Wendell Berry

Poet, fiction writer, and conservationist, the writer is a native of Kentucky. Some of his other books include:The Gift of Good Land and Home Economics

Man . . . is the center of the universe only in the sense that wherever he is it seems to him that he is at the center of his own horizon; the truth is that he is only a part of a vast complex of life, on the totality and the order of which he is blandly dependent. The Hudson Review, Autumn, 1970.

An enduring agriculture must never cease to consider and respect and preserve wildness. The Unsettling of America, 1977.

The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. Ibid.

The damages of our present agriculture all come from the determination to use the life of the soil as if it were an extractable resource like coal . . . Ibid.

How can we value our lives if we devalue them in making a living? Ibid.

With its array of gadgets and machines, all powered by energies that are destructive of land or air or water, and connected to work, market, school, recreation, etc., by gasoline engines, the modern home is a veritable factory of waste and destruction. Ibid.