Wendell Berry Quotes About Fossil Fuels

Quotes about: Fossil Fuels

• This curious faith is predicated on the notion that we will soon develop unlimited new sources of energy: domestic oil fields, shale oil, gasified coal, nuclear power, solar energy, and so on. This is fantastical because the basic cause of the energy crisis is not scarcity: it is moral ignorance and weakness of character. We don't know how to use energy or what to use it for. And we cannot restrain ourselves. Our time is characterized as much by the abuse and waste of human energy as it is by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy.

  Wendell Berry

  Ignorance, Character, Oil

  Wendell Berry (2015). “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture”, p.20, Counterpoint

• We are now, measurably, reducing the availability of these life-supporting goods which we can think of (though only on the conditions of good health and good care) as self-renewing or "sustainable." We are also destroying rapidly the supplies of the fossil fuels, which are limited and not renewable, and on which we have become totally dependent.

  Wendell Berry

  Thinking, Self, Availability

  Wendell Berry (2006). “The Way of Ignorance: And Other Essays”, p.146, Counterpoint Press

• We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.

  Wendell Berry

  Reading, Years, Grandfather

  Wendell Berry (2009). “Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food”, p.74, Counterpoint Press

• We don't know how to use energy or what to use it for. And we cannot restrain ourselves. Our time is characterized as much by the abuse and waste of human energy as it is by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy.

  Wendell Berry

  Abuse, Energy, Fuel

  Wendell Berry (2015). “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture”, p.20, Counterpoint

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin