Wes Jackson > Quotes

“If your life's work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you're not thinking big enough.”
― Wes Jackson

“... the forces of power, particularly corporate power, are impatient with what is adequate for a coherent community. Because power gains so little from community in the short run, it does not hesitate to destroy community for the long run.”
― Wes Jackson, Becoming Native to This Place

“A necessary part of our intelligence is on the line as the oral tradition becomes less and less important. There was a time throughout our land when it was common for stories to be told and retold, a most valuable exercise, for the story retold is the story reexamined over and over again at different levels of intellectual and emotional growth.”
― Wes Jackson, Becoming Native to This Place

“We have become a more juvenile culture. We have become a childish "me, me, me" culture with fifteen-second attention spans. The global village that television was supposed to bring is less a village than a playground...
Little attempt is made to pass on our cultural inheritance, and our moral and religious traditions are neglected except in the shallow "family values" arguments.”
― Wes Jackson, Becoming Native to This Place

“What we must think about is an agriculture with a human face. We must give standing to the new pioneers, the homecomers bent on the most important work for the next century - a massive salvage operation to save the vulnerable but necessary pieces of nature and culture and to keep the good and artful examples before us. It is time for a new breed of artists to enter front and center, for the point of art, after all, is to connect. This is the homecomer I have in mind: the scientist, the accountant who converses with nature, a true artist devoted to the building of agriculture and culture to match the scenery presented to those first European eyes.”
― Wes Jackson, Becoming Native to This Place

“As we search for a less extractive and polluting economic order, so that we may fit agriculture into the economy of a sustainable culture, community becomes the locus and metaphor for both agriculture and culture.”
― Wes Jackson, Becoming Native to This Place

“Our task is to build cultural fortresses to protect our emerging nativeness. They must be strong enough to hold at bay the powers of consumerism, the powers of greed and envy and pride. One of the most effective ways for this to come about would be for our universities to assume the awesome responsibility to both validate and educate those who want to be homecomers -- not necessarily to go home but to go someplace and dig in and begin the long search and experiment to become native.”
― Wes Jackson, Becoming Native to This Place

“The dialectical or ecological approach asserts that creating the world is involved in our every act. It is impossible for us to operate in our daily lives and not create the world that everyone must live in. What we desire arranges the genetic code in all of our major crops and livestock. We cannot avoid participating in the creation, and it is in agriculture, far and away our largest and most basic artifact, that human culture and the creation totally interpenetrate.”
― Wes Jackson, Becoming Native to This Place

“Squiggly light bulbs and Priuses, whatever value they have, come out of the industrial mind. Ecological agriculture has the disciplines of ecology and evolutionary biology to call on, based on millions of years of emerging efficiencies such as those seen in nature’s prairie ecosystems. The industrial sector has no such organizing discipline to call on.”
― Wes Jackson

“The distinction between evil and error is not always clear, and this isn’t the place to explore the distinction. What is important is that error is likely to require as much effort for rectification as evil. Redemption can follow either, for redemption is an ecological reality that must very early have become a religious notion, for whether ignorance or greed leads to overgrazing of a hillside, the result is the same. The hillside can be redeemed, probably not completely, probably not very soon, but eventually and to some degree.”
― Wes Jackson, Nature as Measure: The Selected Essays of Wes Jackson

“Optimism and pessimism are not arguments. They are opposite forms of the same surrender to simplicity. Relieved of the burden of complex options with complicated consequences, both optimists and pessimists carry on without caring about the consequences of their actions.”
― Wes Jackson, Nature as Measure: The Selected Essays of Wes Jackson

“You may think of myths as worlds of light sabers, rings of power, and enchanted spells. Hip-Hop is also a mythical place. A place free from strangling bonds of racism, sexism and bigotry. A place where the only currency is your skills with a mic, a turntable, or a drum machine. Hip-Hop is filled with faraway lands populated by dragons, wizards and knights - places like Marcy Projects, 5th Ward, Compton, Shaolin and Strong Island. Our knights are MC's, B-Boys, B-Girls, DJs, producers and graf artists.”
― Wes Jackson, Ten Years Fresh: The Story Of The Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival