1 Ecological Morality: A New Ethic for Agriculture

The astonishing thing about our deepened [scientific] understanding of reality over the last four or five decades is the degree to which it confirms and reinforces so many of the older insights of humanity. The philosophers told us we were one, part of a greater unity that transcends our local drives and needs. They told us that all living things are held together in a most intricate web of inter-dependence.... These were, if you like, intuitions drawn in the main from the study of human societies and behavior. What we now learn is that they are factual descriptions of the way in which our universe actually works.--Rene Dubos and Barbara Ward That we failed to learn from them [Native Americans] how to live in this land is a stupidity... they had a responsible sense of living within the creation---which is to say that they had, among much else, an ecological morality...--Wendell Berry Had they [European immigrants] been other than they were, they might have written a new mythology here. As it was they took inventory..