Kindle Notes & Highlights
The exploiter typically serves an institution or organization; the nurturer serves land, household, community, place.
The first casualties of the exploitive revolution are character and community.
we are familiar enough with the nature of American salesmanship to know that it will be done in the name of the starving millions, in the name of liberty, justice, democracy, and brotherhood, and to free the world from communism.
five to twelve calories of fossil fuel energy are required to produce one calorie of hybrid corn energy.
A dangerous equation.
politics is to sell despotism and avarice as freedom
I am talking about the idea that as many as possible should share in the ownership of the land and thus be bound to it by economic interest, by the investment of love and work, by family loyalty, by memory and tradition.
This supposedly fortunate citizen is therefore left with only two concerns: making money and entertaining himself.
Faisal Ghadially liked this
The specialist system fails from a personal point of view because a person who can do only one thing can do virtually nothing for himself. In living in the world by his own will and skill, the stupidest peasant or tribesman is more competent than the most intelligent worker or technician or intellectual in a society of specialists.
We have given up the understanding—dropped it out of our language and so out of our thought—that we and our country create one another, depend on one another, are literally part of one another; that our land passes in and out of our bodies just as our bodies pass in and out of our land;
A responsible consumer would be a critical consumer, would refuse to purchase the less good. And he would be a moderate consumer; he would know his needs and would not purchase what he did not need; he would sort among his needs and study to reduce them.
The typical present-day conservationist will fight to preserve what he enjoys; he will fight whatever directly threatens his health; he will oppose any ecological violence large or dramatic enough to attract his attention. But he has not yet worried much about the impact of his own livelihood, habits, pleasures, or appetites.
“economy of size,” which means the gathering of farmland into the ownership of fewer and fewer people—not farmers necessarily but an “agribusiness elite”—and the consequent dispossession of millions of small farmers and farm families;
That we should have an agriculture based as much on petroleum as on 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.
It is true, but that is to our shame.
the ideals of workmanship and thrift have been replaced by the goals of leisure, comfort, and entertainment.
the force used by the communists was military; with us, it has been economic—a “free market” in which the freest were the richest.
A culture is not a collection of relics or ornaments, but a practical necessity, and its corruption invokes calamity.
“you can’t do one thing”—
the modern home is a veritable factory of waste and destruction.
Our “success” is a catastrophic demonstration of our failure. The industrial Paradise is a fantasy in the minds of the privileged and the powerful; the reality is a shambles.
But the only possible guarantee of the future is responsible behavior in the present.
They have made “redskins” of our descendants, holding them subject to alien values, while their land is plundered of anything that can be shipped home and sold.
“watching kids and crops grow on a handful of acres a man can call his own.” Why, one wonders, does this feeling assert itself when the handful of acres is owned by an urban migrant, but not when they are owned by a farmer? How, rationally, can one hold the small farm in contempt as the living of a farm family and then sentimentalize over it as the “country place” or hobby of an executive? It cannot be done unless it is assumed that an executive is more deserving of a small farm because, as an urban or a professional person, he is superior to a farmer.
He is berating us, with the fervor of an evangelist, because we do not abandon ourselves to machines as people of faith abandon themselves to God.
The energy crisis reduces to a single question: Can we forbear to do anything that we are able to do? Or to put the question in the words of Ivan Illich: Can we, believing in “the effectiveness of power,” see “the disproportionately greater effectiveness of abstaining from its use”?
If competition is the correct relation of creatures to one another and to the earth, then we must ask why exploitation is not more successful than it is. Why, having lived so long at the expense of other creatures and the earth, are we not healthier and happier than we are? Why does modern society exist under constant threat of the same suffering, deprivation, spite, contempt, and obliteration that it has imposed on other people and other creatures?
This determination that nurturing should become exclusively a concern of women served to signify to both sexes that neither nurture nor womanhood was very important.
As housekeeping became simpler and easier, it also became more boring. A woman’s work became less accomplished and less satisfying.
The forsaking of all others is a keeping of faith, not just with the chosen one, but with the ones forsaken.
It is characteristic of our present society that one does not think to improve oneself by becoming better at what one is doing or by assuming some measure of public responsibility in order to improve local conditions; one thinks to improve oneself by becoming different, by “moving up” to a “place of higher consideration.”
Agriculture experts and “agribusinessmen” are free to believe that their system works because they have accepted a convention which makes “external,” and therefore irrelevant, all evidence that it does not work.
For the complex biological wilderness of a healthy topsoil it has substituted a simple chemistry.
“agribusinessmen” see themselves as conservatives. They look with contempt upon governmental “indulgence” of those who have no more “moral fiber” than to accept “handouts” from the public treasury—but they look with equal contempt upon the most traditional and appropriate means of independence. What do such conservatives wish to conserve? Evidently nothing less than the great corporate blocks of wealth and power, in whose every interest is implied the moral degeneracy and economic dependence of
“The giant corporations have made a colony out of rural America.”
so we have before us one of the characteristic political necessities of our time: to take seriously what we cannot respect.
The same is true of the “questions over feeding so many horses in this country while people abroad are starving.” This serviceable charity is not at all troubled by work now being done at the University of Nebraska on the possibility of using grain alcohol as a motor fuel. It is morally questionable to feed grain to a work horse; but if the grain is to be consumed by engines to the profit of energy corporations and the machinery and automobile manufacturers, then the starving are forgotten.
The “goal” of Amish culture is not just the welfare of the spirit, but a larger harmony “among God, nature, family, and community.”*
Amish are the truest geniuses of technology, for they understand the necessity of limiting it, and they know how to limit it.
It is the calculated effect of a deliberate policy to allow the big to grow bigger at the expense of the small.
We must understand that our strength is, first of all, strength of body, and that this strength cannot thrive except in useful, decent, satisfying, comely work. There is no such thing as a reservoir of bodily energy. By saving it—as our ideals of labor-saving and luxury bid us to do—we simply waste it, and waste much else along with it.
We have been wrong to believe that competition invariably results in the triumph of the best.
