Wendell Berry Quotes About Stewardship

Quotes about: Stewardship

• Once plants and animals were raised together on the same farm - which therefore neither produced unmanageable surpluses of manure, to be wasted and to pollute the water supply, nor depended on such quantities of commercial fertilizer. The genius of American farm experts is very well demonstrated here: they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems.

  Wendell Berry

  Animal, Two, Water

  Wendell Berry (2015). “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture”, p.54, Counterpoint

• The country where he lives is haunted by the ghost of an old forest. In the cleared fields where he gardens and pastures his horses it stood once, and will return. There will be a resurrection of the wild. Already it stands in wait at the pasture fences.

  Wendell Berry

  Country, Horse, Past

  Wendell Berry (2012). “New Collected Poems”, p.93, Counterpoint Press

• Our destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility; it is the most horrid blasphemy. It is flinging God's gifts into His face, as if they were of no worth beyond that assigned to them by our destruction of them.

  Wendell Berry

  Betrayal, Stupid, Responsibility

  Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.308, Counterpoint

• In losing stewardship we lose fellowship; we become outcasts from the great neighborhood of creation.

  Wendell Berry

  Environmental, Fellowship, Losing

• A protest meeting on the issue of environmental abuse is not a convocation of accusers, it is a convocation of the guilty. The realization ought to clear the smog of self-righteousness that has always conventionally hovered over these occasions, and let us see the work that is to be done.

  Wendell Berry

  Self, Issues, Abuse

• Obviously, if Christianity is going to survive as more than a respecter and comforter of profitable inquiries, then Christians, regardless of their organizations, are going to have to interest themselves in economy-which is to say, in nature and in work. They are going to have to give workable answers to those who say we cannot live without this economy that is destroying us and our world, who see the murder of Creation as the only way of life.

  Wendell Berry

  Christian, Organization, Our World

• ... it is not a crisis of our environs or surroundings; it is a crisis of our lives as individuals, as family members, as community members, and as citizens. We have an 'environmental crisis' because we have consented to an economy in which by eating, drinking, working, resting, traveling, and enjoying ourselves we are destroying the natural, god-given world.

  Wendell Berry

  Drinking, Community, Environmental

  Wendell Berry (2001). “In the Presence of Fear: Three Essays for a Changed World”

• We do not need to plan or devise a "world of the future"; if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us. A good future is implicit in the soils, forests, grasslands, marshes, deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans that we have now, and in the good things of human culture that we have now; the only valid "futurology" available to us is to take care of those things. We have no need to contrive and dabble at "the future of the human race"; we have the same pressing need that we have always had - to love, care for, and teach our children.

  Wendell Berry

  Children, Ocean, Lakes

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Are People For?: Essays”, p.188, Counterpoint Press

• In the loss of skill, we lose stewardship; in losing stewardship we lose fellowship; we become outcasts from the great neighborhood of Creation. It is possible - as our experience in this good land shows - to exile ourselves from Creation, and to ally ourselves with the principle of destruction - which is, ultimately, the principle of nonentity. It is to be willing in general for being to not-be. And once we have allied ourselves with that principle, we are foolish to think that we can control the results. (pg. 303, The Gift of Good Land)

  Wendell Berry

  Loss, Thinking, Land

• It is possible, I think, to say that... a Christian agriculture [is] formed upon the understanding that it is sinful for people to misuse or destroy what they did not make. The Creation is a unique, irreplaceable gift, therefore to be used with humility, respect, and skill.

  Wendell Berry

  Christian, Humility, Unique

  Wendell Berry (1996). “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture”, Counterpoint LLC

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