Adam Parker

“I conceive a strip miner to be a model exploiter, and as a model nurturer I take the old-fashioned idea or ideal of a farmer. The exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The exploiter’s goal is money, profit; the nurturer’s goal is health—his land’s health, his own, his family’s, his community’s, his country’s. Whereas the exploiter asks of a piece of land only how much and how quickly it can be made to produce, the nurturer asks a question that is much more complex and difficult: What is its carrying capacity? (That is: How much can be taken from it without diminishing it? What can it produce dependably for an indefinite time?) The exploiter wishes to earn as much as possible by as little work as possible; the nurturer expects, certainly, to have a decent living from his work, but his characteristic wish is to work as well as possible. The competence of the exploiter is in organization; that of the nurturer is in order—a human order, that is, that accommodates itself both to other order and to mystery. The exploiter typically serves an institution or organization; the nurturer serves land, household, community, place. The exploiter thinks in terms of numbers, quantities, “hard facts”; the nurturer in terms of character, condition, quality, kind.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry

“Professional people should know their clients outside their offices. Teachers should know the families of their students. University professors and intellectuals should know the communities and the households that will be affected by their ideas. Rich people and poor people should know each other. If this familiar knowledge does not exist, then these various groups will think of each other and deal with each other on the basis of stereotypes as vicious and ultimately as dangerous as the stereotypes of race.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry

“As Walter Shewring rightly said, both “the plowman and the potter have a cosmic function.” And bad art in any trade dishonors and damages Creation.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry

“The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.”
― Wendell Berry