#think little
“If we are to hope to correct our abuses of each other and of other races and of our land, and if our effort to correct these abuses is to be more than a political fad that will in the long run be only another form of abuse, then we are going to have to go far beyond public protest and political action. We are going to have to gather up the fragments of knowledge and responsibility that we have parceled out to the bureaus and the corporations and the specialists, and we are going to have to put those fragments back together again in our own minds and in our families and households and neighborhoods. We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities. We need persons and households that do not have to wait upon organizations, but can make necessary changes in themselves, on their own.”
-Wendell Berry, “Think Little” (1970) in The Art of the Commonplace, (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2002), 86.
“… [T]he movement to preserve the environment [should] be seen to be, as I think it has to be, not a digression from the civil rights and peace movements, but the logical culmination of those movements. For I believe that the separation of these three problems is artificial. They have the same cause, and that is the mentality of greed and exploitation. The mentality that exploits and destroys the natural environment is the same that abuses racial and economic minorities, that imposed on young men the tyranny of the military draft, that makes war against peasants and women and children with the indifference of technology. The mentality that gives institutionalized insult to black people and panic at the prospect of race riots. It is the same mentality that can mount deliberate warfare against a civilian population and then express moral shock at the logical consequence of such warfare at My Lai. We would be fools to believe we could solve any one of these problems without solving the others.”
–Wendell Berry, “Think Little” (1970) in The Art of the Commonplace, (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2002), 82.
