Laws of Nature

Wendell Berry, the Kentucky naturalist and poet, gave the commencement address at the College of the Atlantic a few years ago.

He ended his address with "10 Commands" which really are laws of nature.

The first one is especially pertinent, in light of the great natural disaster America recently experienced.

1. Beware the justice of nature.

2. Understand that there can be no successful human economy apart from nature or in defiance of it.

3. Understand that no amount of education can overcome the innate limits of human intelligence and responsibility. We are not smart enough or conscious enough or alert enough to work responsibly on a gigantic scale.

4. In making things always bigger and more centralized, we make them both more vulnerable in themselves and more dangerous to everything else. Learn, therefore, to prefer small-scale elegance and generosity to large-scale greed, crudity and glamour.

5. Make a home. Help to make a community. Be loyal to what you have made.

6. Put the interest of the community first.

7. Love your neighbors -- not the neighbors you pick out, but the ones you have.

8. Love this miraculous world that we did not make, that is a gift to us.

9. As far as you are able, make your lives dependent upon you local place, neighborhood, and household -- which thrive by care and generosity -- and independent of the industrial economy, which thrives by damage.

10. Find work, if you can, that does no damage. Enjoy your work. Work well.