Maria Rodale > Quotes

“Organic is something we can all partake of and benefit from. When we demand organic, we are demanding poison-free food. We are demanding clean air. We are demanding pure, fresh water. We are demanding soil that is free to do its job and seeds that are free of toxins. We are demanding that our children be protected from harm. We all need to bite the bullet and do what needs to be done—buy organic whenever we can, insist on organic, fight for organic and work to make it the norm. We must make organic the conventional choice and not the exception available only to the rich and educated.”
― Maria Rodale, Organic Manifesto: How Organic Farming Can Heal Our Planet, Feed the World, and Keep Us Safe

“If you do just one thing—make one conscious choice—that can change the world, go organic. Buy organic food. Stop using chemicals and start supporting organic farmers. No other single choice you can make to improve the health of your family and the planet will have greater positive repercussions for our future.”
― Maria Rodale, Organic Manifesto: How Organic Farming Can Heal Our Planet, Feed the World, and Keep Us Safe

“Switching to all organic food production is the single most critical (and most doable) action we can take right now to stop our climate crisis.”
― Maria Rodale, Organic Manifesto: How Organic Farming Can Heal Our Planet, Feed the World, and Keep Us Safe

“Why do we keep believing that we can control nature,even as it banishes us repeatedly from our homes in search of new fertile ground?”
― Maria Rodale, Organic Manifesto: How Organic Farming Can Heal Our Planet, Feed the World, and Keep Us Safe

“Mugwort is considered a key part of the Korean creation myth. The story goes that a tiger and a bear named Ungnyeo lived together in a cave and prayed to their divine king to be made into humans. The king gave them twenty cloves of garlic and a bundle of mugwort and ordered them to stay in the cave for one hundred days, eating only the garlic and mugwort.”
― Maria Rodale, Love, Nature, Magic: Shamanic Journeys into the Heart of My Garden

“They read about composting in Sir Albert Howard’s famous book, An Agricultural Testament. And they read about the importance of healthy soil in Lady Eve Balfour’s The Living Soil.”
― Maria Rodale, Love, Nature, Magic: Shamanic Journeys into the Heart of My Garden

“The latest superweed for farmers is a plant called Palmer amaranth.”
― Maria Rodale, Love, Nature, Magic: Shamanic Journeys into the Heart of My Garden

“The reason buffalo no longer roam the prairies of the Midwest and West (except where they have been reintroduced) is because during the nineteenth century, white men killed as many of them as possible in a fun sporty effort to starve the Indigenous people of the region. Sometimes cruelty is the point.”
― Maria Rodale, Love, Nature, Magic: Shamanic Journeys into the Heart of My Garden

“Walking Purchase deception of the 1730s.”
― Maria Rodale, Love, Nature, Magic: Shamanic Journeys into the Heart of My Garden

“Black woman named Eve (whom I had encountered in previous journeys) emerged from the cottage and said, “It is woman’s blood that heals the earth and creates things. Men fight because they are jealous of our power. They think spilling their blood will create things, but it doesn’t.”
― Maria Rodale, Love, Nature, Magic: Shamanic Journeys into the Heart of My Garden

“The Germans, who were also originally pagans (as all people in Europe were before the advent of the Abrahamic religions), first used a bear to help predict the weather because this is around the time bears come out of hibernation. When bears became too hard to find, badgers, and then hedgehogs, were used instead.”
― Maria Rodale, Love, Nature, Magic: Shamanic Journeys into the Heart of My Garden

“When Temple Grandin spoke at that conference in California that helped start me on my shamanic path, the thing that struck me most was her discovery that many people who worked at factory farms and meat-processing plants actually enjoyed hurting animals. Though she is an expert at designing cruelty-free livestock processing systems, that joy from cruelty is a flaw she could not engineer out of the system, as gifted as she is at understanding how to help animals suffer less. I have often thought that when we eat meat from animals that were raised in suffering, we ingest that trauma.”
― Maria Rodale, Love, Nature, Magic: Shamanic Journeys into the Heart of My Garden

“Bill Mollison,”
― Maria Rodale, Love, Nature, Magic: Shamanic Journeys into the Heart of My Garden

“A long-buried memory surfaced of eating mugwort rice balls at Miya’s Sushi (Chef Bun Lai’s former restaurant in New Haven, Connecticut, that celebrated eating invasive species). They were yummy. Mugwort has a distinct and strong herby flavor that is hard to forget.”
― Maria Rodale, Love, Nature, Magic: Shamanic Journeys into the Heart of My Garden

“learned about superfetation. That’s when an animal (or sometimes even a human) becomes pregnant with a new batch of babies even while pregnant with another batch. This unique skill of rabbits is what may have led Christians to think that rabbits had “virgin births” and so associated them with purity.”
― Maria Rodale, Love, Nature, Magic: Shamanic Journeys into the Heart of My Garden

“the groundhog have to do with this? Candlemas also happens to fall on the date of the Pagan celebration called Imbolc, which means “in the belly” and refers to when animals get pregnant in the Spring. Imbolc originated as a Celtic festival to mark the midpoint of the season between winter solstice and spring equinox. It was also celebrated as St. Brigid’s Day. Before Brigid was a saint, she was a pagan goddess renowned for her generosity.”
― Maria Rodale, Love, Nature, Magic: Shamanic Journeys into the Heart of My Garden

“(In the movie Rabbit-Proof Fence, based on real-life events, three young Aboriginal girls who were taken from their mothers and forced into a white-led conversion school escape and follow the rabbit-proof fence all the way home. It’s definitely worth watching.)”
― Maria Rodale, Love, Nature, Magic: Shamanic Journeys into the Heart of My Garden

“Dr. Bernd Blossey, a conservation biologist at Cornell University, discovered after studying garlic mustard for ten years that the best strategy for controlling it was to simply leave it alone.”
― Maria Rodale, Love, Nature, Magic: Shamanic Journeys into the Heart of My Garden