“We seek the purity of our absence, but everywhere we find our own fingerprints. It is ultimately our own bodies and our labor that blur the boundaries between the artificial and the natural. Even now we can tamper with the genetic stuff of our own and other creatures’ bodies, altering the design of species. We cannot come to terms with nature without coming to terms with our own work, our own bodies, our own bodily labor.” (173)

“What most deeply engaged these first white men with nature, what they wrote about most vividly, was work: backbreaking, enervating, heavy work. The Labor of the body revealed that nature was cold, muddy, sharp, tenacious, slippery. Many more of their adjectives also described immediate, tangible contact between the body and the nonhuman world.” (177)

“It is precisely this recognition of how work provides a knowledge of, and a connection to, nature that separates a minority of environmentalists, particularly  those sympathetic to Wendell Berry, from the dominant environmentalist denigration of work.” (178)