Informant38

The first necessity is to teach the young

...there's no way to defend yourself against a shallow reader. If your work includes a criticism of history, which mine certainly does, you can't be accused of wanting to go back to something, because you're saying that what we were wasn't good enough. There is no time in history, since white occupation began in America, that any sane and thoughtful person would want to go back to, because that history so far has been unsatisfactory. It has been unsatisfactory for the simple reason that we haven't produced stable communities well adapted to their places.

What I'm talking about in my work is the hope that it might be possible to produce stable, locally adapted communities in America, even though we haven't done it. The idea of a healthy community is an indispensable measure, just as the idea of a healthy child, if you're a parent, is an indispensable measure. You can't operate without it

Wendell Berry
Jordan Fisher-Smith/Orion Autumn 1993
EnviroArts: Orion Online
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