We see how everything -the whole world- is belittled by the idea that all creation is moving or ought to move toward and end that some body, some human body, has thought up. To be free of that end and that ambition would be a delightful and precious thing.
Once free of it, we might again go about our work and our lives with a seriousness and pleasure denied to us when we merely submit to a fate already determined by gigantic politics, economics, and technology.
Such freedom is implicit in the adoption of nature as the measure of economic life.
(...)
When we adopt nature as measure, we require practice that is locally knowledgeable. The particular farm, that is, must not be treated as any farm. And the particular knowledge of particular places is beyond the competence of any centralized power or authority.Farming by the measure of nature, which is to say the nature of the particular place, means that farmers must tend farms that they know and love, farms small enough to know and love, using methods that they know and love, in the company of neighbors that they know and love.
WB
(MANUEL DO MAZADEIRO, PENELAS,O INCIO, OURENSE;
FOTOGRAFÍA DE IAIN COLQUHOUN)
