#074: A Path, Not a Road

Join Austin and Tyler on the path as they discuss roads. The distinction is not the obvious one. The inspiration for this episode was an essay written by Wendell Berry, Native Hill, where he says our inability to be stewards of the earth stems directly from the structures we have adopted. There is a fundamentally different attitude towards our natural environment when we take a road, versus a path. Join us as we not only critique the culture, but try to imagine what the different way forward could look like. See you on the path!
From Wendell Berry:
“The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape. It is not destruction. It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around. A road, on the other hand, even the most primitive road, embodies a resistance against the landscape. Its reason is not simply the necessity for movement, but haste. Its wish is to avoid contact with the landscape; it seeks so far as possible to go over the country, rather than through it; its aspiration, as we see clearly in the example of our modern freeways is to be a bridge; its tendency is to translate place into space in order to traverse it with the least effort. It is destructive, seeking to remove or destroy all obstacles in its way.” (62)"