The Unsettling of America (1977) by Wendell Berry

"ENERGY," SAID William Blake, "is Eternal Delight. " And the scientific prognosticators of our time have begun to speak of the eventual opening, for human use, of "infinite" sources of energy. In speaking of the use of energy, then, we are speaking of an issue of religion, whether we like it or not.

Religion, in the root sense of the word, is what binds us back to the source of life. Blake also said that "Energy is the only life. " And it is superhuman in the sense that humans cannot create it. They can only refine or convert it. And they are bound to it by one of the paradoxes of religion: they cannot have it except by losing it; they cannot use it except by destroying it. The lives that feed us have to be killed before they enter our mouths; we can only use the fossil fuels by burning them up. We speak of electrical energy as "current": it exists only while it runs away; we use it only by delaying its escape. To receive energy is at once to live and to die.