necessity of balancing productivity with environmental stewardship and social responsibility to ensure that agriculture serves both current and future generations.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a community meeting about environmental conservation.
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.
Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven; the brightest oriole fades into leaves.
Nature seems to take advantage of the simple mathematical representations of the symmetry laws. When one pauses to consider the elegance and the beautiful perfection of the mathematical reasoning involved and contrast it with the complex and far-reaching physical consequences, a deep sense of respect for the power of the symmetry laws never fails to develop.
Animal agriculture makes a 40% greater contribution to global warming than all transportation in the world combined; it is the number one cause of climate change.
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts_x000D_ _x000D_ Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose.
Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.
The summer breeze was blowing on your face_x000D_ _x000D_ Within your violet you treasure your summery words_x000D_ _x000D_ And as the shiver from my neck down to my spine_x000D_ _x000D_ Ignited me in daylight and nature in the garden
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