Wes Jackson Quotes

If your life's work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you're not thinking big enough.

... the forces of power, particularly corporate power, are impatient with what is adequate for a coherent community. Because power gains so little from community in the short run, it does not hesitate to destroy community for the long run.

It wasn't until Kiffney-Brown, when I met Jason Talbot, that I really thought I might actually have one of those boyfriend kind of stories to tell the next time I got together with my old friends. Jason was smart, good-looking, and seriously on the rebound after his girlfriend at Jackson dumped him for, in his words, 'a juvenile delinquent welder with a tattoo'.

Out of context,” as Wes Jackson has said, “the best minds do the worst damage.

I want you,” he murmured into her ear, before placing another kiss in the hollow behind her ear. “God help me, I don’t care if it’s against the rules. I want you so fucking much.” She turned her head, looking him straight in the eye, and smiled like a vixen. “I want you, too.

A necessary part of our intelligence is on the line as the oral tradition becomes less and less important. There was a time throughout our land when it was common for stories to be told and retold, a most valuable exercise, for the story retold is the story reexamined over and over again at different levels of intellectual and emotional growth.

Do you know I’d do anything for you?” he asked. “Do you know I think about you constantly? Sometimes I think I’m crazy. You make me crazy. I’m insane when I’m not with you. Jesus, Kat, I ache.” She grabbed at his neck. “I need you so badly,” he continued, breathlessly. “I need us. I need to feel us like this, because I swear to God, my heart, it beats only for you.

As we search for a less extractive and polluting economic order, so that we may fit agriculture into the economy of a sustainable culture, community becomes the locus and metaphor for both agriculture and culture.

We have become a more juvenile culture. We have become a childish "me, me, me" culture with fifteen-second attention spans. The global village that television was supposed to bring is less a village than a playground... Little attempt is made to pass on our cultural inheritance, and our moral and religious traditions are neglected except in the shallow "family values" arguments.

The dialectical or ecological approach asserts that creating the world is involved in our every act. It is impossible for us to operate in our daily lives and not create the world that everyone must live in. What we desire arranges the genetic code in all of our major crops and livestock. We cannot avoid participating in the creation, and it is in agriculture, far and away our largest and most basic artifact, that human culture and the creation totally interpenetrate.

Our task is to build cultural fortresses to protect our emerging nativeness. They must be strong enough to hold at bay the powers of consumerism, the powers of greed and envy and pride. One of the most effective ways for this to come about would be for our universities to assume the awesome responsibility to both validate and educate those who want to be homecomers -- not necessarily to go home but to go someplace and dig in and begin the long search and experiment to become native.

What we must think about is an agriculture with a human face. We must give standing to the new pioneers, the homecomers bent on the most important work for the next century - a massive salvage operation to save the vulnerable but necessary pieces of nature and culture and to keep the good and artful examples before us. It is time for a new breed of artists to enter front and center, for the point of art, after all, is to connect. This is the homecomer I have in mind: the scientist, the accountant who converses with nature, a true artist devoted to the building of agriculture and culture to match the scenery presented to those first European eyes.

Squiggly light bulbs and Priuses, whatever value they have, come out of the industrial mind. Ecological agriculture has the disciplines of ecology and evolutionary biology to call on, based on millions of years of emerging efficiencies such as those seen in nature’s prairie ecosystems. The industrial sector has no such organizing discipline to call on.

But he imagined no such thing. In this he was like apparently all agribusiness executives. They don’t imagine farms or farmers. They imagine perhaps nothing at all, their minds being filled to capacity by numbers leading to the bottom line. Though the corporations, by law, are counted as persons, they do not have personal minds, if they can be said to have minds. It is a great oddity that a corporation, which properly speaking has no self, is by definition selfish, responsible only to itself. This is an impersonal, abstract selfishness, limitlessly acquisitive, but unable to look so far ahead as to preserve its own sources and supplies. The selfishness of the fossil fuel industries by nature is self-annihilating; but so, always, has been the selfishness of the agribusiness corporations. Land, as Wes Jackson has said, has thus been made as exhaustible as oil or coal.

Let me leave you with one very recent example of Berry at his best, drawn from an op-ed piece that he published (with his old friend and collaborator Wes Jackson) shortly after the economy crashed in the fall of 2008. For 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe that as long as we have money we will have food. This is a mistake. If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy. The government will bring forth no food by providing hundreds of billions of dollars to the agribusiness corporations. I

(Wes Jackson calls our species “homo the homogenizer.”)

The distinction between evil and error is not always clear, and this isn’t the place to explore the distinction. What is important is that error is likely to require as much effort for rectification as evil. Redemption can follow either, for redemption is an ecological reality that must very early have become a religious notion, for whether ignorance or greed leads to overgrazing of a hillside, the result is the same. The hillside can be redeemed, probably not completely, probably not very soon, but eventually and to some degree.

Optimism and pessimism are not arguments. They are opposite forms of the same surrender to simplicity. Relieved of the burden of complex options with complicated consequences, both optimists and pessimists carry on without caring about the consequences of their actions.

the beginning of a twelve or fifteen hundred year effort to learn

Agriculture, too, will have to see a revival in planning if we are to address the triple crisis of soil erosion, extreme weather, and dependence on fossil fuel inputs. Wes Jackson, the visionary founder of the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, has been calling for “a fifty-year farm bill.” That’s the length of time he and his collaborators Wendell Berry and Fred Kirschenmann estimate it will take to conduct the research and develop the infrastructure to replace many soil-depleting annual grain crops (grown in monocultures) with perennial crops (grown in polycultures). Because perennials don’t need to be replanted every year, their long roots do a much better job of storing scarce water, holding soil in place and sequestering carbon. Polycultures are also less vulnerable to pests and to being wiped out by the extreme weather that is already locked in. Another bonus: this type of farming is much more labor intensive than industrial agriculture, which means that farming can once again be a substantial source of employment in long neglected rural communities.

You may think of myths as worlds of light sabers, rings of power, and enchanted spells. Hip-Hop is also a mythical place. A place free from strangling bonds of racism, sexism and bigotry. A place where the only currency is your skills with a mic, a turntable, or a drum machine. Hip-Hop is filled with faraway lands populated by dragons, wizards and knights - places like Marcy Projects, 5th Ward, Compton, Shaolin and Strong Island. Our knights are MC's, B-Boys, B-Girls, DJs, producers and graf artists.