askîy @askiiy - Tumblr Blog

“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 Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture

(via speakerforthetrees)

We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.

#earth #responsibility #generations

sa-harris-deactivated20141201

A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.

Franklin D. Roosevelt (via sa-harris)

#soil #strength

quoteskeepmegoing

"Johan Dormaar’s work was quite practical, the study of the impact of range grazing in a highly specific, technical and internationally useful way: not tirades against this or that practice, but developing techniques to study soil organic matter and the restoration of carbon -- matters of life and death on this planet. He traced soil phosphorus, both organic and inorganic, as it cycled through the seasons.

Since I belong to a number of academic listservs that study both environmental science and the philosophy about it, I’m aware of a huge body of literature of “place,” wherein people look at how land and people shape each other over time. Nomadism may be part of this if the wandering is a pattern-cycle of return. The ideas themselves can become a bit unmoored if they are not anchored by real experience on the land. This Dr. Dormaar knew. He walked the land, he got down on his knees in curiosity and gratitude."

#soil history

"Thorpe explores the ways concepts, such as ‘nature’ and ‘wilderness’, were (and are) socially constructed to create exclusionary spaces. The designation of Temagami as a nature preserve and park in northern Ontario at the start of the twentieth century relied on categories of race, class, and gender in order to obfuscate the long indigenous human occupation of the territory and reconstitute it as a place without history. In doing so, ‘nature’ became something without humans, and ‘wilderness’ framed as something antithetical to civilization. Thorpe argues that these ways of thinking reveal far more about the context within which they are expressed than they do about the places and people they describe and their history."

-- Andrew Watson and Thomas Peace, Active History

#environmental history #indigenous history #natural history