b'is too important to not evoke Wendell Berry. The nurture in nurture capital comes from him. 5I find myself thinking, today, about an essay that Berry wrote in 1968 about a University of Kentucky student being arrested for protesting the war in Vietnam. It was a week after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Now, theres a danger in my attempting to lift excerpts from this essay, as it is, in its entirety, one the most formative pieces of writing for me in Berrys remarkable canon of 50 or so books of essays, fiction and poetry. Some Thoughts on Citizenship and Conscience in Honor of Donald Pratt is a worthy sequel to Thoreaus Civil Disobedience. But unlike Thoreaus essay, which, roughly a century earlier, made reference to the Mexican-American War against which Thoreau had protested, Some Thoughts contains no mention of the war in Vietnam. Berry looked past the precipitating event, to what he saw as the underlying cultural woundsa disconnection from the land so profound that it undercuts civic engagement and leads to violence. I am struggling, amid all the current political uproar, to keep clearly in mind that it is not merely because our policies are wrong that we are so destructive and violent. It goes deeper than that, and is more troubling. We are so little at peace with ourselves and our neighbors because we are not at peace with our place in the world, our land. 5 See SOIL: Notes Towards the Theory and Practice of Nurture Capital (Slow Money Institute, 2017), p. 83.I consider a strip miner to be a model exploiter; and as a model nurturer I take the old-fashioned idea or ideal of a farmer. . . Wendell Berrys words are like sourdough mother; they just keep on giving, fermenting, carrying forward a life of the mind that is mysteriously simple and simply mysterious. If you have ever broken this bread, you know it is like no other.13'