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The spectator’s judgment is sure to miss the root of the matter and to possess no truth.
—William James,
“On a Certain Sense of Blindness in
Human Beings” (1899)
The Anthropic Principle . . . states that one of the constraints on the initial state of the cosmos was that it should be the kind of cosmos that could bring about through evolution observers of it that could confirm its existence and compel it to actualize itself by being observed.
—Frederick Turner,
“A Field Guide to the Synthetic
Landscape” (1988)
There always comes a moment, just before the moment of composition, when a subject seems stripped of all attraction, all charm, all atmosphere, even bare of significance. At last, losing all interest in it, you curse that sort of secret pact whereby you have committed yourself, and which makes it impossible for you to back out honorably.
—André Gide,
Journal of “The Counterfeiters” (1926)
We must allow for the possibility that we can only understand something truly by knowing its future, its fruits, its consequences.
—Frederick Turner,
“A Field Guide to the Synthetic Landscape” (1988)
The small country mill used to be one of the most common and important pivots of the American social and economic scene. . . . The road leading to the mill was always well traveled, as the miller was one of the most important members of the community. . . . Conversation and sociability were part of the mill’s stock-in-trade, and a strengthened sense of community a byproduct of its existence.
—Douglass L. Brownstone,
A Field Guide to America’s History, (1984)
“Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”
—Samuel Johnson, in Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1777)
Whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together.
—Jonathan Swift,
Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
The earth belongs in usufruct to the living.
—Thomas Jefferson,
Letter to James Madison (1789)
There are large tracts of land in America whose bounty is wasted because the plants which can be grown on them are not acceptable to our people. This is not because these plants are not in themselves useful and desirable, but because their valuable qualities are unknown.
The people of any country must finally subsist on those articles of food which their own soil is best fitted to produce. New articles of diet must come into use, and all the resources of our own country must be adequately developed.
—Melvin Gilmore,
Uses of Plants by the Indians of the
Missouri River Region (1919)
We shall continue to have a worsening ecological crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.
—Lynn White, Jr.,
“The Historical Roots of
Our Ecological Crisis” (1967)
Christianity reserved spirit to men alone, and without spirits, plants and animals become mere matter, eligible for dissection into scientific law and economic advantage.
—Peter Steinhart,
“Ecological Saints” (1984)
If agriculture is founded upon life, upon the use of energy to serve life, and if its primary purpose must therefore be to preserve the integrity of the life cycle, then agricultural technology must be bound under the rule of life. It must conform to natural processes and limits rather than to mechanical or economic models.
Our agriculture, potentially capable of a large measure of independence, is absolutely dependent on petroleum, on the oil companies, and on the vagaries of politics.
It is likely that we will have either to live within our limits . . . or not live at all. And certainly the knowledge of these limits and of how to live within them is the most comely and graceful knowledge that we have, the most healing and the most whole.
The energy crisis is not a crisis of technology but of morality.
—Wendell Berry,
The Unsettling of America (1977)
To raise protein in a vegetable form and then feed it to an animal results not in more but less protein for us, for the animal is an inefficient converter. A rough figure for the conversion of vegetable protein to animal protein by all livestock is 8:1. For cattle, the ratio is closer to 21:1. The twenty pounds of vegetable protein that do not become meat become mainly manure, which is not used to fertilize fields, but is washed down the river.
Indirectly, the meat-eating quarter of humanity consumes nearly forty percent of the world’s grain—grain that fattens the livestock they eat. Meat production is behind a substantial share of the environmental strains induced by the present global agricultural system, from soil erosion to overpumping of underground water.
—Alan Durning,
“The Grim Payback of Greed” (1991)
Fertilizers, pesticides, and farm machinery all appear convenient and useful in raising productivity. However, when viewed from a broader perspective, these kill the soil and crops, and destroy the natural productivity of the earth. “But after all,” we are often told, “along with its advantages, science also has its disadvantages.” Indeed, the two are inseparable; we cannot have one without the other. Science can produce no good without evil. It is effective only at the price of the destruction of nature. That is why, after man has maimed and disfigured nature, science appears to give such striking results—when all it is doing is repairing the most extreme damage.
Man is but an arrogant fool who vainly believes that he knows all of nature and can achieve anything he sets his mind to. Seeing neither the logic nor order inherent in nature, he has selfishly appropriated it to his own ends and destroyed it. The world today is in such a sad state because man has not felt compelled to reflect upon the dangers of his high-handed ways.
—Masanobu Fukuoka,
The Natural Way of Farming (1985)
So much energy is consumed by farms and in the processing of foods that by the time the average American inserts the average calorie into the average mouth, some 9.8 calories of fossil fuels have been spent, meaning that we each eat the energy equivalent of more than thirteen barrels of oil every year.
—Jon R. Luoma,
“Prophet of the Praine” (1989)
We have worked from the outside in, to alter our environment. Now we are starting to work from the inside out, and that changes everything. Everything except the driving force, the endless desire to master our planet.
People talk about human intelligence as the greatest adaptation in the history of the planet. It is an amazing and marvelous thing, but in evolutionary terms, it is as likely to do us in as to help us along.
—Stephen Jay Gould,
Time magazine interview (1990)
Since European settlement of North America, we’ve gone from native flora to mostly an exotic one, and now we are working our way back to native, environmentally adapted plants, with, perhaps, a few genetic manipulations thrown in. Sadly, it took us two hundred years to make this circle, and, two hundred years from now, we’ll probably still be battling the exotics that acclimated and became weeds while we were making the circuit.
—Steven Clubine,
Native Warm-Season Grass
Newsletter (1990)
All mankind is entering a new age, and world trends are beginning to obey new laws and logic.
—Mikhail Gorbachev,
A speech in California (1990)
What is love?
One name for it is knowledge.
—Robert Penn Warren,
Audubon: A Vision (1969)
The very playful character of [the eastern wood rat], its cleanly habits, its mild, prominent, and bright eyes, together with its fine form and easy susceptibility of domestication, would render it a far more interesting pet than many others that the caprice of man has from time to time induced him to select.
—John James Audubon,
The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North
America (1851)
The ideal geographer should be able to do two things: he should be able to read his newspaper with understanding, and he should be able to take his country walk—or maybe his town walk—with interest.
—H. C. Darby,
Lecture at the University of Liverpool (1946)
Kansas has had more newspapers established than any other state.
—Leo E. Oliva,
“Kansas: A Hard Land in the
Heartland” (1988)
The frontier everywhere, and nowhere more so than in Kansas, was a crucible which, if it often extracted the best from men, frequently revealed their baser metals as well. Or, in other words, the American West was not only a land of new beginnings, it was also one of bad endings.
—Albert Castel,
William Clarke Quantrill (1962)
The aboriginal inhabitants of our state were called [Escansaques], “those who harass,” “those who stir up,” “disturbers,” and it seems that latter-day Kansans—those brothers—are keeping up the record by continually working at the same old game. Possibly they have absorbed from the atmosphere or from the soil some of the elements which give them the same characteristics. . . . Kansas will be Kansas no more when she lapses into a stupid pace and ceases to stir public sentiment along lines of activity.
—George P. Morehouse,
“History of the Kansa or Kaw Indians” (1906)
[Consider] the redoubtable Sam Wood, who as soon as he plays out in one county moves into another, which he never fails to have under his control within a period of ninety days.
—Editorial,
Topeka Weekly Leader (1865)
Those who cannot answer my arguments are at liberty to use their old arguments of abuse and vilification.
In the number of rich men we now exceed the Old World. These men in many, in fact in most instances, have been made rich by class legislation by which the rich have been made richer and the poor poorer. Public officials and public trusts are today bought and sold with as little hesitancy as we used to buy hogs and sheep.
As a saint [Sam Wood] was bright, but as a sinner, miserable, dirty, and unreliable. . . . Upon the whole, his life was a queer admixture of joke and uncommon earnestness, of the lowest comedy and of the highest tragedy.
—Obituary,
Wichita Eagle (1891)
It has been said that [Sam Wood] had more ardent friends and more violently inclined enemies than any other man who ever trod the soil of Kansas.
—Cecil Howes,
Kansas City Times (1946)
The typical Kansas politician has long ceased to be a brave, colorful fellow who coins vivid phrases, makes symbolic gestures around which social movements can cohere and so exercises personal leadership.
In most of the key areas of Kansas I’ve known, the economic man has become dominant almost to the point of excluding values and interests that differ from his. There is a tacit assumption among our ruling elite that the proper major aim of all education, scientific research, and cultural activity is the increase of private profits.
[There is] the present growing national passion for the second-rate in our political life, the present insistence that everybody must think like the more reactionary of our businessmen on pain of being damned as a traitorous fellow.
—Kenneth S. Davis,
“What’s the Matter with Kansas?” (1954)
God made big men and little men, but Mr. Colt made eveners.
—Anonymous,
Western apothegm (c. 1880)