It's the impeded stream that sings

To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.

The assumption is that people so ignorant and thoughtless and silly and greedy may simply call upon the Army Corps of Engineers in order to receive a clean and abundant supply of water from reservoirs in the mountains. A much likelier outcome is that they will be drinking an ever stronger mixture of sewage and mine acid and mud and cropspray and various other defecations of the industrial paradise.

It is a fact that the entire Kentucky River system, which the central part of the state complacently depends upon for its future water, is deteriorating rapidly because of strip mining, because of bad farming, because of industrial and agricultural pollutants, because of urban sewage. It is deteriorating, that is to say, because almost nobody cares, or cares to know, where water comes from, so long as it keeps coming.

We can make ourselves whole only by accepting our partiality, by living within our limits, by being humans not by trying to be gods.

The discussion about food doesn't make any sense without discussion at the same time of land, land use, land policy, fertility maintenance, and farm infrastructure maintenance.

We conservatives bemoan the decline in values that has besieged our society. Why then should we not abhor the lack of morality involved in discharging untested chemicals into the air, ground, and water to alter and harm, to whatever degree, human life and wildlife? As a conservative, I do abhor it.