Well, start small...locally, perhaps
>> .... Fresh out of ideas of how you fix ....
In a commencement address delivered in June 1989 at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, Berry gave some advice that to most modern graduates would sound old fashioned, indeed backward. But the advice he gave was timeless, and his reminder seems apocalyptic in view of the world's current environmental crisis and, as Berry sees it, America's cultural crisis. In a sense, Berry's deliverance of such a critical message parallels Moses' deliverance of the Ten Commandments, for Berry's advice is also a prescription for cultural healing through the imposition of a set of laws. The laws Berry delivers, however, seem to be Nature's laws. He closed his address (later published in Harper's as "The Futility of Global Thinking") with a series of ten commands, which, he said, "is simply my hope for us all". These instructions are at the heart of Berry's personal and literary world, and collectively they express the thesis informing all of his work, a canon now in excess of thirty books of essays, fiction, and poetry:
1.Beware the justice of Nature.
2.Understand that there can be no successful human economy apart from Nature or in defiance of Nature.
3.Understand that no amount of education can overcome the innate limits of human intelligence and responsibility. We are not smart enough or conscious enough or alert enough to work responsibly on a gigantic scale.
4.In making things always bigger and more centralized, we make them both more vulnerable in themselves and more dangerous to everything else. Learn, therefore, to prefer small-scale elegance and generosity to large-scale greed, crudity, and glamour.
5.Make a home. Help to make a community. Be loyal to what you have made.
6.Put the interest of the community first.
7.Love your neighbors--not the neighbors you pick out, but the ones you have.
8.Love this miraculous world that we did not make, that is a gift to us.
9.As far as you are able make your lives dependent upon your local place, neighborhood, and household--which thrive by care and generosity--and independent of the industrial economy, which thrives by damage.
10.Find work, if you can, that does no damage. Enjoy your work. Work well.
(more...)
https://spider.georgetowncollege.edu/htallant/border/bs10/grubbs.htm
In a commencement address delivered in June 1989 at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, Berry gave some advice that to most modern graduates would sound old fashioned, indeed backward. But the advice he gave was timeless, and his reminder seems apocalyptic in view of the world's current environmental crisis and, as Berry sees it, America's cultural crisis. In a sense, Berry's deliverance of such a critical message parallels Moses' deliverance of the Ten Commandments, for Berry's advice is also a prescription for cultural healing through the imposition of a set of laws. The laws Berry delivers, however, seem to be Nature's laws. He closed his address (later published in Harper's as "The Futility of Global Thinking") with a series of ten commands, which, he said, "is simply my hope for us all". These instructions are at the heart of Berry's personal and literary world, and collectively they express the thesis informing all of his work, a canon now in excess of thirty books of essays, fiction, and poetry:
1.Beware the justice of Nature.
2.Understand that there can be no successful human economy apart from Nature or in defiance of Nature.
3.Understand that no amount of education can overcome the innate limits of human intelligence and responsibility. We are not smart enough or conscious enough or alert enough to work responsibly on a gigantic scale.
4.In making things always bigger and more centralized, we make them both more vulnerable in themselves and more dangerous to everything else. Learn, therefore, to prefer small-scale elegance and generosity to large-scale greed, crudity, and glamour.
5.Make a home. Help to make a community. Be loyal to what you have made.
6.Put the interest of the community first.
7.Love your neighbors--not the neighbors you pick out, but the ones you have.
8.Love this miraculous world that we did not make, that is a gift to us.
9.As far as you are able make your lives dependent upon your local place, neighborhood, and household--which thrive by care and generosity--and independent of the industrial economy, which thrives by damage.
10.Find work, if you can, that does no damage. Enjoy your work. Work well.
(more...)
https://spider.georgetowncollege.edu/htallant/border/bs10/grubbs.htm