Land Use Quotes

“Thanks to the centrifugal pump, places like Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas had thrown on the garments of fertility for a century, pretending to greenery and growth as they mined glacial water from ten-thousand-year-old aquifers. They'd played dress-up-in-green and pretended it could last forever. They'd pumped up the Ice Age and spread it across the land, and for a while they'd turned their dry lands lush. Cotton, wheat, corn, soybeans -- vast green acreages, all because someone could get a pump going. Those places had dreamed of being different from what they were. They'd had aspirations. And then the water ran out, and they fell back, realizing too late that their prosperity was borrowed, and there would be no more coming.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife

“By and large, our present problem is one of attitudes and implements. We are remodeling the Alhambra with a steam-shovel, and we are proud of our yardage. We shall hardly relinquish the shovel, which after all has many good points, but we are in need of gentler and more objective criteria for its successful use”
― Aldo Leopold

“For us, the possibility of kindly use is weighted with problems. In the first place, this is not ultimately an organization or institutional solution. Institutional solutions tend to narrow and simplify as they approach action. A large number of people can act together only by defining the point or the line on which their various interests converge. Organizations tend to move toward single objectives -- a ruling, a vote, a law -- and they find it relatively simple to cohere under acronyms and slogans.

But kindly use is a concept that of necessity broadens, becoming more complex and diverse, as it approaches action. The land is too various in its kinds, climates, conditions, declivities, aspects, and histories to conform to any generalized understanding or to prosper under generalized treatment. The use of land cannot be both general and kindly -- just as the forms of good manners, generally applied (applied, that is, without consideration of differences), are experienced as indifference, bad manners. To treat every field, or every part of every field, with the same consideration is not farming but industry. Kindly use depends upon intimate knowledge, the most sensitive responsiveness and responsibility. As knowledge (hence, use) is generalized, essential values are destroyed. As the householder evolves into a consumer, the farm evolves into a factory -- with results that are potentially calamitous for both.”
― Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture

“The fallacy the economic determinists have tied around our collective neck, and which we now need to cast off, is the belief that economics determines all land-use. This is simply not true. An innumerable host of actions and attitudes, comprising perhaps the bulk of all land relations, is determined by the land-users’ tastes and predilections, rather than by his purse.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

“He turned to his own place then . . . and began to ask what might be the best use of it. How might a family live there without reducing it?”
― Wendell Berry, Remembering

“Local and state governments can help civil society by building towns and cities in ways more conducive to neighborliness and community building. Walkability is a big thing. Mixing residential and commercial development would create real neighborhoods where people can walk to the corner store for a gallon of milk and run into their neighbors. It could allow for “third places” like neighborhood pubs, barbershops, and sandwich shops.”
― Timothy P. Carney, Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse

“Landed interets also successfully staged a fightback around this time by reviving the language of stewardship, and by claiming to be the voice of rural Britain. Older organisations like the NFU and CLA were joined by new lobby groups such as the Moorland Association and Countryside Alliance. These lobbyists still claim to speak for the countryside, despite most of them representing only tiny numbers of people with huge power and wealth: the 27,000 members of the CLA who own around a third of the land of England and Wales; the 150 or so grouse moor estates that that own at least half a million acres of the English uplands Even the 45,000 members of the NFU and the 100,000 who belong to the Countryside Alliance comprise but a small fraction of the rural population. By shouting loudly, they have occluded the fact that farming, forestry and fishing make up just 7 percent of employment even in rural areas of England. Across the UK as a whole, agriculture generates just 0.5 per cent of GDP and employs only 1.5 per cent of the workforce, yet takes up 71 per cent of the land. Land use decisions remain disproportionately dominated, therefore, by a small number of people.”
― Guy Shrubsole, The Lie of the Land: Who Really Cares for the Countryside?

“The increasingly one-dimensional use of land stands in stark contrast to the mixed arable and pastoral economies of the bailtean which, in turn, sustained socially complex communities. These township populations nurtured knowledge production systems that enabled mixed land management strategies. This was underpinned by communal, rule-based approaches to foreshores, grazing, and fuel assets which were taken to be common pool resources. Local resources could then be exploited through a consciously integrated and diverse set of micro-economies.”
― Iain MacKinnon, Plantation Slavery and Land Ownership in the West Highlands and Islands