From Wendell Berry’s 1977 book “The Unsettling of America Culture & Agriculture”
HOME LAND AND HOUSE HOLD
What I have been trying to do is to define a pattern of disintegration that is at once cultural and agricultural. I have been groping for connections – that I think are indissoluble, though obscured by modern ambitions – between the spirit and the body, the body and other bodies, the body and the earth. If these connections do necessarily exist, as I believe they do, then it is impossible for material order to exist side by side with spiritual disorder, or vice versa, and impossible for one to thrive long at the expense of the other; it is impossible ultimately, to preserve ourselves apart from our willingness to preserve other creatures, or to respect and care for ourselves except as we respect and care for other creatures; and, most to the point of this book, it is impossible to care for each other more or differently than we care for the earth.
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