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Quote by Ralph McTell

“This little patch of earth and this little pile of stones I can wash the dust from off my face and skin But this earth is in my bones”

Quote by Ralph McTell

Author

Ralph McTell
Ralph McTell

Ralph McTell is a British singer known for his unique folk style and emotive voice. Born on December 3, 1944, McTell's musical career spans over half a century, and his music has been beloved by audiences worldwide. more

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“claiming that the destructive practice of mountaintop removal mining, blowing the tops off mountains to get at the coal beneath, performs the "necessary" function of creating flat land for development To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe.”

“Unkindness to anything means an injustice to that thing. If I am unkind to you I do you an injustice, or wrong you in some way. On the other hand, if I try to assist you in every way that I can to make a better citizen and in every way to do my very best for you, I am kind to you. The above principles apply with equal force to the soil. The farmer whose soil produces less every year, is unkind to it in some way; that is, he is not doing by it what he should; he is robbing it of some substance it must have, and he becomes, therefore, a soil robber rather than a progressive farmer.”

“We are already engaged in World War III. It is a war against nature, and it is simply no contest. As a result, the threat from the skies is no longer missiles but ozone-layer depletion and global warming. Leaders who assert they will not concede one square meter of national territory to an invader should think of the hundreds of square kilometers of topsoil eroded from their countries each year.”

“What the new fertilizer technology has accomplished for the farmer is clear: more crop can be produced on less acreage than before. Since the cost of fertilizer, relative to the resultant gain in crop sales, is lower than that of any other economic input, and since the Land Bank pays the farmer for acreage not in crops, the new technology pays him well. The cost-in environmental degradation-is borne by his neighbors in town who find their water polluted. The new technology is an economic success-but only because it is an ecological failure.”

“When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one's ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine. Once that leap has been made, one input follows another, so that when the synthetic nitrogen fed to plants makes them more attractive to insects and vulnerable to disease, as we have discovered, the farmer turns to chemical pesticides to fix his broken machine.”