Defender of small-farm values and sustainable agriculture, champion of appropriate technology and environmental causes, cultural conscience and effective critic of industrial farming, environmental degradation, and materialistic lifestyle; Berry’s prolific writing beginning with articles in the early 70’s for Rodale Press, Organic Gardening, and The New Farm and continuing through more than 50 books has inspired new generations willing to put place over ambition, sustainability over wealth, family and friends over fame, making the world a better place over power and prestige.
The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (1977)
“A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.”
Chapters:
53. Shameless Thieves
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“a lot of farmers have gone to a lot of trouble merely to be self-employed to live at least a part of their lives without a boss.”
Chapters:
59. The Gardening of Spirit
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“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.”
Chapters:
29. Not Doing
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“And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home.”
Chapters:
81. Journey Without Goal
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“Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.”
Chapters:
65. Simplicity: the Hidden Power of Goodness
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“If we do not live where we work, when we work we are wasting our lives and our work too.”
Chapters:
61. Lying Low
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“In this state of total consumerism - which is to say a state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide ourselves - all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken.”
Chapters:
60. Less is More
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“It is certain, I think, that the best government is the one that governs the least. But there is a much-neglected corollary: the best citizen is the one who least needs governing.”
Chapters:
75. Greed
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“It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”
Chapters:
72. Helpful Fear
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“It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed.”
Chapters:
25. The Mother of All Things
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“Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world.”
Chapters:
76. The Soft and Flexible
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“one of the characteristic diseases of the twentieth century was making its way: the suspicion that they would be greatly improved if they were somewhere else.”
Chapters:
80. A Golden Age
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“People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food.”
Chapters:
75. Greed
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“The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.”
Chapters:
53. Shameless Thieves
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“The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth - and so destroys democracy.”
Chapters:
13. Honor and Disgrace
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“The promoters of the global economy...see nothing odd or difficult about unlimited economic growth or unlimited consumption in a limited world.”
Chapters:
58. Goals Without Means
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“The soil under the grass is dreaming of a young forest, and under the pavement the soil is dreaming of grass.”
Chapters:
16. Returning to the Root, Meditation
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“There comes . . . a longing never to travel again except on foot.”
Chapters:
47. Effortless Success
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“this destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations.”
Chapters:
57. Wu Wei
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“We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all — by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians — be participating in its destruction?”
Chapters:
58. Goals Without Means
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“We can say without exaggeration that the present national ambition of the United States is unemployment. People live for quitting time, for weekends, for vacations, and for retirement; moreover, this ambition seems to be classless, as true in the executive suites as on the assembly lines. One works not because the work is necessary, valuable, useful to a desirable end, or because one loves to do it, but only to be able to quit - a condition that a saner time would regard as infernal, a condemnation.”
Chapters:
72. Helpful Fear
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“we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy”
Chapters:
44. Fame and Fortune
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“What could be more superstitious than the idea that money brings forth food?”
Chapters:
46. Enough
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“What I stand for is what I stand on.”
Chapters:
14. Finding and Following the Formless Form
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“When going back makes sense, you are going ahead.”
Chapters:
28. Turning Back
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“You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.”
Chapters:
18. The Sick Society
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“Problems must be solved in work and in place...by people who suffer the consequences of their mistakes.”
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“You have to be able to imagine lives that are not yours.”
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“If a healthy soil is full of death, it is also full of life: worms, fungi, microorganisms of all kinds ... Given only the health of the soil, nothing that dies is dead for very long.”
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“Mr. Fukuoka is a scientist who is suspicious of science—or of what too often passes for science. This does not mean that he is either impractical or contemptuous of knowledge. His suspicion, indeed, comes from his practicality and from what he knows... a science that begins and ends in reverence”
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“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.”
from The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (1977)
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“We don't have the right to ask wheter we will succeed. We must just do the right thing.”
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