Sublime

Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. Want more of everything ready-made. Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die. And you will have a window in your head. Not even your future will be a mystery any more. Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer. When they want you to buy something they will cal

Polanyi, who fled fascist Europe in 1933 and eventually taught at Columbia University, wrote that a self-regulating market turned human beings and the natural environment into commodities, a situation that ensures the destruction of both society and the natural environment. He decried the free market’s assumption that nature and human beings are ob

The land to him isn’t real. It’s an economy of scale on a scale no one’s ever tried here.

Tom had read aloud a Seamus Heaney poem, ‘Blackberry Picking’, and was talking about landscape as a source of allegory, as well as political and social commentary. The challenge was to find fresh ways to describe nature, he said, to see its potential for secrets, for clues.

I thought often and seriously of picking huckleberries; that surely I could do, and its small profits might suffice—for my greatest skill has been to want but little—so little capital it required, so little distraction from my wonted moods, I foolishly thought.

Absence of community. America is one vast, terrifying anti-community. The great organizations to which most people give their working day and the apartments and suburban homes to which they return at night are equally places of loneliness and alienation.

they are for their woodlands, not against progress. They are guardians, ordinary citizens compelled to speak out on behalf of the nation’s natural and cultural heritage in the absence of the political will to do so. The ongoing case around Smithy Wood has been framed as an issue of small-scale

To the ‘right’ he shows the consequences of a love of money and markets, of government by corporation, of an economic growth unmoored from place, which eats through nature and culture and leaves ruins. To the ‘left’ he shows the consequences of a rootless individualism, of rights without rites, of the rejection of family and tradition, of the champ

Mastery has a Midas problem. Everything’s dying a gold-plated death.