“It is the nature of the soil to be highly complex and variable, to conform very inexactly to human conclusions and rules. It is itself easily damaged by the imposition of alien patterns. Out of the random grammar and lexicon of possibilities – geological, topographical, climatological, biological – the soil of any one place makes its own peculiar and inevitable sense.”

Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977.