Quotes About Land

The land promised to them was one of incredible goodness—"flowing with milk and honey," as it is repeatedly described. But it still had to be conquered by careful, persistent, and intelligent human action, over a long period of time.

the Masons transported their secret wisdom from the Old World to the New World—here, to America—a land they hoped would remain free from religious tyranny.

I remember that day in early May after Le Vesconte's and Private Pilkington's brief joint burial service, one of the men suggested that we name the small spur of land where they were buried Le Vesconte Point, but Captain Crozier vetoed that idea, saying that if we named every place where one of us might end up buried after the dead person there, we'd run out of land before we ran out of names.

she released the world for the land of infant sleep.

I mean that in a consumer society, the family is the means by which most people become tied to a cycle like this: go along with things, so long as you get enough to buy more and more things even though the whole world is exploited so that a relatively small number of people in this country - US! - can live well. (Our own land and air and water are also plundered in the interests of blind consumerism.)

In this agony of mind, I made many vows and resolutions that if it would please God to spare my life in this one voyage, if ever I got once my foot upon dry land again, I would go directly home to my father, and never set it into a ship again while I lived; that I would take his advice, and never run myself into such miseries as these any more.

Now, these parts of the earth [Europe, Africa, Asia] have been more extensively explored and a fourth part has been discovered by Amerigo Vespucci (as will be described in what follows). Inasmuch as both Europe and Asia received their names from women, I see no reason why any one should justly object to calling this part Amerige [from Greek "ge" meaning "land of"], i.e., the land of Amerigo, or America, after Amerigo, its discoverer, a man of great ability.

By the time they were done, EOG's land men had acquired half a million acres at $400 an acre. EOG thought it had acquired almost a billion barrels of oil.

T]he whole human population of the world cannot live on imported food. Some people some where are going to have to grow the food. And where ever food is grown the growing of it will raise the same two questions: How do you preserve the land in use? And how do you preserve the people who use the land? The farther the food is transported, the harder it will be to answer those questions correctly.

A lifetime's knowledge shimmers on the face of the land in the mind of a person who knows. The history of a place is the mind of an old man or an old woman who knows it.

The gait most congenial to agrarian thought and sensibility is walking. It is the gait best suited to paying attention, most conservative of land and equipment, and most permissive of stopping to look or think. Machines, companies, and politicians run. Farmers studying their fields travel at a walk.

Soon the majority of the world's people will be living in cities. We are now obliged to think of so many people demanding the means of life from the land, to which they will no longer have a practical connection, and of which they will have little knowledge. We are obliged also to think of the consequences of any attempt to meet this demand by large-scale, expensive, petroleum-dependent technological schemes that will ignore local conditions and local needs.

we must not speak or think of the land alone or of the people alone, but always and only of both together. If we want to save the land, we must save the people who belong to the land. If we want to save the people, we must save the land the people belong to.

And every day I am confronted by the question of what inheritance I will leave. What do I have that I am using up? For it has been our history that each generation in this place has been less welcome to it than the last. There has been less here for them. At each arrival there has been less fertility in the soil, and a larger inheritance of destructive precedent and shameful history.

And there is no use in saying that if we can invent the nuclear bomb and fly to the moon, we can solve hunger and related problems of land use. Epic feats of engineering require only a few brilliant technicians and a lot of money. But feeding a world of people year to year for a long time requires cultures of husbandry fitted to the nature of millions of unique small places—precisely the kind of cultures that industrialism has purposely disvalued, uprooted, and destroyed.

I recently attended a meeting at which an agricultural economist argued that there is no essential difference between owning and renting a farm. A farmer stood up in the audience and replied: "Professor, I don't think our ancestors came to America in order to rent a farm.

We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true. And if we offend gravely enough against what we know to be true, as by failing badly enough to deal affectionately and responsibly with our land and our neighbors, truth will retaliate with ugliness, poverty, and disease. The crisis of this line of thought is the realization that we are at once limited and unendingly responsible for what we know and do.

And then Andy told him about Meikelberger's farm. Had Isaac ever thought of buying more land – say, a neighbor's farm? Well, if I did I've have to go in debt to buy it, and to farm it. It would be more time and help than I've got. And I'd lose my neighbor. You'd rather have your neighbor? We're supposed to love our neighbors as ourselves. We try. If you need them, it helps.

The industrial eater is, in fact, one who does not know that eating is an agricultural act, who no longer knows or imagines the connections between eating and the land, and who is therefore necessarily passive and uncritical—in short, a victim. When food, in the minds of eaters, is no longer associated with farming and with the land, then the eaters are suffering a kind of cultural amnesia that is misleading and dangerous.

The stories they tell become tragic because the interest of the land, the human investment of interest and affection in the land, becomes subordinated to the interest of a 'larger' economy that removes the human interest native to a place and replaces it with its own interest in itself.

The value of land, like the value of a life, is unreckonable and absolute.

Every community needs to learn how much of the local land is locally owned, and how much is available for local needs and uses.

That we live now in an economy that is not sustainable is not the fault only of a few mongers of power and heavy equipment. We all are implicated. We all, in the course of our daily economic life, consent to it, whether or not we approve of it. This is because of the increasing abstraction and unconsciousness of our connection to our economic sources in the land, the land-communities, and the land-use economies.

Our governments have only occasionally recognized the need of land and people to be protected against economic violence. It is true that economic violence is not always as swift, and is rarely as bloody, as the violence of war, but it can be devastating nonetheless.