Quotations on the Land

The land shall not be sold in pertuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants.  

-Leviticus 25:23
God speaking to Moses on Mt. Sinai in NRSV Bible  

We did not inherit the land from our fathers.
We are borrowing it from our children.

-Amish Proverb  

One does not sell the earth upon which the people walk.

-Tesunke Witko [Crazy Horse] (1842?-1877), Oglala Sioux War Chief  

I am amused to see from my window here how busily a man has divided and staked off his domain. God must smile at his puny fences running hither and thither everywhere over the land.

-Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.

-Aldo Leopold (1886–1948),
quoted in The Quiet Crisis by Stewart L. Udall, 1963  

This little patch of earth
and this little pile of stones
I can wash the dust from off my face and skin
But this earth is in my bones

-Ralph McTell from Peppers and Tomatoes, 1998  

We know we belong to the land, and the land we belong to is grand!

-Oscar Hammerstein (1895-1960), from the song Oklahoma, 1943  

I am married to this land. I was put here by God…and if I am to leave, I must be removed by God who put me here.

-Chief Rekayi Tangwena of Rhodesia
in refusing to leave his ancestral home, 1969  

The reality is that the founding fathers were land speculators. The fact was that you couldn’t vote in this country if you did not own land, and that was basically you had to be a white man who owned land. Now how did they get that land? They basically had to steal it from someone, and that would be probably the Indians. And so most of the initial founding fathers were, while they may have had some really nice ideas about democracy, they had a lot of issues with people of color. They had a lot of issues with people who held things that they coveted.

-Winona LaDuke,
Speech: “Land Tenure and Native American People,”
UW-Madison, 6 Jun 01  

The only compensation for land is land.

-Winona LaDuke,
Speech: “Land Tenure and Native American People,”
UW-Madison, 6 Jun 01  

The ground is holy, being even as it came from the Creator. Keep it, guard it, care for it, for it keeps men, guards men, cares for men. Destroy it and man is destroyed.

-Alan Stewart Paton (1903-1988), Cry, the Beloved Country, 1948  

Love to throw yourself on the earth and kiss it. Kiss the earth and love it with an unceasing, consuming love.

-Feodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881), The Brothers Karamazov, 1880 ch 41  

Faithfulness springs forth from the earth, and righteousness looks down from heaven. The LORD will indeed give what is good, and our land will yield its harvest.

-Psalm 85:12-13 from the New International Version of the Bible  

Humility is the situation of the earth. It’s there silent and accepting everything and in a miraculous way making out of all the refuse new richness…transforming corruption itself into a power of life and a new possibility of creativeness, open to the sunshine, open to the rain, ready to receive any seed we sow and capable of bringing thirtyfold, sixtyfold, a hundredfold out of every seed.

-Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray, 1970  

The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism. Only those who know the most about it can appreciate how little we know about it.

-Aldo Leopold (1886-1948), Round River, 1993

If you want inner peace find it in solitude, not speed, and if you would find yourself, look to the land from which you came and to which you go.

-Stewart L. Udall, U.S. Secretary of the Interior (1961-69),
The Quiet Crisis, 1963

The organic wastes of our society, for which our land is starved and which in a sound agricultural economy should be returned to the land, are flushed out through the sewers to pollute the streams and rivers and, finally, the oceans; or they are burned and the smoke pollutes the air; or they are wasted in other ways. Similarly, the small farmers who in a healthy society ought to be the mainstay of the country—whose allegiance to their land, continuing and deepening in association from one generation to another, would be the motive and guarantee of good care—are forced out by the homicidal economics of efficiency, to become emigrants and dependents in the already overcrowded cities. In both instances, by abuse of knowledge in the name of efficiency, assets have been converted into staggering problems.

-Wendell Berry, “Discipline and Hope,” A Continuous Harmony, 1970

When there are enough people on the land to use it but not enough to husband it, then the wildness of the soil that we call fertility begins to diminish, and the soil itself begins to flee from us in water and wind.

-Wendell Berry, "Getting Along With Nature," Home Economics, 1987

The damages of our present agriculture all come from the determination to use the life of the soil as if it were an extractable resource like coal.

-Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America, 1977

Of course agriculture must be productive; that is a requirement as urgent as it is obvious. But urgent as it is, it is not the first requirement; there are two more requirements equally important and equally urgent. One is that if agriculture is to remain productive, it must preserve the land, and the fertility and ecological health of the land; the land, that is, must be used well. A further requirement, therefore, is that if the land is to be used well, the people who use it must know it well, must be highly motivated to use it well, must know how to use it well, must have time to use it well, and must be able to afford to use it well. Nothing that has happened in the agricultural revolution of the last fifty years has disproved or invalidated these requirements, though everything that has happened has ignored or defied them.

-Wendell Berry, "Nature as Measure," What Are People For?, 1990

During the last 17 years … I have been working at the restoration of a once exhausted hillside. Its scars are now healed over, though still visible, and this year it has provided abundant pasture, more than in any year since we have owned it. But to make it as good as it is now has taken 17 years. If I had been a millionaire or if my family had been starving, it would still have taken 17 years. It can be better than it is now, but that will take longer. For it to live fully in its own responsibility, as it did before bad use ran it down, may take hundreds of years.

-Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace, 2002

For their possessions were too great for them to live together; the land where they were staying could not support them because of their livestock.

-Genesis 36:6 NRSV Bible

Indeed, as we begin the twenty-first century, the money and traditional economies are slowly destroying their own support system. Increasing demands of the two economies are surpassing the sustainable yields of the ecosystems that underpin them. For example, one-third of the world’s cropland is losing topsoil at a rate that is undermining its long-term productivity, fully half of the world’s rangeland is overgrazed and deteriorating into desert, and the world’s forests have shrunk by about half since the dawn of agriculture and are continuing to shrink.

-Stuart L. Hart, Capitalism at the Crossroads, 2007  

The American Colossus was fiercely intent on appropriating and exploiting the riches of all continents -- grasping with both hands, reaping where he had not sown, wasting what he thought would last forever. New railroads were opening new territory. The exploiters were pushing farther and farther into the wilderness. The man who could get his hands on the biggest slice of natural resources was the best citizen. Wealth and virtue were supposed to trot in double harness.

-Gifford Pinchot (1865-1946), first chief of the U.S. Forest Service
from his autobiography Breaking New Ground *  

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream Waters
This land was made for you and me

-Woody Guthrie (1912-1967)
from the song This Land Is Your Land, 1940  

The country was made without lines of demarcation, and it is no man's business to divide it... Do not misunderstand me, but understand me fully with reference to my affection for the land. I never said the land was mine to do with it as I chose. The one who has the right to dispose of it is the one who created it. I claim a right to live on my land and accord you the privilege to live on yours.

-Chief Joseph a.k.a. In-mut-too-yah-lat-lat (1840-1904), Nez Perce Chief
from The Confederated Tribes of Umatilla Indian reservation

"There must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief
"There's too much confusion; I can't get no relief,
Business men, they drink my wine; plowmen dig my earth.
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth."

-Bob Dylan, from the song All Along the Watchtower, 1968  

To smell to a turf of fresh earth is wholesome for the body; no less are thoughts of mortality cordial to the soul.

-Thomas Fuller (1608-1661), The Virtuous Lady

A continent ages quickly once we come.

-Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)  

To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.

-Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), 26th President of the United States  

Why has the land been ruined and laid waste like a desert that no one can cross? The LORD said, “It is because they have forsaken my law, which I set before them; they have not obeyed me or followed my law. Instead, they have followed the stubbornness of their hearts; they have followed the Baals, as their fathers taught them.”

-the prophet Jeremiah (c.628-586 B.C.) 
in Jeremiah 9:12-14 NIV Bible

So far, no study has documented harm to human or animal health in the United States from the recycling of hazardous wastes into fertilizers.  In Japan, however, studies showed that subsistence rice farmers had been sickened by ingesting cadmium that had passed from fertilizers through the rice crop.  And there is consensus among scientists that toxic chemicals from fertilizers can go into the plants growing in the soil.  The disagreement concerns whether those substances move along the food chain at levels that pose any danger.  For fertilizers made from biosolids, or sewage waste, levels of heavy metals are strictly regulated by the federal government. But for those made from recycled industrial wastes, there are no federal controls.  There's not even a requirement that toxic materials be included in the list of fertilizer ingredients.  When consumers buy fertilizer, they usually don't know exactly what they're getting. A fertilizer labeled "20-20-20" has 20 percent each of the beneficial ingredients nitrogen, potassium and phosphate. That adds up to 60 percent. The manufacturer doesn't have to say what's in the other 40 percent, which often includes trace metals.

-Duff Wilson,
“Here's What's Known, And Not Known, About Toxics, Plants And Soil,”
Seattle Times, 3 Jul 97

Between 1990 and 1995, 600 companies from 44 different states sent 270 million pounds of toxic waste to farms and fertilizer companies across the country. The steel industry provided 30% of this waste. Used for its high levels of zinc, which is an essential nutrient for plant growth, steel industry wastes can include lead, arsenic, cadmium, chromium, nickel and dioxin, among other toxic substances. Although the industrial facilities that generate these toxic wastes report the amount of chemicals they transfer off-site to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Toxics Release Inventory every year, they only report the total amount of a given chemical contained in wastes transferred over the course of a year, making it difficult to determine the chemical make-up of a given waste shipment. With little monitoring of the toxics contained in fertilizers and fertilizer labels that do not list toxic substances, our food supply and our health are at risk.

-Matthew Shaffer, Waste Lands: The Threat Of Toxic Fertilizer,
Executive Summary: California Public Interest Research Group, 3 May 2001

[F]ertilizers often contain high levels of harmful toxic metals that exceed levels of concern and could violate federal law. Labeling is inadequate. Because fertilizer labeling laws only require beneficial nutrients, like zinc or phosphate, to be listed, fertilizers are sold directly to the public and farmers without warnings or information that informs consumers about the presence and quantity of toxic metals. …Each of these metals is suspected or known to be toxic to humans and the environment by the U.S. EPA. Nine metals, like arsenic and lead, are known or suspected to cause cancer and ten metals, like mercury, are linked to developmental effects. Three of the tested metals – lead, cadmium and mercury – are also persistent bioaccumulative toxins (PBTs). PBTs persist for long periods of time in the environment – some indefinitely – and they can accumulate in the tissues of humans and wildlife, increasing the long-term health risks at even low levels of exposure. These three metals cause cancer, birth defects, or reproductive problems.

-Matthew Shaffer, Waste Lands: The Threat Of Toxic Fertilizer,
Executive Summary: California Public Interest Research Group, 3 May 2001

Every year, polluting industries send millions of pounds of waste materials to fertilizer companies, presumably for use as raw materials in fertilizer production. Even though these wastes are often laden with toxic metal and chemical impurities, fertilizer manufacturers use steel mill smokestack ash and air pollution scrubber brine, and other industrial by-products as the raw materials for a substantial portion of the nation's fertilizers. In theory, fertilizers applied to farm fields are subject to the same toxic chemical contamination standards as those applied to waste headed for toxic chemical dump sites. In practice, however, there is almost no monitoring of fertilizer or soil contamination levels, and contamination levels may be much higher than allowed by these loosely enforced standards. Highly contaminated fertilizer can render cropland sterile, harm the health of farmers and their families, and even threaten the food supply.

-Jacqueline Savitz, Todd Hettenbach, & Richard Wiles,
Factory Farming: Toxic Fertilizer in the United States 1990-1995, 1998   

“When it goes into our silo, it’s a hazardous waste. When it comes out of the silo, it’s no longer regulated. The exact same material. Don’t ask me why. That’s the wisdom of the EPA.”

-Dick Camp, President, Bay Zinc Fertilizer Company, Moxee, Washington,
cited in Duff Wilson, Fateful Harvest, 2001

The Federal government doesn’t regulate fertilizers at all, and states have deployed a purblind oversight system. They have kept a fairly close eye on nutrient content, but have been as vigilant about toxics as Mr. Magoo. The result is a loophole–riddled regulatory “safety net.” It greatly benefits factories that otherwise would be stuck with truckloads of toxic waste to dispose of at considerable cost.  And it handsomely profits fertilizer makers, who are completely free under law to make use of raw materials that often contain both nutritive and toxic components, without having to disclose the fact to their customers. Farmers, their families, and their land bear the resulting risks, along with workers in fertilizer plants and dealerships, consumers, and Mother Nature.

- Environmental Working Group: Kenneth A. Cook,
Factory Farming: Toxic Fertilizer in the United States 1990-1995, 1998

Cement kilns were the third largest source of dioxin air emissions in the United States.  Many kilns sent their ash to farms as soil amendments, raising the cancer risk for farm families from arsenic, beryllium, and dioxins, but in USEPA’s view, an acceptable level, if quickly tilled under the soil.

-Duff Wilson, Fateful Harvest, 2001 footnote, p 101

What the new fertilizer technology has accomplished for the farmer is clear: more crop can be produced on less acreage than before. Since the cost of fertilizer, relative to the resultant gain in crop sales, is lower than that of any other economic input, and since the Land Bank pays the farmer for acreage not in crops, the new technology pays him well. The cost—in environmental degradation—is borne by his neighbors in town who find their water polluted. The new technology is an economic success—but only because it is an ecological failure.

-Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle, 1971

The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all.

-Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America, 1977

The image of the frontier is probably one of the oldest images of mankind, and it is not surprising that we should find it hard to get rid of.

-Kenneth E. Boulding (1910-1993),
The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth, 1966  

The meek shall inherit the earth, but not the mineral rights.

-J. Paul Getty (1892-1976),
quoted in Robert Lenzner's The Great Getty, 1985  

Soil…is lost a little at a time over millions of acres by the careless acts of millions of people. It cannot be saved by heroic feats of gigantic technology but only by millions of small acts and restraints, conditioned by small fidelities, skills and desires. Soil loss is ultimately a cultural problem; it will be corrected only by cultural solutions.

-Wendell Berry, "Conservation and Local Economy,"
Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, 1992  

Measured by the land area that can support human habitation, the earth is shrinking. Mounting population densities, once generated solely by the addition of over 70 million people per year, are now also fueled by the relentless advance of deserts and the rise in sea level.…The heavy losses of territory to advancing deserts in China and Nigeria, the most populous countries in Asia and Africa respectively, illustrate the trends for scores of other countries. China is not only losing productive land to deserts, but it is doing so at an accelerating rate. From 1950 to 1975 China lost an average of 600 square miles of land (1,560 square kilometers) to desert each year. By 2000, nearly 1,400 square miles were going to desert annually.

-E-Wire, “The Earth Is Shrinking 
Advancing Deserts And Rising Seas Squeezing Civilization,” 16 Nov 06

The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.

-Aldo Leopold (1886-1948), 1938  

Hey farmer, farmer
Put away that D.D.T. now
Give me spots on my apples
But leave me the birds and the bees
Please!
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got till it's gone
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

-Joni Mitchell from the song Big Yellow Taxi, 1970  

By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.

-Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Walden, 1854  

Speed is everything now; just jump on the tractor and way across the field as if it's a dirt-track. You see it when a farmer takes over a new farm: he goes in and plants straight- way, right out of the book. But if one of the old farmers took a new farm, and you walked round the land with him and asked him: "What are you going to plant here and here?" he'd look at you some queer; because he wouldn't plant nothing much at first. He'd wait a bit and see what the land was like: he'd prove the land first. A good practical man would hold on for a few weeks, and get the feel of the land under his feet. He'd walk on it and feel it through his boots and see if it was in good heart, before he planted anything: he'd sow only when he knew what the land was fit for.

-Wendell Berry, The Gift of the Good Land, 1981  

A real gardener is not a man who cultivates flowers; he is a man who cultivates the soil … If he came into the Garden of Eden he would sniff excitedly and say: "Good Lord, what humus!"

-Karel Capek (1890-1938), The Gardener's Year, 1931  

Artificial manures lead inevitably to artificial nutrition, artificial food, artificial animals and finally to artificial men and women.

-Sir Albert Howard (1873-1947), An Agricultural Testament, 1940

Mother earth never attempts to farm without live stock; she always raises mixed crops; great pains are taken to preserve the soil and to preserve the soil and to prevent erosion; the mixed vegetable and animal wastes are converted into humus; there is no waste; the processes of growth and the processes of decay balance one another; the greatest care is taken to store the rainfall; both plants and animals are left to protect themselves against disease.

-Sir Albert Howard (1873-1947), An Agricultural Testament, 1940

The reality of a rural society in decline and a shaky agriculture that has to be propped up with almost constant subsidy programs are in, in fact, bringing an angry chorus of criticism upon the university…By the terms of the Morrill Act of 1862, Congress specifically prescribed that the land grant colleges (created through the grant of thousands of acres of public land to each state's congressional delegations) were intended "to promote a sound and prosperous agriculture and rural life as indispensible to …national prosperity and security." Critics contend that the directive has been corrupted to mean: to promote a prosperous oligarchy of wealthy absentee landowners, megafarms, and international agribusiness firms as indispensable to a global, centralized, urban power structure.

-Gene Logsdon, The Failure of Agricultural Education, 1992
from At Nature's Pace, 1994  

Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread.

-Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), 3rd U.S. President  

Laws Change; people die; the land remains.

-Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), 16^th U.S. President,
cited in Peter Blake's God's Own Junkyard, 1964

Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as is by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.

-William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925),
Speech at the Democratic National Convention, Chicago, 8 Jul 1896  

Now that the issue of sustainability has arisen so urgently, and in fact so transformingly, we can see that the correct agricultural agenda following World War II would have been to continue and refine the already established connection between our farms and the sun and to correct, where necessary, the fertility deficit. There can be no question, now, that that is what we should have done. It was, notoriously, not what we did. Instead, the adopted agenda called for a shift from the cheap, clean, and, for all practical purposes, limitless energy of the sun to the expensive, filthy, and limited energy of the fossil fuels. It called for the massive use of chemical fertilizers to offset the destruction of topsoil and the depletion of natural fertility. It called also for the displacement of nearly the entire farming population and the replacement of their labor and good farming practices by machines and toxic chemicals. This agenda has succeeded in its aims, but to the benefit of no one and nothing except the corporations that have supplied the necessary machines, fuels, and chemicals-and the corporations that have bought cheap and sold high the products that, as a result of this agenda, have been increasingly expensive for farmers to produce.

…Wendell Berry, “Farming and the Global Economy,”
Another Turn of the Crank, 1995

The present practice of handing down from on high policies and technologies developed without consideration of the nature and the needs of the land and the people has not worked, and it cannot work. Good agriculture and forestry cannot be "invented" by self-styled smart people in the offices and laboratories of a centralized economy and then sold at the highest possible profit to the supposedly dumb country people. That is not the way good land use comes about. And it does not matter how the methodologies so developed and handed down are labeled; whether "industrial" or "conventional" or "organic" or "sustainable," the professional or professorial condescension that is blind to the primacy of the union between individual people and individual places is ruinous.

-Wendell Berry, "An Argument for Diversity,"
What Are People For? 1990  

The ecology of the valley was complex beyond our understanding, and it began to die as we went on manipulating it in ever more frantic ways. As it went dead and empty of the old life it became a place where no one wanted to live. In our right minds we want to seek out places that reek of complexity. Our drive to industrialize soured and undercut the intimacies that drew most people to country life in the first place.

-William Kittredge, Hole in the Sky 1992  

Happy the man whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air
In his own ground

-Alexander Pope (1688-1744), "Ode on Solitude"  

Unkindness to anything means an injustice to that thing. If I am unkind to you I do you an injustice, or wrong you in some way. On the other hand, if I try to assist you in every way that I can to make a better citizen and in every way to do my very best for you, I am kind to you. The above principles apply with equal force to the soil. The farmer whose soil produces less every year, is unkind to it in some way; that is, he is not doing by it what he should; he is robbing it of some substance it must have, and he becomes, therefore, a soil robber rather than a progressive farmer.

-George Washington Carver (1864-1943) , "Being Kind to the Soil,"
Negro Farms, 31 January 1914  

Traditional agriculture coasted on the accumulated principal and interest hard-earned by nature's life-forms over those millions of years of adjustment to dryness, fire, and grinding ice. Modern agriculture coasts on the sunlight trapped by floras long extinct; we pump it, process it, transport it over the countryside as chemicals and inject it into our wasting fields as chemotherapy. Then we watch the fields respond with an unsurpassed vigor, and we feel well informed on the subject of agronomics. That we can feed billions is less a sign of nature's renewable bounty and of our knowledge than a sign of her forgiveness and of our own discounting of the future. For how opposite could monoculture of annuals be from what nature prefers? Both the roots and the aboveground parts of annuals die every year; thus, throughout much of the calendar the mechanical grip on the soil must rely on death rather than life. Mechanical disturbance, powered by an ancient flora, imposed by a mined metal, may make the weed control effective, but the farm far from weatherproof. In the course of it all, soil compacts, crumb structure declines, soil porosity decreases, and the wick effect for pulling moisture down diminishes.

-Wes Jackson, "Living Nets in a New Prairie Sea,"
Altars of Unhewn Stone, 1987  

Land that drinks in the rain often falling on it and that produces a crop useful to those for whom it is farmed receives the blessing of God.

-Hebrews 6:7 from the New International Version of the Bible  

You couldn't see, back then, that this process would build up and go even faster, until finally it would ravel out the entire fabric of family work and exchanges of work among neighbors. The new way of farming was a way of dependence, not on land and creatures and neighbors but on machines and fuel and chemicals of all sorts, bought things, and on the sellers of bought things—which made it finally a dependence on credit. The odd thing was, people just assumed that all the purchasing and borrowing would merely make life easier and better on all the little farms. Most people didn't dream, then, that before long a lot of little farmers would buy and borrow their way out of farming, and bigger and bigger farmers would be competing with their neighbors (or with doctors from the city) for the available land. The time was going to come—it is clear enough now—when there would not be enough farmers left…

-Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow, 2000  

You can't have the family farm without the family.

-G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936), Tales of the Long Bow  

During the 1980s, large multinationals—such as Cargill, ConAgra, and IBP—were allowed to dominate one commodity market after another. Farmers and cattle ranchers are losing their independence, essentially becoming hired hands for the agribusiness giants or being forced off the land. Family farms are now being replaced by gigantic corporate farms with absentee owners. Rural communities are losing their middle class and becoming socially stratified, divided between a small, wealthy elite and large numbers of the working poor. Small towns that seemingly belong in a Norman Rockwell painting are being turned into rural ghettos. The hardy, independent farmers whom Thomas Jefferson considered the bedrock of American democracy are a truly vanishing breed. The United States now has more prison inmates than full-time farmers.

-Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation, 2002 

We were doing God's labor and creating a good place on earth, living the pastoral yeoman dream—that's how our mythology defined it, although nobody would ever had thought to talk about work in that way. And then it all went dead, over years, but swiftly. You can imagine our surprise and despair, our sense of having been profoundly cheated. It took us a long while to realize some unnamable thing was wrong, and then we blamed it on ourselves, our inability to manage enough. But the fault wasn't ours, beyond the fact that we had all been educated to believe in a grand bad factory-land notion as our prime model of excellence.

-William Kittredge, Owning It All 1987  

What we lose in our great human exodus from the land is a rooted sense, as deep and intangible as religious faith, of why we need to hold on to the wild and beautiful places that once surrounded us. We seem to succumb so easily to the prevailing human tendency to pave such places over, build subdivisions upon them, and name them The Willows, or Peregrine’s Roost, or Elk Meadows, after whatever it was that got killed there. Apparently, it’s hard for us humans to doubt, even for a minute, that this program of plunking down our edifices at regular intervals over the entire landmass of planet earth is overall a good idea.

-Barbara Kingsolver, Small Wonder, 2002   

Cities of mortals woe-begone
    Fantastic care derides,
But in the serious landscape lone
    Stern benefit abides.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Waldeinsamkeit"  

We are already engaged in World War III. It is a war against nature, and it is simply no contest. As a result, the threat from the skies is no longer missiles but ozone-layer depletion and global warming. Leaders who assert they will not concede one square meter of national territory to an invader should think of the hundreds of square kilometers of topsoil eroded from their countries each year.

-Norman Myers
quoted in Living in the Environment, by G. Tyler Miller, 1996  

The white man, preoccupied with the abstractions of the economic exploitation and ownership of the land, necessarily has lived on the country as a destructive force, an ecological catastrophe, because he assigned the hand labor, and in that the possibility of intimate knowledge of the land, to a people he considered racially inferior; in thus debasing labor, he destroyed the possibility of a meaningful contact with the earth. He was literally blinded by his presuppositions and prejudices. Because he did not know the land, it was inevitable that he would squander its natural bounty, deplete its richness, corrupt and pollute it, or destroy it altogether. The history of the white man's use of the earth in America is a scandal.

-Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound, 1989  

I think it is inappropriate to call land a "resource" because that term is tied so closely to economics. We can call gold or chrome or coal a resource, but land and people transcend a one-dimensional economic consideration.

-Wes Jackson, American Land Forum, Summer 1986 *  

…before we plow an unfamiliar patch
It is well to be informed about the winds,
About the variations in the sky,
The native traits and habits of the place,
What each locale permits, and what denies.

-Virgil (70-19 B.C.), from The Georgics (c. 36-29 B.C.)
tr. Smith Palmer Bovie  

But in fact as knowledge expands globally it is being lost locally. This is the paramount truth of the modern history of rural places everywhere in the world. And it is the gravest problem of land use: Modern humans typically are using places whose nature they have never known and whose history they have forgotten; thus ignorant, they almost necessarily abuse what they use.

-Wendell Berry, Life Is a Miracle, 2000  

Well you roll on roads over fresh green grass.
For your lorryloads pumping petrol gas.
And you make them long, and you make them tough.
But they just go on and on, and it seems you can't get off.
Oh, I know we've come a long way,
We're changing day to day,
But tell me, where do the children play? 

-Cat Stevens a.k.a Yusuf Islam, Where Do the Children Play? 1970

“The worldwide consumer must have confidence with the credibility of the U.S. farmer and government dealers, which will have no control should Monsanto be in control of wheat releases,” said one elevator operator. “Where is the demand for Roundup Ready wheat? Not one consumer group wants it!” 

-Environment News Service, 
“Grain Elevator Operators Resist Transgenic Wheat,” 16 Apr 02  

Responding to the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy survey, one elevator operator wrote, "If genetically engineered wheat is introduced I will quit handling wheat. It would be literally impossible to segregate GM wheat. I think it’s about time we hold responsible the companies developing products, which ruin our market." 

-Environment News Service, 
“Grain Elevator Operators Resist Transgenic Wheat,” 16 Apr 02  

Species extinction and genetic narrowing of the major crops aside, the loss of cultural information due to the de-population of our rural areas is far greater than all the information accumulated by science and technology in the same period. Farm families who practiced the traditions associated with planting, tending, harvesting, and sorting the produce of the agricultural landscape gathered information, much of it unconsciously, from the time they were infants: in the farm house, in the farm community, and in the barns and fields. They heard and told stories about relatives and community members who did something funny or were caught in some kind of tragedy. From these stories they learned basic lessons of agronomy. But there was more. There was the information carried by a farmer who looked to the sky and then to the blowing trees or grasses and made a quick decision as to whether or not to make two more rounds before quitting to do chores. Much of that information has already disappeared and continues to disappear as farmers leave the land. It is the kind of information that has been hard won over the millennia, from the time agriculture began.

-Wes Jackson, "The Information Implosion,"
Altars of Unhewn Stone, 1987  

We have to take care of the land so we can stay here. We want to be ranchers. We want the open space lifestyle. It's not like in the past when people ruined the landscape or [when] the place got overcrowded they moved west. Well, there is no more West. We are the West. So we've got to take care of what we have.

-Wendy Glenn, Arizona rancher, quoted in The Ecology of Hope
by Ted Bernard and Jora Young, 1997  

The ultimate challenge for conservation biology isn't to create more parks, manage more forests, or shepherd through more environmental legislation. Rather the challenge is to change the way we as a society perceive the natural world… As mundane as it may sound, for many of us the land at our doorstep provides the starting point for developing an affection for the earth, which is a necessary foundation for living respectfully within the confines of our planet.

-Christopher Uhl from Conservation Biology, December 1998  

If in the human economy, a squash in the field is worth more than a bushel of soil, that does not mean that food is more valuable than soil; it means simply that we do not know how to value the soil. In its complexity and its potential longevity, the soil exceeds our comprehension; we do not know how to place a just market value on it, and we will never learn how. Its value is inestimable; we must value it, beyond whatever price we put on it, by respecting it.

-Wendell Berry, Home Economics, 1995  

By land is meant all of the things on, over, or in the earth. Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say, you cannot love game and hate predators; you cannot conserve the waters and waste the ranges; you cannot build the forest and mine the farm. The land is one organism.

-Aldo Leopold (1886-1948), Round River, 1993  

We shall never understand the natural environment until we see it as a living organism. Land can be healthy or sick, fertile or barren, rich or poor, lovingly nurtured or bled white. Our present attitudes and laws governing the ownership and use of land represent an abuse of the concept of private property.... Today you can murder land for private profit. You can leave the corpse for all to see and nobody calls the cops.

-Paul Brooks  

…the species occupying the surface along with a handful of itinerant insects; belowdecks and out of sight tunneled earthworms (knowable by their castled mounds of rich castings), pocket gophers, woodchucks, and burrowing insects, all making their dim way through an unseen wilderness of bacteria, phages, eelish nematodes, shrimpy rotifers, and miles upon miles of mycelium, the underground filaments of fungi. We think of the grasses as the basis of this food chain, yet behind, or beneath, the grassland stands the soil, that inconceivably complex community of the living and the dead. Because a healthy soil digests the dead to nourish the living, Salatin calls it the earth’s stomach.

-Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 2006  

Grab this land! Take it, hold it, my brothers, make it, my brothers, shake it, squeeze it, turn it, twist it, beat it, kick it, kiss it, whip it, stomp it, dig it, plow it, seed it, reap it, rent it, buy it, sell it, own it, build it, multiply it, and pass it on--can you hear me? Pass it on!

-Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, 1977 *  

The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said, "This is mine," and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society.

–Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778),
Discours sur l'Origine et le Fondement do I'Inégalité parmi les Hommes, 1754  

As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivated, and can use the product of, so much is his property. He by his labour does, as it were, enclose it from the common.

-John Locke (1632-1704), Second Treatise on Government, 1690  

Woe to those who add house to house and join field to field, Until there is no more room, So that you have to live alone in the midst of the land!

-the prophet Isaiah (c.760-690 B.C.) in Isaiah 5:8
from the New American Standard Version of the Bible  

Then the coal company came with the world's largest shovel
And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land
Well, they dug for their coal 'till the land was forsaken
Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man.

And daddy, won't you take be back to Muhlenberg County
Down by the Green river where Paradise lay
Well I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking
Mr. Peabody's coal train has hauled it away.

-John Prine from the song Paradise  

For a long time, the news from everywhere in rural America has been almost unrelievedly bad: bankruptcy, foreclosure, depression, suicide, the departure of the young, the loneliness of the old, soil loss, soil degradation, chemical pollution, the loss of genetic and specific diversity, the extinction or threatened extinction of species, the depletion of aquifers, stream degradation, the loss of wilderness, strip mining, clear-cutting, population loss, the loss of supporting economies, the deaths of towns. Rural American communities, economics, and ways of life that in 1945 were thriving and, though imperfect, full of promise for an authentic human settlement of our land are now as effectively destroyed as the Jewish communities of Poland; the means of destruction were not so blatantly evil, but they have proved just as thorough.

-Wendell Berry, "Conservation and Local Economy,"
Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, 1992  

"To imply that we're flattening Appalachia is so untrue. We're creating level land for Appalachia."

-Bill Caylor, president of the Kentucky Coal Association, 
claiming that the destructive practice of mountaintop removal mining, 
blowing the tops off mountains to get at the coal beneath, 
performs the "necessary" function of creating flat land for development

What we, the Christian community, have to do is to refuse men the right to ravish our land, just as we refuse them the right to ravish our women; to insist that somebody accepts a little less profit by not exploiting nature.

-Francis A. Schaeffer (1912-1984), Pollution and the Death of Man, 1970

If my land has cried out against me,
and its furrows have wept together;
if I have eaten its yield without payment,
and caused the death of its owners;
let thorns grow instead of wheat,
and foul weeds instead of barley.

-Job speaking in Job 31:38-40,
New Revised Standard Version of the Bible  

The land did not have value in and of itself, but only in terms of the number of the crops it would produce until the Jubilee (Lev. 26:16). Land was not used as an investment as is common today.  The point was that the children of Israel did not own the land; they were merely the use of it. God was the sovereign of the land: “The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine.” (Lev. 25:23). Like the treasurer of a company or the housekeeper of a mansion, human authority over the land was one of supervision. God had so parceled out the land that all the people could benefit from its produce.

-Richard Foster, Freedom of Simplicity, 1981 

You can't tear up everything just to get the dollar out of it without suffering as result. It is a travesty to burn our woods and thereby burn up the fertilizer nature has provided for us. We must enrich our soil every year instead of merely depleting it. It is fundamental that nature will drive away those who commit sin against it.

-George Washington Carver (1864-1943), quoted by James H. Cobb, Jr.
in "Ford and Carver Point South's Way," Atlanta Journal, March 17, 1940  

That we should have an agriculture based as much on petroleum as the soil—that we need petroleum exactly as much as we need food and must have it before we can eat—may seem absurd. It is absurd. It is nevertheless true.

-Wendell Berry, “The Ecological Crisis as a Crisis of Agriculture,” 
The Unsettling of America, 1977

Man has only a thin layer of soil between himself and starvation.

-attributed to Bard of Cincinnati 

The mistake is in the assumption - centuries old, but more damaging in our time than ever before - that the agricultural mind is an extremely simple mind, dulled by bodily labor: the mind of a "hick" or "yokel." This assumption exactly suits the purposes of the agricultural industrialists. The last head they want the farmer to use is his own. They want to do his thinking for him, because it is enormously profitable to them to do so. They don't, of course, tell him that he is a stupid yokel; they tell him that his problems are simple and can be simply solved by buying their expensive products.

-Wendell Berry, Meeting the Expectations of the Land, 1984  

All agriculture is at its heart a business of capturing free solar energy in a food product that can then be turned into high-value human energy. There are only two efficient ways of doing this. One is for you to walk out in your garden, pull a carrot and eat it. This is a direct transfer of solar energy to human energy. The second most efficient way is for you to send an animal out to gather this free solar food and then you eat the animal. All other methods of harvest require higher capital and petroleum energy inputs and these necessarily lower the return to the farmer/rancher. As Florida rancher Bud Adams once told me, “Ranching is a very simple business. The really hard part is keeping it simple.”

-Allan Nation, Al’s Obs, 
cited in Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 2006

We have to reconceptualize agriculture and face up to the realization that you can't maximize profit in farming without minimizing environmental well-being. That lesson should begin in the university. Students sealed off from reality on college campuses or in the world of computer screens and malls don't learn much about natural systems, don't learn how to care about the living world, or about each other. They and their professors specialize in specific narrow areas of knowledge and don't learn how to make connections with other areas of knowledge. So they can't appreciate, for example, the idea that the world may not be able to endure the completely urban civilization that society is now trying to form.

-David Orr from speech at Ohio State University
quoted by Gene Logsden in The Failure of Agricultural Education, 1992  

It is a severe question, but one which imposes itself as a matter of public conscience, whether agricultural research in adopting the esoteric attitude, in putting itself above the public and above the farmer whom it professes to serve, in taking refuge in the abstruse heaven of the higher mathematics, has not subconsciously been trying to cover up what must be regarded as a period of ineptitude and of the most colossal failure. Authority has abandoned the task of illuminating the laws of Nature, has forfeited the position of the friendly judge, scarcely now ventures even to adopt the tone of the earnest advocate: it has sunk to the inferior and petty work of photographing the corpse…

-Sir Albert Howard (1873-1947), The Soil and Health, 1947  

The farmer and the farm, like "the environment," are looked upon, for example, as means to offset trade deficits. The farm is a place where we can externalize costs. The cost of pesticides to the farmer and the cost of the pesticides to the soil and groundwater are regarded similarly by the public: "a serious problem that something ought to be done about." But the problem is more fundamental than this glib statement would indicate, for soil pollution is an expense of production. So are pesticides and nitrates in our farm wells. So is the loss of farmers from the land.

-Wes Jackson, "Farm Debt," Altars of Unhewn Stone, 1987  

But the earth will be desolate because of its inhabitants, for the fruit of their doings.

–the Prophet Micah (c.8th century BC) in Micah 7:13,
the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible  

The health of nature is the primary ground of hope—if we can find the humility and wisdom to accept nature as our teacher. The pattern of land stewardship is set by nature. This is why we must have stable rural communities; we must keep alive in every place the human knowledge of the nature of that place. Nature is the best farmer and forester, for she does not destroy the land in order to make it productive. And so in our wish to preserve our land, we are not without the necessary lessons, nor are we without instruction, in our cultural and religious tradition, to learn those lessons.

-Wendell Berry, "Conservation and Local Economy,"
Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, 1992  

Dispossessed peasants slash-and-burn their way into the rain forests of Latin America, hungry nomads turn their herds out into fragile African rangeland, reducing it to desert, and small farmers in India and the Philippines cultivate steep slopes, exposing them to the erosive powers of rain. Perhaps half the world's billion-plus absolute poor are caught in a downward spiral of ecological and economic impoverishment. In desperation, they knowingly abuse the land, salvaging the present by savaging the future.

-Alan Durning, How Much Is Enough?, 1992  

According to UNEP's Global Environmental Outlook 2000 report, half of all land in South Asia has lost agricultural potential because of poor agricultural practices, deforestation, overgrazing and climate change. Degraded areas include the sand dunes of Syria, the steeply eroded mountain slopes of Nepal, and the deforested and overgrazed highlands of Laos. The result, said UNEP, is desertification. Dramatic examples of this can also be seen in the encroachment of desert in Western China, India and Pakistan, and dust problems in the two Koreas and Japan, said the organization.

- Environment News Service,
"Asia's Dry Lands Crisis too Critical to Ignore," 10 Nov 2000  

The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.

-Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945), 32nd President of the United States
Letter to state governors urging uniform soil conservation laws,
26 Feb 1937  

The prairies were dust. Day after day, summer after summer, the scorching winds blew the dust and the sun was brassy in a yellow sky. Crop after crop failed. Again and again the barren land must be mortgaged for taxes and food and next year's seed. The agony of hope ended when there was not harvest and no more credit, no money to pay interest and taxes; the banker took the land. Then the bank failed.

-Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968), On the Way Home, 1962  

You have defiled the land with your prostitution and wickedness.
Therefore the showers have been withheld, and no spring rains have fallen.

-the prophet Jeremiah (c.628–586 B.C.)
from Jeremiah 3:2-3 in the New International Version of the Bible  

Our children are our signature to the roster of history; our land is merely the place our money was made. There is as yet no social stigma in the possession of a gullied farm, a wrecked forest, or a polluted stream, provided the dividends suffice to send the youngsters to college. Whatever ails the land, the government will fix it.

-Aldo Leopold (1886-1948), Round River, 1993

As soils are depleted, human health, vitality and intelligence go with them.

-Louis Bromfield (1896-1956)  

The consumer wants food to be as cheap as possible. The producer wants it to be as expensive as possible. Both want it to involve as little labor as possible. And so the standards of cheapness and convenience, which are irresistibly simplifying and therefore inevitably exploitive, have been substituted for the standard of health (of both people and land), which would enforce consideration of essential complexities.

-Wendell Berry, “The Ecological Crisis as a Crisis of Agriculture,”
The Unsettling of America 1977  

I went back to Ohio
But my pretty countryside had been paved down the middle
By a government that had no pride
The farms of Ohio had been replaced by shopping malls
And Muzak filled the air
From Seneca to Cuyahoga Falls
Said, A, O, oh way to go, Ohio

-Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders, from "My City Was Gone" 1983  

The art of land doctoring is being practiced with vigor, but the science of land health is yet to be born.

-Aldo Leopold (1886-1948), A Sand County Almanac, 1949  

If you follow my decrees and are careful to obey my commands, I will send you rain in its season, and the ground will yield its crops and the trees of the field their fruit. Your threshing will continue until grape harvest and the grape harvest will continue until planting, and you will eat all the food you want and live in safety in your land. I will grant peace in the land, and you will lie down and no one will make you afraid.

-Leviticus 26:3-6 NIV Bible  

Texas is suffering through one of worst droughts in the state's history…Hot temperatures and high winds continue to deplete the soil moisture and take their toll on Texas crops such as wheat, hay, sorghum, cotton, oats, peanuts, soybeans, corn and alfalfa. Department of Agriculture (USDA) data show that Texas cotton yields are only 66 percent of normal. Sorghum is at 61 percent, corn at 82 percent, and peanuts are at 68 percent of normal yields…The Dallas-Fort Worth area has been particularly hard hit, with not even a trace of rain falling since June - a record 61 days. The previous record of 58 consecutive days was set in 1934, from May 25 through July 21, during the infamous Dust Bowl period.

-Cat Lazaroff, "Texas Withering Under Record Breaking Drought,"
Environment News Service, 30 August 2000  

Be careful, or you will be enticed to turn away and worship other gods and bow down to them. Then the Lord's anger will burn against you, and he will shut the heavens so that it will not rain and the ground will yield no produce, and you will soon perish from the good land the Lord is giving you.

-Deuteronomy 11:16-17 NIV Bible  

Farmers are totally dependent on the oil companies, machinery companies, fertilizers and pesticide companies. Farmers are, in one sense, helpless subjects of the corporate kingdoms of agriculture. The lords of the manor in the feudal system of the Middle Ages in Europe demanded no more of their subjects than modern suppliers of chemicals, machinery, and fuel demand of theirs. Agriculture has always been highly profitable, but not necessarily for those who work the land. The lord of the medieval manor was rich. The peasants who worked the land were not. The lords of the corporate agribusiness who supply the inputs for industrial agriculture are rich. The farmers who work the land are not. The peasants identified themselves willingly with a particular feudal lord and declared their loyalty to that lord. Their modern counterparts who work the land wear hats advertising the corporate lords for whom they work.

-Wes Jackson, "Falsehoods of Farming," Altars of Unhewn Stone, 1987  

Not only is no more land being brought under irrigation, but also a great deal of irrigated land is being taken out of production. Salination of the soil, to a degree that inhibits farming, is spreading at a rate of more than 1 million hectares a year. In Pakistan alone, 2 million hectares have been decommissioned, the soil poisoned by high salinity, and farm yields are down 30 percent from historic high levels. Egypt is showing similar declines. In the Imperial Valley in California, more land is being decommissioned than commissioned, again because it is overly salty.

-Marq de Villiers, Water, 2000  

Worldwide, an estimated 24.7 million acres (10 million hectares) of once agriculturally productive land are being lost each year because of irrigation induced salinity, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Crop production is limited by salinity on 40 percent of the world's irrigated land and on 25 percent of irrigated land in the United States.

–Environment News Service,
"Genetically Engineered Tomato Plant Grows in Salty Water,"
9 Aug 2001  

The discovery that salt is harmful to crops is not novel. Cultures that rely on irrigation water for agriculture have been cursed for thousands of years by excess salt accumulating in their soils. The purest spring water contains some dissolved salt, and when water evaporates after being spread on cultivated fields, it leaves salt behind. If there is not enough rainfall to wash the salt away, extra irrigation water must be used to flush the soil. But in an arid region where people, livestock, and crops must compete for limited water, there is often not enough to "waste" on flushing the fields. As years pass, the soil becomes saltier and saltier until there is a white crust of crystals on the surface: crops can longer be grown, and agricultural man must move on or succumb. The destructive power of salt was known to ancient armies that once used salt as a form of chemical warfare. "(They) beat down the city and sowed it with salt" reads the Old Testament. Today a quarter of the irrigated land in the United States yields less than it should because of excess salt.

-Roger B. Swain, Earthly Pleasures, 1978  

Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, When ye come into the land which I give you, then shall the land keep a sabbath unto Jehovah. Six years thou shalt sow thy field, and six years thou shalt prune thy vineyard, and gather in the fruits thereof; but in the seventh year shall be a sabbath of solemn rest for the land, a sabbath unto Jehovah: thou shalt neither sow thy field, nor prune thy vineyard. That which groweth of itself of thy harvest thou shalt not reap, and the grapes of thy undressed vine thou shalt not gather: it shall be a year of solemn rest for the land. And the sabbath of the land shall be for food for you; for thee, and for thy servant and for thy maid, and for thy hired servant and for thy stranger, who sojourn with thee. And for thy cattle, and for the beasts that are in thy land, shall all the increase thereof be for food.

-Leviticus 25:2-7 ASV Bible  

Take rest; a field that has rested gives a beautiful crop.

-Ovid (43 BC-17 AD)  

Having to squeeze the last drop of utility out of the land has the same desperate finality as having to chop up the furniture to keep warm.

-Aldo Leopold (1886-1948), A Sand County Almanac, 1949  

How long will the land be parched
and the grass in every field be withered?
Because those who live in it are wicked,
the animals and birds have perished...
Many shepherds will ruin my vineyard
and trample down my field:
they will turn my pleasant field
into a desolate wasteland.
It will be made a wasteland,
parched and desolate before me;
the whole land will be laid waste
because there is no one who cares.

-the prophet Jeremiah (c.628–586 B.C.)
from Jeremiah 12:4,10-11 NIV Bible  

We have been the most prodigal of people with land, and for years we wasted it with impunity. There was so much of it, and no matter how we fouled it, there was always more over the next hill, or so it seemed.

-William Whyte, The Last Landscape, 1968 *  

Our politics and science have never mastered the fact that people need more than to understand their obligation to one another and to the earth; they need also the feeling of such obligation, and the feeling can come only within the patterns of familiarity. A nation of urban nomads, such as we have become, may simply be unable to be enough disturbed by its destruction of the ecological health of the land, because the people's dependence on the land, though it has been expounded to them over and over again in general terms, is not immediate to their feelings.

-Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound, 1989  

If my people, who are called by my name humble themselves, pray, seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.

-2 Chronicles 7:14 NRSV Bible

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