A soupçon of our favorite quotes about regeneration
“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.”
— Wendell Berry
“The health of soil, plant, animal and man is one and indivisible.”
— Sir Albert Howard
“It boils down to a combination of three factors: Park the plow to minimize soil disturbance; grow cover crops, including legumes to get nitrogen and carbon into the soil; and grow a diversity of crops, so that you can break up the pest and pathogen carryover problem.”
— David Montgomery
“There is only one soil, one flora, one fauna, and one people, and hence only one conservation problem.”
— Aldo Leopold
“Water is planted”
— Ernst Gotsch
“[W]e can only fully manifest this planetary era in time to avoid Biospheric collapse if we come home to place and region again. We need to fit our now globalised human patterns of meeting our needs into the life-sustaining, abundace-generating, scale-linking complexity of life as a planetary process. To do this we have to pay attention to scale and reinhabit every bioregions as we transform our impact from one of exploitation and degeneration towards becoming healing and regenerative custodians and nurturers of the ecosystems we not only inhabit but can become living expressions of.”
— Daniel Christian Wahl
“On the last day of the world / I would plant a tree.”
— Former Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin
“We stand, in most places on earth, only six inches from desolation, for that is the thickness of the topsoil upon which the entire life of the planet depends.”
— R. Neil Sampson
“The soil is, as a matter of fact, full of live organisms. It is essential to conceive of it as something pulsating with life, not as a dead or inert mass. There could be no greater misconception than to regard the earth as dead: a handful of soil is teeming with life.”
— Sir Albert Howard
“We found that agroecological management leads to a radical change in the plant physiology of cultivated plants, to the point that they build their tissues from molecular constituents that fungi, bacteria, and insects have a hard time digesting. Plants under this type of management do not disperse substances attracting pests and diseases in the air and soil. All these positive changes, both in culture and in the environment as a whole, have led to a very significant increase in the degree of environmental resilience, which is characterized by the greater resistance of plants to pests, diseases and especially the harmful effects of droughts and others climatic anomalies that are already manifesting themselves.”
— Leontino Balbo Jr.
“A healing of the Earth is a prerequisite for the healing of the human.”
— Thomas Berry (Quoted in Call of the Reed Warbler)
“To be healed we must come with all other creatures to the feast of Creation…the wilderness of Creation where we must go to be reborn.”
— Wendell Berry
“When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and island, flying through space with other starts all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.”
— John Muir
“When we try to pick anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
— John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra
“Agriculture might just be the single most important industry on the planet for creating negative carbon emissions under current economic policy.”
— Professor Benjamin Houlton, Director of the John Muir Institute of the Environment
“Ecosystem agriculturalists will take advantage of huge chunks of what works. They will be taking advantage of the natural integrities of ecosystems worked out over the millennia.”
— Wes Jackson, The Land Institute
“Soil microorganisms are the key link between mineral resources and plant growth”
— Bruce Tainio