“We are going to have to rebuild the substance and the integrity of private life in this country. We are going to have to gather up the fragments of knowledge and responsibility that we have parceled out to the bureaus and the corporations and the specialists, and put those fragments back together in our own minds and in our families and households and neighborhoods. We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities. We need persons and households that do not have to wait upon organizations, but can make necessary changes in themselves, on their own…

A man (or woman) who is willing to undertake the discipline and the difficulty of mending his (or her) own ways is worth more to the conservation movement than a hundred who are insisting merely that the government and the industries mend their ways.

If you are concerned about the proliferation of trash, then by all means start an organization in your community to do something about it. But before – and while – you organize, pick up some cans and bottles yourself…

If you talk a good line without being changed by what you say, then you are not just hypocritical and doomed; you have become an agent of the disease.”

In our family’s experience (www.yearofplenty.org), changes in the personal space of our lives have turned us into the social activists that we never would have been without that. We are by nature part of a community, and to make personal change is to impact the community. Transforming our family’s small society has reverberations in the larger society. (More on this here: http://www.yearofplenty.org/2009/12/wendell-berry-think-little-and-start-a-garden-for-real-change.html)

Thanks for the provocative post.