The Need to Go to Nature

So long as the sun shines and the fields are green we shall need to go to nature for our inspiration and our respite; and our need is the greater with every increasing complexity of our lives. L.H. Bailey, The Nature-Study Idea

The Fresh Air Interview: Filmmaker Josh Fox - 'Living In The Middle Of A 'Gasland' : NPR

So bountiful hath been the earth and so securely have we drawn from it our substance, that we have taken it all for granted as if it were only a gift, and with little care or conscious thought of the consequences of our use of it; nor have we very much considered the essential relation that we bear to it as living parts in the vast creation. Liberty Hyde Bailey, The Holy Earth

    Josh Fox lives in the Upper Delaware River Basin, on the border straddling Pennsylvania and New York State. In May 2008, he received a letter from a natural gas mining company. The company wanted to lease 19.5 acres of land from Fox — and would pay him $100,000 to do so.
    "[They say] 'We might not even drill,' " he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. " 'We don't even know if there's gas here. It's going to be a fire hydrant in the middle of a field — very little impact to your land. You won't hardly know we're here.' "
    Instead of saying yes, Fox decided to travel around the country to see how the process of natural gas drilling affected other communities and homeowners. The result, his documentary Gasland, premieres on HBO on June 21. See more with the link above.

Seasonal Sundaes this Saturday

It's all local and good!

Ice Cream & Fruit Festival at

the Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum,

903, Bailey Avenue, South Haven, MI 49090, A National Historic Site

Saturday, June 19th from 2:00 to 4:00 PM

South Haven's own Sherman's Ice Cream covered with locally grown Michigan strawberries!  $5 donation.

Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible

Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible

This book examines the theology and ethics of land use, especially the practices of modern industrialized agriculture, in light of critical biblical exegesis. Nine interrelated essays explore the biblical writers' pervasive concern for the care of arable land against the background of the geography, social structures, and religious thought of ancient Israel. This approach consistently brings out neglected aspects of texts, both poetry and prose, that are central to Jewish and Christian traditions. Rather than seeking solutions from the past, Davis creates a conversation between ancient texts and contemporary agrarian writers; thus she provides a fresh perspective from which to view the destructive practices and assumptions that now dominate the global food economy. The biblical exegesis is wide-ranging and sophisticated; the language is literate and accessible to a broad audience.

Two Ways of Knowing a Tree

There are, then, two ways of knowing a tree. One is the way of human feeling and sympathy, through which a tree becomes a part of one's self, as the sunshine does. It is identified with every hallowed experience. The influence of its benignant branches throws a savor into the commonest nooks and comers of our lives. Another way to know the tree is the botanical or analytical way. This method sternly scrutinizes every detail. This is essential to truth, but not to feeling. It is so likely to restrict and dwarf the vision and the sympathies as to make the tree but a laboratory filled with curiously fashioned mechanisms. Some persons are slaves to facts. There are botanists, no doubt, who know all the kinds of trees, but who have never seen the greenness and verdure and sublimeness of the woods. Yet, despite the narrow vision which may come from the analytical study of plants, there is no inherent reason why the person who traces the veins in the leaf, counts the seeds in the pod, and unravels the structure in the wood, may not also see the tree of which all these charming details are but the various parts. L.H. Bailey, introduction to "Familiar Trees and their Leaves"

A Society of the Holy Earth

"I propose a Society of the Holy Earth. Chapters and branches it may have, but its purpose is not to be organization and its practice is not to be the operation of parliamentary machinery. It will have nothing to ask of anybody, not even of Congress. It will not be based on profit-and-loss. It will have no schemes to float, and no propaganda. It will have few officers and many leaders. It will be controlled by a motive rather than by a constitution. The associations will be fellowships of the spirit. Its principle of union will be the love of the Earth, treasured in the hearts of men and women. To every person who longs to walk on the bare ground, who stops in a busy day for the song of a bird, who hears the wind, who looks upward to the clouds, who would protect the land from waste and devastation realizing that we are transients and that multitudes must come after us, who would love the materials and yet not be materialistic, who would give of himself, who would escape self-centered, commercial and physical valuations of life, who would exercise a keepership over the planet,—to all these souls everywhere the call will come." L.H. Bailey, Universal Service (Image credit from chalk4peace.blogspot.com/)

Encore Online - The Agricultural Act of Eating:

“Eating is an agricultural act.”

    Wendell Berry’s quote is a simple observation of the reality of eating. So much energy and advertising is expended trying to separate us from what we eat that we don’t stop to realize that over 90 percent of a supermarket is not even food. Remaining blissfully unaware of what we eat and where it comes from is crippling us, but it’s curable.

    Not many years ago, most of our food was produced within a 100 miles of our homes...

Read the entire artilce at: Encore Online - The Agricultural Act of Eating: