Why should conservationists have a positive interest in… farming? There are lots of reasons, but the plainest is: Conservationists eat. – Wendell Berry
It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits. – Wendell Berry
The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it. – Wendell Berry
Urban conservationists may feel entitled to be unconcerned about food production because they are not farmers. But they cant be let off so easily, for they are all farming by proxy. – Wendell Berry
The nature of catastrophe is, after all, reasonably unvarying in the way it ruins, destroys, wounds and devastates. But if something can be learned from the event – not least something as profound as the theory of plate tectonics – then it somehow puts the ruination into a much more positive light. – Simon Winchester