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What I Stand for Is What I Stand On (Green Ideas) QUOTES

What I Stand for Is What I Stand On (Green Ideas) QUOTES

1 " A better possibility is that 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. For I believe that the separation of these three problems is artificial. They have the same cause, and that is the mentality of greed and exploitation. The mentality that exploits and destroys the natural environment is the same that abuses racial and economic minorities, that imposes on young men the tyranny of the military draft, that makes war against peasants and women and children with the indifference of technology. 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. [...] We would be foold to believe that we could solve any one of these problems without solving the others. "

― Wendell Berry , What I Stand for Is What I Stand On (Green Ideas)

2 " But the environmental crisis rises close to home. Every time we draw a breath, every time we drink a glass of water, we are suffering from it. And more important, every time we indulge in, or depend on, the wastefulness of our economy - and our economy's first principle is waste - we are causing the crisis. Nearly every one of us, nearly every day of his life, is contributing directly to the ruin of this planet. "

― Wendell Berry , What I Stand for Is What I Stand On (Green Ideas)

3 " A man who is willing to undertake the discipline and the difficulty of mending his own ways is worth more to the conservation movement than a hundred who are insisting merely that the government and the industries mend their ways. "

― Wendell Berry , What I Stand for Is What I Stand On (Green Ideas)

4 " In other words, if you are fearful of the destruction of the environment, then learn to quit being an environmental parasite. "

― Wendell Berry , What I Stand for Is What I Stand On (Green Ideas)

5 " A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has set his mind decisively against what is wrong with us. "

― Wendell Berry , What I Stand for Is What I Stand On (Green Ideas)

6 " The 'environmental crisis' has happened because the human household ore conomy is in conflict at almost every point with the household of nature. We have built our household on the assumption that the natural world is simple and can be simply used. We have assumed increasingly over the last five hundred years that nature is merely a supply of 'raw materials', and that we may safely possess those materials merely by taking them. This taking, as our technical means have increased, has involved always less reverence or respect, less gratitude, less local knowledge, and less skill. "

― Wendell Berry , What I Stand for Is What I Stand On (Green Ideas)