Fire and Knowledge

How can you love your neighbor if you don’t know how to build or mend a fence, how to keep your filth out of his water supply and your poison out of his air; or if you do not produce anything and so have nothing to offer, or do not take care of yourself and so become a burden? How can you be a neighbor without applying principle—without bringing virtue to a practical issue? How will you practice virtue without skill?

—Wendell Berry, “The Gift of Good Land,” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002), p. 299

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.

—Wendell Berry, “The Use of Energy,” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002), p. 285