Think Little: Essays (Counterpoints Series)

by Wendell Berry

the movement to preserve the environment will be seen to be, as I think it has to be, not a digression from the civil rights and peace movements, but the logical culmination of those movements.

They have the same cause, and that is the mentality of greed and exploitation.

The mentality that destroys a watershed and then panics at the threat of flood is the same mentality that gives institutionalized insult to black people and then panics at the prospect of race riots.

Racism and militarism have been institutionalized among us for too long for our personal involvement in those evils to be easily apparent to us.

A protest meeting on the issue of environmental abuse is not a convocation of accusers, it is a convocation of the guilty.

The time is past when it was enough merely to elect our officials. We will have to elect them and then go and watch them and keep our hands on them, the way the coal companies do.

all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken.

I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand.

Our model citizen is a sophisticate who before puberty understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato. And for this condition we have elaborate rationalizations, instructing us that dependence for everything on somebody else is efficient

and economical and a scientific miracle. I say, instead, that it is madness, mass produced. A man who understands the weather only in terms of golf is participating in a public insanity that either he or his descendants will be bound to realize as suffering. I believe that the death of the world is breeding in such minds much more certainly and much faster than in any political capital or atomic arsenal.

As a class, farmers are one of the despised minorities.

We are going to have to rebuild the substance and the integrity of private life in this country.

we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities.

FOR MOST OF the history of this country our motto, implied or spoken, has been Think Big.

A better motto, and an essential one now, is Think Little.

the citizen who is willing to Think Little, and, accepting the discipline of that, to go ahead on his own, is already solving the problem.

if you are fearful of the destruction of the environment, then learn to quit being an environmental parasite.

To have a healthy environment we will all have to give up things we like; we may even have to give up things we have come to think of as necessities. But to be fearful of the disease and yet unwilling to pay for the cure is not just to be hypocritical; it is to be doomed.

Louis Bromfield liked to point out that the people of France survived crisis after crisis because they were a nation of gardeners, who in times of want turned with great skill to their own small plots of ground.

A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home,

is helping himself in a way that dignifies him and that is rich in meaning and pleasure.

is making vital contact with the soil and the weather on which his life depends.

We will see that war and oppression and pollution are not separate issues, but are aspects of the same issue.

no person is free except in the freedom of other persons,

our only real freedom is to know and faithfully ...

The principles of ecology, if we will take them to heart, should keep us aware that our lives depend upon other lives and upon processes and energies in an interlocking system that, though we can destroy it, we can neither fully understand nor fully control.

We are not humble enough or reverent enough.

there are only a few vague word-of-mouth recollections.

And so, such history as my family has is the history of its life here.

It is a complex inheritance, and I have been both enriched and bewildered by it.

I BEGAN MY life as the old times and the last of the old-time people were dying out.

which mule had the best head, which the best shoulder or rump, which was the lead mule, were they hitched right.

I seem to have been born with an aptitude for a way of life that was doomed,

If I had been born five years later I would have begun in a different world, and would no doubt have become a different man.

I am something of an anachronism.

less a child of my time than the people of my age who grew up in the cities, or than the people who grew up here in my own place five

years after...

I could comfort myself by recalling in intricate detail the fields I had worked and played in, and hunted over, and ridden through on horseback – and that were richly associated in my mind with people and with stories.

When I have thought of the welfare of the earth, the problems of its health and preservation, the care of its life, I have had this place before me, the part representing the whole more vividly and accurately, making clearer and more pressing demands, than any idea of the whole.

Why should I love one place so much more than any other? What could be the meaning or use of such love?

The conversation

a persistence of politeness in the face of impossibility.

Home

the place, the countryside

was still there, still p...

as I left it, and there was no reason I could not go back to...

I knew that because I was a writer the literary world would always have an importance for me and would always attract my interest.

the world would always be most fully and clearly present to me in the place I was fated by birth to know better than any other.

a confrontation of two radically different minds,

a confrontation with significant historical overtones.