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JEFFERSON, GARDENING, AND POLITICS
> I've always found that wise gardeners are too busy > gardening to play politics - too grounded to be swept > up by the mass psychosis which popularly masquerades > as the civic duty of our era. They're too busy doing > the real work. Jefferson understood this better than > most, I sense. He insisted that farmers were the > bedrock of American democracy because he knew that to > be truely American is fundamentally to be deeply in > relationship with our landscape, enjoying the full > responsibility such a relationship demands and the > gnosis it births. As the poet Gary Syder puts it: "I > pledge allegiance to the soil of Turtle island, one > ecosystem in diversity, under the sun." Jefferson was, > fundamentally, an _ecological_ patriot. This is correct. He believed that the healthiest sentiments came from those whose life and livelihood were rooted in the soil and in the processes of Nature. "Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth. Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example." --Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia Q.XIX, 1782. ME 2:229