Quotes about Stewardship

God made the world because He wanted it made. He thinks the world is good, and He loves it. It is His world; He has never relinquished title to it. And He has never revoked the conditions, bearing on His gift to us of the use of it, that oblige us to take excellent care of it. If God loves the world, then how might any person of faith be excused for not loving it or justified in destroying it?

If we are serious about these big problems, we have got to see that the solutions begin and end with ourselves. Thus we put an end to our habit of oversimplification. If we want to stop the impoverishment of land and people, we ourselves must be prepared to become poorer. If

The value of land, like the value of a life, is unreckonable and absolute.

it is by the place we've got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven.

Every community needs to learn how much of the local land is locally owned, and how much is available for local needs and uses.

What I am has been to a considerable extent determined by what my forebears were, by how they chose to treat this place while they lived in it;

One is that if agriculture is to remain productive, it must preserve the land, and the fertility and ecological health of the land; the land, that is, must be used well. A further requirement, therefore, is that if the land is to be used well, the people who use it must know it well, must be highly motivated to use it well, must know how to use it well, must have time to use it well, and must be able to afford to use it well.

trouble with this is that a proper concern for nature and our use of nature must be practiced, not by our proxy-holders, but by ourselves

He turned to his own place then . . . and began to ask what might be the best use of it. How might a family live there without reducing it?

it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.

As Sir Albert Howard, a British agrarian much admired by Berry, once put it in The Soil and Health: "The using up of fertility is a transfer of past capital and of future possibilities to enrich a dishonest present: it is banditry pure and simple.

The price is high. God does not want partnership with us, but ownership of us.