Parenting & Family Quote by Luther Burbank

Burbank’s optimism has the polished sheen of a man who watched nature become legible - and, crucially, manipulable. He frames “plant evolution” as something he personally “observed,” a quiet flex from a breeder whose career depended on speeding up change through selection, grafting, and relentless tinkering. The “wondrous progress” isn’t just botanical awe; it’s a progress narrative with a lab coat on. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when industrial growth promised abundance and reformers preached uplift, Burbank offers a familiar American bargain: improve the environment and you can improve the human.

The pivot is where the quote really shows its hand. A “healthy, happy world” arrives not through policy, redistribution, or restraint from industry, but “as soon as its children are taught” to live “simple and rational” lives. That’s both pedagogical and paternalistic. The subtext is that ecological well-being is less a collective political project than a moral curriculum - teach the next generation the right habits and the world self-corrects. “Simple and rational” functions as a cultural code: distrust excess, reject superstition, embrace scientific common sense. It’s also a way of sidestepping messier questions about who benefits from “progress” and who pays for it.

What makes the line work is its airy certainty. Burbank takes the dramatic, slow violence of environmental degradation and answers with a near-immediate timeline: educate children, fix the planet. It’s an inspiring compression - and a revealing one, capturing a reform-era faith that engineered nature and engineered citizens could march in tandem toward utopia.