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.
Interpretation
The quote reflects a deep connection to the environment and the importance of preserving natural ecosystems.
Wendell Berry expresses his appreciation for the landscape of Kentucky, emphasizing the need for perennial plants that protect the soil from erosion. This highlights the relationship between a region's natural features and its sustainability, suggesting that care for the environment is essential for maintaining the beauty and health of our home landscapes.
In practice
In a speech about environmental conservation, one might say, 'As Wendell Berry notes, the uplands of my home country are dependent on the cover of perennial plants.'
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.
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.
I finally knew... why Christ's prayer in the garden could not be granted. He had been seeded and birthed into human flesh. He was one of us. Once He had become mortal, He could not become immortal except by dying. That He prayed the prayer at all showed how human He was. That He knew it could not be granted showed his divinity; that He prayed it anyhow showed His mortality, His mortal love of life that His death made immortal.
For this lovely bowl let us arrange these flowers since there is no rice.
The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks where the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its freshets.
There are so many colors in the rainbow_x000D_ So many colors in the morning sun_x000D_ So many colors in the flower and I see every one.
Auld Nature swears the lovely dears Her noblest work she classes, O; Her 'prentice han' she tried on man, And then she made the lasses, O!
The lark that shuns on lofty boughs to build, Her humble nest, lies silent in the field.
Hurricane season brings a humbling reminder that, despite our technologies, most of nature remains unpredictable.
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