'Love this miraculous world that we did not make, that is a gift to us'
Greetings, Friends.
"We are not smart enough or conscious enough or alert enough to work responsibly on a gigantic scale. In making things always bigger and more centralized, we make them both more vulnerable in themselves and more dangerous to everything else.
”Learn, therefore, to prefer small-scale elegance and generosity to large-scale greed, crudity, and glamour. Make a home. Help to make a community. Be loyal to what you have made. Put the interest of the community first. Love your neighbors – not the neighbors you pick out, but the ones you have.
”Love this miraculous world that we did not make, that is a gift to us. As far as you are able make your lives dependent upon your local place, neighborhood, and household – which thrive by care and generosity – and independent of the industrial economy, which thrives by damage.
”Find work, if you can, that does no damage. Enjoy your work. Work well."
~Wendell Berry
“The Futility of Global Thinking.” Harper’s Magazine, September, 1989, 16-22. Originally part of a commencement address given to College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, 1989.