Sublime

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community; it is wrong when it does otherwise. Aldo Leopold (1949)

Imminent, at the speed of people, is too late. The law must judge imminent at the speed of trees.

Nowadays almost all man's improvements, so called, as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap. A people who would begin by burning the fences and let the forest stand! I saw the fences half consumed, their ends lost in the middle of the p

for all its pastoral

Decayed literature makes the richest of all soils.

and acorns: both profligate handouts that go mostly wrong.

So I might add to Steinbeck’s advice: nothing good gets away, as long as you create the space to let it emerge.

industrial agriculture, we would surely change the way we eat. “Eating is an agricultural act,” as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world—and what is to become of it.

they are for their woodlands, not against progress. They are guardians, ordinary citizens compelled to speak out on behalf of the nation’s natural and cultural heritage in the absence of the political will to do so. The ongoing case around Smithy Wood has been framed as an issue of small-scale