An economy genuinely local and neighborly offers to localities a measure of security that they cannot derive from a national or a global economy controlled by people who, by principle, have no local commitment.
I prayed like a man walking in a forest at night, feeling his way with his hands, at each step fearing to fall into pure bottomlessness forever. Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart.
When you are new at sheep-raising and your ewe has a lamb, your impulse is to stay there and help it nurse and see to it and all. After a while, you know that the best thing you can do is walk out of the barn.
To hear of a thousand deaths in war is terrible, and we 'know' that it is. But as it registers on our hearts, it is not more terrible than one death fully imagined.
Urban conservationists may feel entitled to be unconcerned about food production because they are not farmers. But they can't be let off so easily, for they are all farming by proxy.
The fertility cycle is a cycle entirely of living creatures passing again and again through birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay.
We're all complicit in the things we may be trying to oppose. I'm complicit in the things that I'm trying to oppose.
The primary motive for good care and good use of the land-community is always going to be affection, which is too often lacking.
The only time I've been arrested was in opposing the Marble Hill nuclear power plant in Indiana. That was in 1979.
I've had a good life, and was born to and among people I've admired and loved.
Annual plants are nature's emergency medical service, seeded in sounds and scars to hold the land until the perennial cover is re-established.
The two great aims of industrialism - replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy - seem close to fulfillment.
These are people who are capable of devotion, public devotion, to justice. They meant what they said and every day that passes, they mean it more.
We cannot comprehend what comprehends us.
It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits.
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.
For any sin, we all suffer. That is why our suffering is endless.
Industrial agriculture characteristically proceeds by single solutions to single problems: If you want the most money from your land this year, grow the crops for which the market price is highest.
If conservationists will attempt to resume responsibility for their need to eat, they will be led back fairly directly to all their previous concerns for the welfare of nature.
I'm a writer more than I am a talker.
