Depleting Natural Resources In Wendell Berry's Home Economies

We live in a depleting world. Although thoughts and awareness are being put in effort to save it, there are still reluctant demand and greed from people, who would want to acquire as much resource as possible for their personal benefits. Human’s greed lead to unsolvable problems both environmentally and politically. As natural resources are getting limited every day, it strongly affects not only to the people, but also to plants and animals. The consequences lead to creating higher risk of extinction, which means there will no longer be that specific species exist on earth forever. According to Wendell Berry’s Home Economies, we can see that each economy represents different motives and cultures. Some economies lean towards allowing human to

Although the results of human activity can cause hubris, there are specific substance that prevent humans from depleting natural resources. Topsoil has known to be source of life for both plants and animals. Without topsoil, our ecosystem is going to vanish and destroyed by the power of humanity. Most importantly topsoil is regard as The Great Economy because “we cannot make any substitute for it; we cannot do what it does. It is apparently impossible to make an adequate description of top-soil in the sort of language that we have come to call scientific” (Berry 62). The benefits of topsoil can be outline as “made by the life dying into it and by the life living in it.” (Berry 63), which means that topsoil is source of life to these plants and animals that we are disturbing. Furthermore, it has the ability to “drain and retain water we are complexly indebted, for it not only gives us good crops but also erosion control as well as both flood control and a constant water supply.” (Berry 63). Seeing these features of topsoil will put shame to us. “We find ourselves in debt for other benefits that baffle our mechanical logic and defy our measures” (Berry 63), if we continue to break the Great Economy’s rules and regulations, severe penalties from the topsoil will occur. Thus, we will not have enough foods supply to sustain our lives and eventually died