"Though I can see no way to defend the economy, I recogniize the need 
to be concerned for the suffering that would be produced by its 
failure.  But I ask if it is necessary for it to fail in order to 
change:  I am assuming that if it does not change it must sooner or 
later fail, and that a great deal that is more valuable will fail 
with it.  As a deity the economy is a sort of egotistical French 
monarch, for it apparently can see no alternative to itself except 
chaos, and perhaps that is its chief weakness.  For, of course, chaos 
is not the only alternative to it.  A better alternative is a better 
economy.  But we will not conceive the possibility of a better  
economy, and therefore will not begin to change, until we quit 
deifying the present one."
-- Wendell Berry in "A Continuous Harmony" 

"a people who are entirely lacking in economic self-determination, 
either personal or local, and who are therefore entirely passive in 
dealing with the suppliers of all their goods and services, including 
political goods and services, cannot be governed democratically--or 
not for long."
Wendell Berry

"And even today, against overpowering odds and prohibitive costs, one 
does not have to go far in any part of the country to hear voiced the 
old hopes that stirred millions of immigrants, freed slaves, westward 
movers, young couples starting out: a little farm, a little shop, a 
little store--some kind of place and enterprise of one's own, within 
and by which one's family could achieve a proper measure of 
independennce, not only of economy, but of satisfaction, thought, and 
character."
Wendell Berry

"capitalism against communism...If one must spend one's life as an 
employee, what difference does it make whether one's employer is a 
government or a corporation?"
Berry

"...if we want our forests to last, then we must make wood products 
that last, for our forests are more threatened by shoddy workmanship 
than by clear-cutting or by fire."
Berry

"We assume that we can have an exploitive, ruthlessly competitive, 
profit-for-profit's-sake economy, and yet remain a God-fearing and a 
democratic nation, as we still apparently think of ourselves.  This 
simply means that our highest principles and standards have no 
practical force or influence, and are reduced merely to talk."
Berry

"...our country is not being destroyed by
bad politics, it is being destroyed by a bad way
of life. Bad politics is merely another result."
-- Wendell Berry (http://www.brtom.org/wb/berry.html)

"A change of heart or of values without a practice is only another
pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life."
-- Wendell Berry in "The Idea of a Local Economy"

It is, in every way, in the best interest of urban consumers to be 
surrounded by productive land, well farmed and well maintained by 
thriving farm families in thriving farm communities.
Wendell Berry

Our national political leaders do not know what we are talking about, 
and they are without the local affections and allegiances that would 
permit them to learn what we are talking about.
Wendell Berry

The message is plain enough, and we have ignored it for too long:
the great, centralized economic entities of our time do not come into
rural places in order to improve them by "creating jobs."  They come
to take as much of value as they can take, as cheaply and as quickly
as they can take it.  They are interested in "job creation" only so 
long as the jobs can be done more cheaply by humans than by 
machines.  They are not interested in good health--economic or 
natural or human--of any place on this earth.
Wendell Berry

...if you should undertake to appeal or complain to one of these 
great corporations on behalf of your community, you would discover 
something most remarkable: you would find that these organizations 
are organized expressly for the evasion of responsibility.  They are 
structures in which, as my brother says, "the buck never stops."  The 
buck is processed up the hierarchy until finally it is passed to "the 
shareholders," who characteristically are too widely dispersed, too 
poorly informed, and too unconcerned to be responsible for anything.
The ideal of the modern corporation is to be (in terms of its own
advantage) anywhere and (in terms of local accountability) nowehere.
Wendell Berry

We are now pretty obviously facing the possibility of a world that 
the supranational corporations, and the governments and educational 
systems that serve them, will control entirely for their own 
enrichment--and, incidentally and inescapably, for the impoverishment 
of all the rest of us.
Wendell Berry

We can't go on too much longer, maybe, without considering the 
likelihood that we humans are not intelligent enough to work on the
scale to which we have been tempted by our technological abilities.
Wendell Berry

...the neighborhood, the local community, is the proper place and 
frame of reference for responsible work.
Wendell Berry

...contrary to all the unmeaning and unmeant political talk about 
"job creation," work ought not to be merely a bone thrown to the 
otherwise unemployed...work ought to be necessary; it ought to be 
good; it ought to be satisfying and dignifying to the people who do 
it, and genuinely useful and pleasing to the people for whom it is 
done.
Wendell Berry

Biotechnology, variety patenting, and other agribusiness innovations
are intended not to help farmers or consumers but to extend and 
prolong corporate control of the food economy; they will increase the 
cost of food, both economically and ecologically.
Wendell Berry

What we have before us, if we want our communities to survive, is the
building of an adversary economy, a system of local or community
economies within, and to protect against, the would-be global 
economy.
Wendell Berry

>From now on we should disbelieve that any corporation ever comes to 
any rural place to do it good, to "create jobs," or to bring to the 
local people the benefits of the so-called free market.
Wendell Berry

Our mistreatment of children is not mitigated by our interest in
"reforming" the institutions into which we put them.  We will not 
have better children by having better day care centers, schools, and 
jails.
Wendell Berry

Nothing is more pleasing or heartening than a plate of nourishing, 
tasty, beautiful food artfully and lovingly prepared.  Anything less
is unhealthy, as well as a desecration.
Wendell Berry

It is certain, I think, that the best government is the one that 
governs least. But there is a much-neglected corollary: the best 
citizen is the one who least needs governing. The answer to big 
government is not private freedom, but private responsibility.
-Wendell Berry, "The Loss of the Future" in The Long-Legged House 
(1969), 

To put the bounty and the health of our land,
our only commonwealth, into the hands of people
who do not live on it and share its fate
will always be an error.
For whatever determines the fortune of the land
determines also the fortune of the people.
If history teaches anything, it teaches that.
--Wendell Berry

As I understand it, I am being paid only for my work in arranging the
words; my property is that arrangement. The thoughts in this book, on
the contrary, are not mine. They came freely to me, and I give them
freely away. I have no "intellectual property," and I think that all
claimants to such property are thieves.
Wendell Berry, from the Joys of Sales Resistance

"If what we call the modern world is inescapable, I think we're 
doomed. I'll be honest about it. I don't think that there is a 
chance. Do you know what Thoreau said? Thoreau saw the railroad 
coming and it gave him the shakes. Not very many people had the 
shakes at that time; plenty of them got them now, because what
we've done is just an extension of the railroad that went past Walden 
Pond. "Thoreau said, 'They think they're going to go on with this 
business of stocks and spades until everybody will ride. But when the 
whistle blows and the smoke clears away, it will be found that a few 
are riding and the rest run over.' "

Wendell Berry speaking at the Agriculture for a Small Planet 
Symposium, Spokane,
WA, July 1, 1974.


"There are some notable exceptions.  A few people have learned to do 
a few things better.  But it is discouraging to reflect that, though 
we have been talking about most of our problems for decades, we are 
still mainly talking about them.  The civil rights movement has not 
given us better communities.  The women's movement has not given us 
better marriages or better households.  The environment movement has 
not changed our parasitic relationship to nature."
  Wendell Berry, from "What Are People For"

"The question that must be addressed, therefore, is not how to care 
for the planet, but how to care for each of the planet's millions of 
human and natural neighborhoods, each of its millions of small pieces 
and parcels of land, each one of which is in some precious way 
different from all the others.  Our understandable wish to preserve 
the planet must sonehow be reduced to the scale of our competence--
that is, to the wish to preserve all of its humble households and 
neighborhoods.

“What can accomplish this reduction?  I will say again, without 
overweening hope but with certainty nonetheless, that only love can 
do it.  Only love can bring intelligence out of the institutions and 
organizations, where it aggrandizes itself, into the presence of the 
work that must be done.

“Love is never abstract.  It does not adhere to the universe or the 
planet or the nation or the institution or the profession, but to the 
singular sparrows of the street, the lilies of the field,'the least 
of these my brethren.' Love is not, by its own desire, heroic.  It is 
heroic only when compelled to be.  It exists by its willingness to be 
anonymous, humble, and unrewarded.

The older love becomes, the more clearly it understands its 
involvement in partiality, imperfection, suffering, and mortality.  
Even so, it longs for incarnation.  It can live no longer by 
thinking."


"We can safely predict that for a long time there are going to be 
people in places of power who will want to solve our local problems 
by inviting in some great multinational corporation. They will want 
to put millions of dollars of public money into an
"incentive package" to make it worthwhile for the corporation to pay 
low  wages for our labor and to pay low prices for, let us say, our 
timber. It is well understood that nothing so excites the glands of a 
free-market capitalist as the offer of a
government subsidy."
-- Wendell Berry, in "Conserving Forest Communities"
http://home.btconnect.com/tipiglen/berryfc.html

"Our model citizen is a sophistocate who, before puberty, understands 
how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how 
to produce a potato"-- Wendell Berry

“---A direct result of the disintegration of the household is the 
division of sexuality from fretility and their virtual takeover by 
specialists.  The specialists of human sexuality are the sexual 
clinicians and the pornographers, both of whom subsists on the 
increasing possibility of sex between people who neither know nor 
care about each other.  The specialists of human fertility are the 
evangelists, technicians, and salesmen of birth control, who subsist 
upon our failure to see any purpose or virtue in sexual discipline.  
In this, as in our use of every othe kind of energy, our inability to 
contemplate any measure of restraint or forbearance has been ruinous.  
Here the impulse is characteristically that of a laboratory scienist: 
to encapsulate sexuality by separating it absolutely from the 
problems of fertility.

This division occurs, it seems to me, in a profound cultural failure.  
That failure is in the loss of any sense that sexuality and fertility 
might exist together in this world.  We have lost this possibility 
because we do not understand, because we cannot bear to consider, the 
meaning of restraint.  The sort of restraint I am talking about is 
illustrated in a recent _National Geographic_ article about the 
people of Hunza in northern Pakistan.  The author is a woman, Sabrina 
Michaud, and she is talking with a Hunza woman in her kitchen:

 "'What have you done to have only one child?' she asks me.  Her own 
 children range from 12 to 30 years of age, and seem evenly spaced, 
four to five years apart. 'We leave our husband's bed until each 
child is  weaned,' she explains simply.  But this natural means of 
birth control  has declined, and population has soared."

The woman's remark is thus passed over and not returned to, but if I 
understand the significance of this paragraph, it is of great 
importance.  The decline of "this natural means of birth control" 
seems to have been contemporaneous with the coming of roads and 
"progress" and the opening up of a previously isolated country.  What 
is of interest is that in their isolation in arid, narrow valleys 
surrounded by the stone and ice of the Karakoram Mountains, these 
people had practiced sexual restraint as a form of birth control.  
They had neither our statistical expertise nor our doom-prophets of 
population growth; it just happened that, placed geographically as 
they were, they lived always in sight of their agricultural or 
ecological limits, and they made a competent response.

We have been unable to see the difference between this kind of 
restraint--a cultural response to an understood practical limit--and 
the obscure, self-hating, self-congratulating Victorian self-
restraint, of which our attitudes and technologies of sexual 
"freedom" are merely the equally obscure other side.  This so-called 
freedom fragments us and turns us more vehemently and violently than 
before against our own bodies and against the bodies of other people.
"---
Wendell Berry in “The Unsettling of America” pp. 132-3


...the word `planetary' also refers to an abstract anxiety or an abstract passion that is 
desperate and useless exactly to the extent that it is abstract. How, after all, can 
anybody—any particular body— do anything to heal a planet? The suggestion that 
anybody could do so is preposterous. The heroes of abstraction keep gallopping in 
on their white horses to save the planet—and they keep falling off in front of the 
grandstand. 

“What we need, obviously, is a more intelligent—which is to say, a more 
accurate—description of the problem. The description of a problem as planetary 
arouses a motivation for which, of necessity, there is no employment. The adjective 
`planetary' describes a problem in such a way that it cannot be solved. In fact, 
though we now have serious problems nearly everywhere on the planet, we have no 
problem that can accurately be described as planetary. And, short of the total 
annihilation of the human race, there is no planetary solution.

"There are also no national, state, or county problems, and no national, state, or 
county solutions. That will-o'-the-wisp, the large-scale solution to the large-scale 
problem, which is so dear to governments, universities, and corporations, serves 
mostly to distract people from the small, private problems that they may, in fact, 
have the power to solve.

"The problems, if we describe them accurately, are all private and small. Or they 
are so initially.

"The problems are our lives. In the `developed' countries, at least, the large 
problems occur because all of us are living either partly wrongly or almost entirely 
wrong. It was not just the greed of corporate shareholders and the hubris of 
corporate executives that put the fate of Prince William Sound into one ship; it was 
also our demand that energy by cheap and plentiful. 

"The economies of our communities and households are wrong. The answers to the 
human problems of ecology are to be found in economy. 
And the answers to the problems of economy are to be found in culture and in 
character. To fail to see this is to go on dividing the world falsely between guilty 
producers and innocent consumers.

"The planetary versions—the heroic versions—of our problems have attracted 
great intelligence. But these problems, as they are caused and suffered in our lives, 
our households, and our communities, have attracted very little intelligence."
--Wendell Berry (from What Are People For?)