ECOLOGY

 

"For those of us left earthbound, we live on a dying planet-a planet undergoing prolonged torture, that is, a huge, fully sensate creature being subjected to an infinity of mass murderers. She is dynamited, she is strip-mined, she is gassed and sprayed with chemicals. She is riddled with wells seeking oil, her blood, determined to suck out the last drop. Her brain, which is the sea, is dumped full of poisons, the air, through which she breathes, becomes a thick toxic cloud of all the heavy metals and radioactive elements, once distributed sparsely throughout her body, are now leached in her bones, into her fleshly soil, into her womb; stored in lethal concentrations, drunk by roots, groundwater, tongues, they will pass down a more-than-necessary death to her remaining creatures for generations. A humanity starved of energy eats its own Mother. Meanwhile, nature’s free and relatively wholesome, holistic energies of sun, wind, thermal heat, water, moon-tidal, human and organic compost are ignored, rejected. Not that they are nonfeasible, but that ,manhood in the Western world is defined as large-scale exploitation, rather than as local cooperation."

Monica Sjoo & Barbara Mor

The Great Cosmic Mother

 

 

"If the world is to be healed....it will be by people who can open to the web of life that called us into being...."

-Joanna Macy

 

"The success of Silent Spring provoked an almost instant backlash from the chemical industry, and in the cold war environment of the time some of the worst smears that could be thrown, as Souder writes, were accusations of communism or socialism:

'Subversive, anti business, Communist sympathizer, health nut, pacifist, and, of course, the coded insult 'spinster." The attack....came from the chemical companies, agricultural interests, and the allies of both in government-the self-protective enclaves within what President Eisenhower had called the "military-industrial complex." Their fierce opposition to Silent Spring  put Rachel Carson and everything she believed about the environment firmly on the left end of the political spectrum. And so two things-environmentalism and its adherents-were defined once and forever."

-Tim Flannery (review of On a Father Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson"  by William Souder) Review  of A Heroine In Defense of Nature by Tim Flannery The New York Review of Books Nov 22,2012

 

 

"Oxygen-what a silly idea: It's highly unstable, it corrodes metal, and it's dangerously flammable. It's also very addictive. Try giving it up-it's impossible Truly nasty stuff.

   I admit that this is not the usual view: Most people think of oxygen as the most basic, obvious requirement for life-and for us, it is; but this wasn't always the case. Oxygen, in the form we breathe it, is basically toxic waste."

-Idan Ben-Barak

The Invisible Kingdom: From the tips of our fingers to the tops of our trash, Inside the curious world of Microbes

 

 

"Think of the most advanced gadget you own. Maybe a laptop? An MP3 player? A GPS device? Now say to yourself, "This thing runs on coal."

-Idan Ben-Barak

The Invisible Kingdom

 

 

"the day before Jobs died, Apple launched the fifth iteration ofiPhone, the 4S, and four million were sold in the first few days. Next year will bring the iPhone 5, and a new MacBook, and more iPods and iMacs. What this means is that somewhere in the third world, poor people are picking through heaps of electronic waste in an effort to recover bits of gold and other metals and maybe make a dollar or two. Piled high and toxic, it is leaking poisons and carcinogens like lead, cadmium, and mercury that leach into their skin, the ground, the air, the water. Such may be the longest-lasting legacy of Steve Job's art."

article "Who Was Steve Jobs" by Sue Halpern  The New York Times Book Review Jan 12, 2012

 

 

   "The first annual Earth Day on April 22,1970, rallied 20 million Americans to support an environmentally healthy planet: twenty years later, 200 million people in 140 countries turned out. Environmentalism went global in the late 1980s, The United nations played a leading role, starting with the influential 1987 report "Our Common Future," known also as the "Brundtland Report" after its Norwegian chairwoman, that called for examining the relationship between economic growth and environmental sustainability. Thereafter it supported Earth Summits of heads of state every decade since 1992m, an ongoing intergovernmental study of climate change from 1988, an influential commission on environmentally sustainable development in 1989, and the first comprehensive, five-year-long assessment of Earth's total ecosystems inaugurated on the occasion of the millennium in 2000 and completed in 2005. International environmental treaties covering environmental problems from air pollution to global warming also were signed by many countries. From the early twenty-first century, water ecosystems received special attention. The U.N. published its first triennial World Water Development Report in 2003 and in 2005 launched the International Decade of Water for Life. Providing clean water and a healthy environment increasingly became a standard measure for domestic legitimacy around the world; horrendous environmental disasters helped undercut the political credibility of the Soviet Union before its collapse and were increasingly becoming focal points of democratic protests in early twenty-first-century China. giant industrial corporations, such as General Electric, gradually embraced environmentalist agendas and attempted to redefine their images and activities as eco-friendly. Sadly, Rachel Carson never lived to see her handiwork come to fruition. She died of cancer in 1964, at age fifty-six, less than two years after Silent Spring's publication."

Steven Solomon

Water: The Epic Struggle For Wealth, Power, And Civilization

 

 

 

   "This phrase-"an animus against humanity"-slips effortlessly out of the mouth of Myron Ebell, the institute's director (Competitive Enterprise Institute) of global warming and international environmental policy. but what could it possibly mean? "(They believe) humans are evil, the use of human power is always bad; everything we do to nature is bad," says Ebell, a good-natured, smiling philosophy graduate, who has worked as a lobbyist for right-wing causes and politicians since settling in Washington in the early 1990s, after an upbringing in the rural American west.

   Ebell, who confesses to not having an extensive science back-ground, appears comfortable dismissing the scientific case about global warming, despite the fact that virtually the entire scientific community around the world has given it credence. "We think the case for scientific alarm looks weak," says Ebell, sitting in the institute's boardroom.

   There is something almost funny about this blithe dismissal of findings supported by such a heavy contingent of scientists, including many Nobel laureates. yet ebell's competitive enterprise Institute, which has received more than $1 million from Exxon since 1998, is a voice that, remarkably, is taken seriously in the halls of power. (Officials in the bush administration have even sought Ebell's opinion on tactics for downplaying claims about global warming, according to correspondence uncovered by the London Observer.) Ebell and the institute are part of a virulent industry-funded anti-Kyoto movement which has played a significant role in keeping Kyoto and other efforts to deal with climate change off the political agenda, both in Congress and in the White House. In the process, they have helped create an atmosphere in which science and world opinion are seen as suspect, as obstacles in the path of Americans living as they choose to live.

   In fact, that's the way the issue has been presented to the American people-as a battle for America's right to do things as it pleases. The notion that there should be any curbs on the consumption of fossil fuels is presented to Americans as an infringement of some fundamental right. "Energy is fundamental to mobility, to comfort. When you start limiting people's access to energy, you limit their ability to live the way they want, to make choices," says Ebell. "We're opposed to things that limit people's choices."

    Of course, Ebell conveniently overlooks the fact that the deterioration of the earth's ecosystem-and the resulting hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, droughts, insect infestations and crop destruction-also limits people's choices, and in much more serious ways. but beyond such practical considerations, there's another aspect to his argument that's more deeply disturbing. He implicitly rejects the notion that humans have a responsibility to each other, that living on earth is a shared experience, something done along with six billion other people (not to mention millions of other animal and plant species). Instead, living on earth is presented as an essentially individual experience, in which everyone simply maximizes his or her own mobility, comfort, pleasure....whatever."

Linda McQuaig

It's The Crude Dude: Greed, Gas, War, and the American Way

 

 

   "In a 1991 piece of global warming, for example, Fred Singer suggested that the threat of global warming had been manufactured by environmentalists based on a "hidden political agenda" against "business, the free market, and the capitalistic system." The true goal of those involved in the global warming issue was not so much to stop global warming-which he insisted did not exist-but rather to foster "international action, preferably with lots of treaties and protocols.

   A similar argument was made by political scientist Aaron Wildavsky in a 1992 preface to a book denying global warming. Wildavsky suggested that the true goal of the environmentalist movement was the redistribution of wealth, and that characterizing environmentalists this was was "an accurate rendition of what environmentalist-cum-post environmentalist leaders are trying to accomplish" This, he suggests, is why environmentalists are so enamored of international treaties and regulation: they view them as levers toward achieving a new world order.

   As the basis for his view that global warming is a fiction, Wildavsky credited the Marshall Institute report, "Scientific Perspectives on the Greenhouse Problem," written by Seitz, Jastrow, and Nierenberg. But the real issue at stake, he continued, is not science, but "central planning versus free enterprise, regulation versus free enterprise, spontaneity versus control." Evidently this is what Wildavsky believes is at stake.

   In her PhD dissertation, anthropologist Myanna lahsen studied the phenomenon of physicists who deny global warming and suggested that their actions were driven in large part by the downfall of physics as America's "prestige science." The reduction of funding and opportunity in physics, and its succession by biological and earth sciences as the dominant sciences of the era, led them to challenge climate science in a kind of turf war. Moreover, these physicists had little regard for the distinctively different methodologies and standards of evidence of these sciences, seeing them as less rigorous than the methods and standards of physics. member of an "old guard" no longer connected to the highest levels of science, they could not accept that a new generation of scientific leaders, from "lesser" sciences, were replacing them in the role of speaking truth to power."

Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway

Agnotology: The Making & Unmaking of Ignorance

 

 

"So why the hell shouldn't the rich destroy the planet! After all, it's theirs. They own it. We all live on it, true, but we're just renting space from the Landlords of our piece of earth, our air, our water.

   The Landlords do what they want with their property. To get at their gold, they dump arsenic in our drinking water; to get at their oil, they melt our polar caps and barf soot into our lungs."

(Foreword by Greg Palest of "How the Rich Are Destroying The Earth" by Herve Kempf)

 

GUARD WELL OUR HUMAN CHAIN.

WATCH WELL YOU KEEP IT STRONG

AS LONG AS SUN WILL SHINE.

AND THIS OUR HOME

KEEP PURE AND SWEET AND GREEN.

FOR NOW I'M YOURS

AND YOU ARE ALSO

MINE.

Pete Seeger  "To My Old brown Earth"

 

   "However, after having believed that things would change, that society would evolve, and that the system could improve, today I make two observations: First, the planet's ecological situation is worsening at a speed that the efforts of millions-but too few- of the world's citizens who are aware of the drama have not succeeded in slowing down. Second, the social system that presently governs human society-capitalism-blindly sticks to its guns against the changes that are indispensable if we want to preserve the dignity and promise of human existence.:

Herve Kempf

How The Rich Are Destroying The Earth

 

 

 

   "it's hard not to conclude then that, as Luddites go, this new twenty-first century batch is more offensive. After all, denying the world the opportunity to save the earth's ecosystem-which sustains nothing less than life on the planet-is, by any meaningful reckoning, a more grievous offense than denying the world the benefits of the flying shuttle or even the calico ball."

-Linda Mcquaig

It's the crude, dude: greed, Gas, War, And the American Way

 

 

 

"I think the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to have been very, very modest."

-Tony Hayward  CEO of BP  Sky News, May 18, 2010

 

 

   "The strategic threats posed by global environment and development problems are the most complex, interwoven and potentially devastating of all the challenges to our security. Scientists....do not fully understand the consequences of our many-faceted assault on the interwoven fabric of atmosphere, water, land and life in all its biological diversity. Things could turn out to be worse than the current scientific best guess. In military affairs, policy has long been based on the dictum that we should be prepared for the worst case. Why should it be so different when the security is that of the planet and our long-term future?"

Charles, Prince of Wales

 

 

 

   "The staggering economic damage caused by aggressive invasive species runs into hundreds of billions of dollars per year worldwide and effects nearly every aspect of human life, health, industry, and economy. Yet many people complacently reason that this musical chairs game with weeds, pests, pathogens and nuisance animals has gone on for so long that there is little point in trying to halt it now. That complacency is dangerous, for the problem of invasions is accelerating. New nuisance species are arriving continually, compounding the threats to the health and well-being of people almost everywhere. And there are many more invasions to come. Only a fraction of the species that can move have yet done so. By one estimate, the 4,000 weeds that have been interchanged between regions so far represent less that 15 percent of the potentially invasive plants from the global stock. Every country knows of species it does not want, and there are thousands of other problematic species out there, not on any warning list, that most would undoubtedly regret acquiring. The economic and social stakes are too high and the threats to our natural heritage too severe to continue letting living organisms be moved around the world by whim or accident."

-Yvonne Baskin

A Plague of Rats and Rubber Vines: The growing threat of species invasions

 

 

 

"All plants and animals have their place in the harmony of nature."

-Stuart Mace

 

 

"Private property is often the friend of conservation; government regulation is often the enemy. Yet such a conclusion enrages environmentalists, who almost to a man and woman blame Western traditions of private property and greed for the damage that is being done to the environment and recommend government intervention as the solution."

Matt Ridley

The Origins of Virtue

 

 

 

"A Native American taught me that the division between ecology and human rights was an artificial one, that the environmental and social justice movements addressed two sides of a single larger dilemma. The way we harm the earth affects all people, and how we treat one another is reflected in how we treat the earth."

-Paul Hawken

blessed unrest

 

 
"I am rather puzzled when I hear discussions about the environment that systematically overlook that crucial interrelationship. The role of an explicit policy is usually overstated; the role of rational, autonomous behavior of individual human beings in political, social, and economic spheres is underestimated or even forgotten. That is methodologically wrong as an explanation of reality, and it is extremely harmful as a guide for government policy. it is ideologically wrong because it reflects a disbelief in the rationality of the behavior of all of us and because it generates a false belief in the capacity of some of us to construct, to design better worlds for the rest of us. We used to live in such a world, and we do not want to do so again.

   By dismantling communism and by creating a free society and a market economy we have, undoubtedly, made the most important contribution to improving the quality of life.

   By introducing a rational economic system based on private property and an unregulated price mechanism, we crated a valid economic, and therefore nature-saving system, which has no alternative; we formed the elementary, systemic preconditions for our better future. Private property, rational prices, and individual responsibility are more important for environmental protection that are the activities of governments, of legislators, and of environmental organizations."

-Vaclav Klaus

Renaissance: The Rebirth of Liberty in the Heart of Europe

 

 

 "In 1991, Lawrence Summers-then the World Banks' chief economist and later Bill Clinton's Treasury secretary-wrote a memo suggesting that the bank should encourage the world's dirty industries to move to developing countries. The forgone earnings of workers sickened or killed by pollution would be lower in low-wage countries, he noted, while people in poor countries also cared less about a clean environment. "The economic logic of dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable," he wrote."

Editorial in New York Times Sept 24,2007

 

 

 

   "The other national malady we face as writers is the politicized, Armageddon-obsessed fundamentalism that tries to dignify such destructions as these by claiming a sense of so-called divine mandate. There are many kinds of  fundamentalists. Precious few are devoted earth stewards but many are big-hearted people. To judge by the conservation voting records of those the Christian Right supports in Congress however; the majority of fundamentalists see Mother Earth as a trampoline upon which we must stomp, the harder we stomp the more proud of us God will be, for Earth is fleeting, and only here to launch us toward heaven- so why not blow mountains up and dump them as rubble on top of streams, and why not support, from the pulpits of our so-called houses of God, so-called conservative candidates who conserve nothing but corporate profits reaped through our Armageddon-aimed Earth- stomping agenda?"

-David James Duncan

God Laughs and Plays

 

 

"Changes will occur whether we intend them or not. We cannot leave one footprint in a new country, pass through it with horses or mules, careen our Golden Hind on its empty beach, without bringing in our luggage or our pockets, in our infested hair or clothes, in our garbage, in the dung of our animals and the sputum of our sick and the very dirt under our fingernails, things which were not there before, and whose compatibility with the native flora and fauna is utterly unknown."

-Wallace Stegner, American Places

 

 

"There is something unbelievable about the world spending hundreds of billions of dollars annually to subsidize its own destruction."

Andre de Moor & Peter Calamai

Subsidizing Unsustainable Development

Seven hundred million trillion tons of junk mail are sent out across the U.S. per year

 

"The public must decide whether it wishes to continue on the present road, and it can do so only when in full possession of the facts."

Rachel Carson

Silent Spring

 

 

   "The lies about energy have now found their second century, this amid the turmoil of natural catastrophes, Mideast terrorism, petropolitical and nuclear blackmail, and national strife over the next tank of gas. Now the world is being fed half-truths, quarter-truths, and outright lies bout ethanol, about coal, and about the real alternatives and energy salvations that are too simple, too easy to achieve to be harnessed by a giant corporation or a foreign capital. They are as endless and free as the howling wind, the frothing waves, and the magic of molecules.

   This is a sorry saga that will surely anger all. You will discover how many good ideas were sabotaged, how many bad ones triumphed-at the expense of all society-for the transient benefit of a few, and how we are operating under those same heartless distortions today. But this saga can also infuse hope to many who will discover the simple truth: clean, renewable energy independence is not a distant dream. It is available right now. This triumph will never be achieved by public policy, an inert gas that has failed so consistently over so many centuries to ignite the needed change. But it is achievable with the concerted action of individuals, energizing themselves."

-Edwin Black

Internal Combustion: How Corporations and Governments Addicted The World To Oil and Derailed The Alternatives

 

 

"but China's modern economic growth is fuelled, Literally, by burning coal, gas, and oil. The torrid rate of expansion of Chinese manufacturing is outstripped only by its growing fossil fuel consumption. between 2002 and 2004, energy use in china increased by a staggering 33 percent, and the resulting increase in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions made china the world's biggest polluter of greenhouse gases by 2007-far ahead of predictions for when china would edge out the United States. Together, these two countries account for over 40 percent of global CO2 emissions, the main culprit behind global warming.

Raymond Fisman & Edwrd Miguel

Economic Gangsters: corruption, violence, and the Poverty of Nations

 

 

"What now remains of the formerly rich land is like the skeleton of a sick man, with all the fat and soft earth having wasted away and only the bare framework remaining....The plains that were full of rich soil are now marshes. Hills that were once covered with forests and produced abundant pasture now produce only food for bees. Once the land was enriched by yearly rains, which were not lost, as they are now, by flowing from the bare land into the sea."

-Plato  The Republic ,Critias

 

"From prehistory to the present time, the mindless horsemen of the environmental apocalypse have been overkill, habitat destruction, introduction of animals such as rats and goats, and diseases carried by these exotic animals....Each agent strengthens the others in a tightening net of destruction."

-Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life

 

 

"Nothing could be done about conservation, without creating a new kind of people."

-Aldo Leopold

 

 

   "The agrarian mind begins with the love of fields and ramifies in good farming, good cooking, good eating, and gratitude to God. "

-Wendell Berry

 

 

 

"We are a weed species, and wherever we go we crowd out natives and carry with us domesticated species that may become weeds in the new environment. What we destroy we often do not intend to harm. What we import, we import with the best intentions. But I find myself wondering....why we should have had to repeat so much dreary history."

-Wallace Stegner, American Places,

 

 

"The present system of production is self-destructive; the present course of human circulation is suicidal. The environmental crisis is sober evidence of an insidious fraud  hidden in the vaunted productivity and wealth of modern technology-based society. This wealth has been gained by rapid short-term exploitation of the environment system, but it has blindly accumulated a debt to nature (in the form of environmental destruction in developed countries and of population pressure in developing ones)-a debt so large and so pervasive that in the next generation it may, if unpaid, wipe out most of the wealth it has gained for us. In effect, the account books of modern society are drastically out of balance, so that, largely unconsciously, a huge fraud has been perpetrated on the people of the world. The rapidly worsening course of environmental pollution is a warning that the bubble is about to burst, that the demand to pay the global debt may find the world bankrupt."

-Barry Commoner

 

 

 

"The monetary system has so many extraordinary and profound problems that it is not reformable or redeemable in anything like its present form. Unless action is taken to disconnect from the present Western money system, all efforts at reducing energy use, controlling pollution, ending species and habitat loss, contracting the population to within Earth's carrying capacity, or coping with any of the things going wrong on the planet, are simply doomed. These tasks are not a complete waste of time in the short-term, but ultimately of no more use than painting the Titanic green."

Julian Darley

High Noon for Natural Gas

 

 

 

"I'm more worried about global warming than I am of any major military conflict."

Sir Peter Levine (Board Chair of Lloyd's of London

 

 

 

"In effect, governments were spending $700 billion of taxpayers money a year to encourage the use of water, the burning of fossil fuels, the use of pesticides, fishing and diving."

Lester R. Brown

Eco-Economy

 

 

 

"U.S. manufacturers, including major drugmakers, have legally released at least 271 million pounds of pharmaceuticals into waterways that often provide drinking water-contamination the federal government has consistently overlooked, according to an Associated press Investigation."

by Jeff Donn, Martha Mendoza and Justin Pritchard Associated Press

 

 

"From Camp's perspective, a ton of hazardous waste from a steel mill represented seventy-five one hundred dollars in Bay Zinc's bank account. A trainload-four hundred tons-was thirty thousand or forty thousand dollars. By adding acid and water, he could roll the ash into granules and sell it as fertilizer for one hundred to two hundred dollars a ton. The industry grew from the EPA exemption.

   At the steel mill, it was hazardous waste. In the railcar, it was hazardous waste. Going into the top of the silo at Bay Zinc, it was hazardous waste. All subject to "cradle to grave" monitoring and treatment that the EPA set up for hazardous wastes.

Then it changed. Camp knew why.

   I came to think of it as the magic silo. When it came out the bottom of the silo, it was no longer considered a hazardous waste, but a fertilizer material.

The same stuff.

Duff Wilson

Fateful Harvest

 

 

 

"We study the archeological sites of civilizations that moved onto economic paths that were environmentally destructive and could not make the needed course corrections in time. We face the same risk."

Lester R. Brown

Eco-Economy

 

 

"An ecological explosion means the enormous increase in numbers of some kind of living organism-it may be an infectious virus like influenza, or a bacterium like bubonic plague, or a fungus like that of the potato disease, a green plant like the prickly pear, or an animal like the gray squirrel. I use the word 'explosion' deliberately, because it means the bursting out from control of forces that were previously held in restraint by other forces."

-Charles Elton The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants

 

 

"The most important pathological effects of pollution are extremely delayed and indirect."

-Rene Dubos

 

 

"Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value."

-Buckminster Fuller

 

 

  "It is an eerie sight, this suburban ghost town. Block after block, the spectacle is the same. Three hundred acres that were once home to twenty-six hundred men, women, and children lie deserted. We are familiar with films and photographs of abandoned mining camps and false-fronted cow towns. But this is not the Old West. This is modern America. Is the shape of things to come to found here within earshot of the continent's greatest natural wonder? Already another community some three miles away  Forest Glen-has had to abandoned for similar reasons."

(about Love Canal)

Pierre Berton

Niagara: A History of the Falls

 

Book: "Altering Eden: The Feminization of Nature" by Deborah Cadbury

 

"We can have a world of industrial smog, diminishing diversity, vanishing rainforests, the threat of nuclear annihilation, and the lurking hazards of genetic engineering, or we can have a world in which there are no 'environmental' diseases, no malnourished children, no warfare between social classes, no poor. a world in which rainforests expand, oceans and lakes teem with fish and marine mammals, new coral reefs are born, the variety of species of life expand and the human prospect grows ever more secure."

Global Ecovillage Network

The Art of Natural Building

www.reefball.org

 

"Sometimes I think that ideas, like men, can become dictators. I doubt if there exists today a more complete regimentation of the human mind than that accomplished by our self-imposed doctrine of ruthless utilitarianism. The saving grace...is that we fastened this yoke on our own necks, and we can cast it off when we want to....Conservation is perhaps one of the many squirmings which foreshadow this act of self-liberation."

Aldo Leopold (1939)

 

"The majority of the American people have demonstrated on every possible occasion that they support the ideal of wilderness preservation; even our politicians are forced by popular opinion to pretend to support the idea. We are the majority; they-the greedy and powerful-are the minority."

Edward Abbey

 

"The mumbo-jumbo of ecology is another substitute for religion. Indeed it is a kind of religion, a modern form of paganism. It teaches us to worship stones. It deifies animals, rather as the ancient Egyptians made gods out of cats, crocodiles, monkeys and ibexes, mummifying them in colossal numbers. It puts 'wilderness areas' before people."

Paul Johnson, Daily Telegraph, 22.1.83

 

"We read in the diaries of Leonardo da Vinci that the earth is a living creature, the rocks its bones, the plants its hair, the water its blood. Nor is this poetic exaggeration, but the purest realism. The earth is a living creature; common fluids course through its body. Every part of it has joined hands in the dance with all the other parts. Everything that grows upon the earth is united by the earth itself and by the air, underground and aboveground, by climate and the soil water. Everything combats or comforts everything else. By the mysterious decree which the artistic mind calls "harmony"-we would do better to speak of "balance"-one thing cannot exist without the other."

H.E. Jacob

Six Thousand Years of Bread

 

 

"The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying ‘this is mine’ and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders; how much misery and horror the human race would have been spared if someone had pulled up the stakes and filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: ‘Beware of listening to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to everyone and that the earth belongs to no one!"

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

A Discourse on Inequality (1755)

 

"Nations that love the country destroy what they adore."

Aldous Huxley

 

"We sleep, we bury ourselves in our affairs and in the meantime, both day and night, hundreds of thousands of poisonous streams pour ceaselessly into our bright rivers and destroy all forms of life. Is it possible that this criminal disgrace should continue?"

Vladimir Soloukhin

A Walk in Rural Russia

 

"With a General Motors owning the Mississippi River, you can be sure that stiff effluent charges would be assessed on industries and municipalities along its banks, and that the water would be kept clean enough to maximize revenues from leases granted to firms seeking rights to drinking water, recreation and commercial fishing."

Edwin G. Dolan

Capitalism and the Environment

 

USING ONLY TECHNOLOGY AVAILABLE TODAY $300 billion in energy waste could be cut from the economy* ed note....written decades ago

 

"If the bottom line is what's so important, here's a good bottom line for you: Proven energy efficiency programs can eliminate the need for hundreds of power plants, and we can enact them right now."

-Tom Blees

Prescription For the Planet

 

"This is what life has come to in city that had about 250 bad-air days last year; joggers in city parks wear face masks; schools advise children not to play outdoors during certain times; a clear sky is front-page news. That’s on good days.

The World Health Organization has ranked the air in Mexico City as the most contaminated in the world, with pollution levels at least double those considered safe for human habitation.

The impact on health is devastating. During one five-day stretch this year, city hospitals and clinics reported a deluge of 400,000 pollution-related cases. "It’s horrible," said one resident. "My throat is always sore."

New proposals to combat the contaminants include flying helicopters over the city to act as giant fans, and switching to bag lunches to replace the varying lunch breaks that create several rush hours each workday."

Molly Moore "Washington Post"

 

NEW CONSTRUCTION; WHAT A WASTE

"As anyone who’s hosted a major building project knows, those ugly dumpsters fill up fast-with scraps of framing lumber, drywall, and roofing shingles: bedsheet-size panels of plastic and paper; and nail-studded pallets to keep supplies flat and off the ground. Now, researchers at Cornell University have audited recyclable materials in construction waste from two houses. The 4,656 pounds of scraps tallied during the building of one four-bedroom vinyl-sided house included 1,788 lbs. Of drywall, 1,338 lbs of wood scraps (46 lbs. As sawdust). 346 lbs. Of asphalt roofing. 273 lbs of cardboard, 211 lbs. Of plastic, 133 lbs of brick pieces and 31 lbs of paper.

The big surprise, to environmental analyst and former building contractor Mark Pierce, was the uniform ratio of waste types among the two houses he examined and those in other studies "Cardboard, wood, and gypsum (drywall) account for between 74% and 77% of all the wastes produced in a residential construction site, regardless of the size of the house or style."

While makers of particleboard and some other materials are periodically "starved" for the raw materials shed as a waste during construction he noted, "we had a real hard time fining conservation and recycling) alternatives that would be cost effective" for a builder putting up houses 60 miles north of New York City. Unless landfills increase their fees. Pierce found, it will remain slightly less expensive to dump most construction materials than to salvage them."

Science News mar 16,1996

See article: "The Nitrogen Bomb by David E. Fisher and Marshall Jon Fisher,DISCOVER Mag,April,2001

 

"Make it a habit to fall down and kiss the earth! Kiss the earth and always love it."

Dostoevsky

 

"Man's separation from his mother, Nature....becomes more complete with every passing year, and may finally reach the point of artifice where, to maintain life at all, we will have to resort to a recording-some recollection of the natural world, some grunting noise that takes us back to reality and stirs us to accept the half-forgotten sources of our original supply."

E.B. White

 

 

Why do we call our planet "Earth?"

In German it is Erde, from Erda in old German

Jordh in Icelandic,Jord in Danish

Aritha in Gothic

/ereds in Hebrew

Tellus

E.RI.DU =Home In the Faraway (ancient Sumerian)

Oceania

Gaia

Daear ,,Weslsh

 

"Forget about saving the planet 'for our grandchildren.' We are already standing in their shoes."

-Bill McKibben

EAARTH: Making a Life on a tough New Planet

 

"It is my own personal belief that we need to combine technological ability with, for want of a better description, spiritual readjustment and a realization that certain truths are eternal.’

Prince Charles

 

BRITANNIA FOULS THE WAVES

Last autumn, more than 4,500 incendiary bombs from the second world war washed up on beaches along the west coast of Scotland. Made of phosphorus, benzene and cellulose, they were designed to ignite on contact with air. A four-year-old picked one up and burned his hand and leg

The phosphorus bombs are the clearest warning of the dangers of using the sea as a dump for military waste. The bombs were dropped into the North Channel between Scotland and Northern Ireland 50 years ago but are now washing up on land and starting to burn. Phosphorus bombs are just a tiny fraction of the 1.15 million tons of conventional and chemical weapons known to have been dumped in the sea around Britain since the war. The could be the heralds of more to come.

According to Britain’s Ministry of Defense, the bombs were to have been dumped in Beaufort’s Dyke , a deep trench about six miles off the Scottish coast. Between 1945 and 1976, Britain dumped about 1 million tons of munitions into and around the trench, making it be far the largest known British military dump. The ministry dumped some 14,000 tons of artillery rockets filled with poisonous phosgene gas in the trench between July and October, 1945. Over the following three years, it consigned 135,000 tons of conventional munitions there, and every year, into the late 1950s, another 20,000 tons ended up in the dyke.

British Gas began plowing the seabed to lay a new pipeline just three days before the phosphorus bombs started to come ashore, and scientists in Aberdeen blame the plowing operation of disturbing the deadly munitions.

The story told by two seamen who sailed on dumping expeditions could explain why the materiel is surfacing now. Many of the munitions meant for Beaufort’s Dyke, they say, never got there. During bad weather, the seamen say, the ships dumped their cargoes no more than a few hundred yards offshore.

Beaufort’s Dyke is not the only military dump off Scotland’s west coast. Ministry of Defense statements disclose that between 1945 and 1957, 24 ships packed with 137,000 tons of chemical weapons were scuttled at two sites in the Atlantic. Eight of the ships are sitting at depths of less than 6,000 feet of water, holding thousands of tons of radioactive waste from Britain’s nuclear program. Officials also admitted recently that the materiel dumped in the Atlantic includes 17,000 tons of captured German bombs filled with nerve gas.

Most marine scientists agree that surveys of the dump sites are needed to find out precisely what is in them. Pollution expert Paul Johnston of the University of Exeter predicts that worse materiel could follow the phosphorous bombs and "there is a very clear risk of personal injury."

Rob Edwards, "New Scientist" (Science weekly), London , Nov,18, 1995

 

It is like the Loch Ness monster, repeatedly surfacing and disappearing. But despite all notices to the contrary, the obstinate sea serpent of nuclear waste has returned, as fresh as a radioactive sardine.

From 1950 to 1963, Britain dumped 18,000 tons of nuclear waste off the coasts of France and the Netherlands, an area fished by boats from both France and Britain. Should we ban fishing in the contaminated areas? "Unthinkable!" say representatives of the fishing industry. But we must understand: The soup stocked by the nuclear industry represents no less than the equivalent of 7,431 years of radioactivity from France’s Flamanville facility, according to the best estimates and confirmed by the International Atomic Energy Agency. During the 1950s and 1960s, the release of radioactive materials was legal, but it was outlawed in this region in 1993.

French nuclear authorities quoted the daily Ouest-France of Rennes have downplayed the danger. " We have doubts but not facts," one scientist told the paper. Apparently, this nuclear waste is an open secret. Everyone knows about it, except those who should be protecting us from it. The people who would not allow the slightest whiff of radioactive gas to cross our frontiers claim to know nothing of the 153,000 tons of radioactive waste dispersed in the Atlantic. They are waiting for verification."

Bernard Thomas "Le Canard Enchaine" (satirical week

-ly, Paris, Oct, 25,1995)

 

"In effect, the United States is committing environmental aggression against the rest of the world....At the military level, the United States is the custodian. At the environmental level, the United States is clearly the greatest risk....One of the worst problems in the United States is energy prices-they're too low....

   It is clear that current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class...involving high meat intake, consumption of large amounts of frozen and 'convenience' foods, ownership of motor-vehicles, numerous electric household appliances, home and work-place air-conditioning....expansive suburban housing...are not sustainable."

Maurice Strong "Ecology Remedy Costly," AP Sacremento Bee mar 12,1992

 

"This, finally, is the punch line of our two hundred years on the Great Plains: we trap out the beaver, subtract the Mandan, infect the Blackfeet and the Hidatsa and the Assinboin, overdose the Arikara; call the land a desert and hurry across it to get to California and Oregon; suck up the buffalo, bones and all; kill off nations of elk and wolves and cranes and prairie chickens and prairie dogs; dig up the gold and rebury it in vaults someplace else; ruin the Sioux and Cheyenne and Arapaho and Crow and Kiowa and Comanche; kill Crazy Horse, kill Sitting Bull; harvest wave after wave of immigrants' dreams and send the wised-up dreamers on their way; plow the topsoil until it blows to the ocean; ship out the wheat, ship out the cattle; dig up the earth itself and burn it in power plants and send the power down the line; dismiss the small farmers, empty the little towns; dry up the rivers and springs, deep-drill for irrigation water as the aquifer retreats."

Ian Frazier

Great Plains

 

Engineers estimate 90% of CFC’s and halons can be reduced in the short term by recycling and using alternative products

 

Even if the entire world were to stop using CFCs and halons immediately, destruction of the ozone layer would go on for decades because the average travel time for a CFC molecule from ground to ozone layer ranges from 20 to 50 years."

H. Patricia Hynes

Earth Right/Every Citizens Guide

 

"Environmental damage caused by each of the Fossil Fuels has been estimated on an item-by-item basis. It has been shown that worldwide this damage adds up to a very large figure of $2360 Billion per year, or $460 per capita per year. This is what the society pays in addition to the market prices for using Fossil Fuels. It should be noted that this figure should actually be greater, as it does not included the costs of human discomfort and the full cost of potential Climatic changes.

International Journal of Hydrogen Energy 1990

Vol 15 no. 10

 

"At heart, the major obstacles standing in the way of a renewable-energy economy) are not technical in nature, but concern the laws, regulations, incentives, public attitudes, and other factors that make up the energy market."

Michael Brower

 

"Few would dispute that nuclear power can and should be made safer than it has been in the past. but as it stands today, the unfortunate exception of Chernobyl, which resulted directly in 56 deaths and in deleterious consequences to many others, the nuclear power industry has been far more benign than any other type of power generation."

-Tom Blees

Prescription For the Planet

Book: "Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy" by Dr. Bruno Conby

 

NEWCLEAR ENERGY    BEYOND FOSSIL FOOLS

 

Nuclear Battery-Toshiba Corporation

 

Environmental Refugees is estimated at 10 million people. These people will soon outnumber all other types.

 

35% pf the earths surface is in some stage of desertification

 

"We produce pesticides today at a rate more than 13,000 times faster than we did only 35 years ago. Our environment and food chains are being inundated by a virtual avalanche of pesticides. What three decades ago took us six years to produce, we now produce every couple hours."

John Robbins

Diet for a new America

 

 

"Ecological virtue must be created from the bottom up, not the top down."

Matt Ridley

 

"A country can cut down all its trees, mine out its most profitable minerals, exhaust its fisheries, erode most of its soil, draw down its underground water, and count all the proceeds as income and none of the depletion as cost. It can pollute the environment and promote policies that crowd its populace into urban slums, without charging the result to overhead."

Edward O. Wilson

Consilience

 

"What does it all mean? This is what it all means to the extent that we depend on prosthetic devices to keep ourselves and the biosphere alive, we will render everything fragile. To the extent, that we banish the rest of life, we will impoverish our own species for all time. And if we should surrender our genetic nature to machine-aided ratiocination, and our ethics and art and our very meaning to a habit of careless discussion in the name of progress, imagining ourselves godlike and absolved from our ancient heritage, we will become nothing."

Edward O. Wilson

Consilience

 

…

 

….for when the trees are gone, man will also be gone, for without them we cannot live."

Louis L’ Amour

 

"The real loser of the next millennium will be the planet itself if the imperative of the market is allowed to run rampant without constraint. Natural resources, which took billions of years to create, will be depleted as the earth is overrun by nomads loaded down with objects fabricated out of irreplaceable raw materials. If the current generation does not combat the compulsion to possess everything, all future generations will be losers."

Jacques Ahali

Millenium

 

 

"Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees."

Revelations

 

 

 

"Earth provides enough to satisfy every mans need, but not for

every man ' s greed . " '

Gandhi

 

 

"The white man, through his insensitivity to the way of

Nature, has desecrated the face of Mother Earth. The white man's

advanced technological capacity has occurred as a result of his

lack of regard for the spiritual path and for the way of all living things. The white man's desire for material possessions and

power has blinded him to the pain he has caused Mother Earth by

his quest for what he calls natural resources. And the path of

the Great Spirit has become difficult to see by almost all men,

even by many Indians who have chosen instead to follow the path

of the white man. . .

Today the sacred lands where the Hopi live are being desecrated

by men who seek coal and water from our soil that they may create

more power for the white man's cities. This must not be allowed

to continue for if it does, Mother Nature will react in such a

way that almost all men will suffer the end of life as they .now

know it. "

(excerpt from a lady to President Nixon from the elders

of the Hopi nation protesting Peabody Coal Companies

rip-off from their land)

 

 

 

 

"We always had plenty; our children never cried from hunger, neither were our people in want. . .The rapids of Rock River furnished us with an abundance of excellent fish, and the land being very fertile, never failed to produce good crops of corn, beans, pumpkins, and squashes.. .Here our village stood for more than a hundred years, during all of which time we were the un- disputed possessors of the Mississippi Valley...Our village was healthy and there was no place in the country possessing such advantages, nor hunting grounds better than those we had in possession. If a prophet had come to our village in those days and told us that the things were to take place which have since come to pass, none of our people would have believed him."

 

Black Hawk , Chief of the

Sauk & Fox

Touch the Earth

T.C. McLuhan

Touchstone books

 

 

"Care for the things of the earth,

Do work, cut wood, till the soil,

Plant nopales, plant magueyes,

And, you will not want for drink, for food, for clothes.

Thus, you will stand firm, be upright, go forward,

Thus, your name will be spoken, will be praised

Thus , you bring yourself fame."

Huehuetlatolli

 

"Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places."

Henry Beston

Outermost House

 

 

 

"We are only guardians of things, oh friends,

During our sojourn on earth;

Tomorrow or the next day,

As the heart desires, oh giver of life,

We shall go, friends, to his abode.

 

Popol Vuh

 

 

"I am not suggesting that many contemporary Americans who are concerned about our ecologic crisis will be either able or willing to counsel with wolves or exhort birds. However, the present increasing disruption of the global environment is the product of a dynamic technology and science which were originating in the Western medieval world and against which St. Francis was rebelling in so original a way. Their growth cannot be understood historically apart from distinctive attitudes toward nature which are deeply grounded in Christian dogma. The fact that most people do not think of these attitudes as Christian is irrelevant. No new set of basic values has been accepted in our society to displace those of Christianity. Hence we shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man. The greatest spiritual revolutionary in Western history. St. Francis, proposed what he thought was an alternative Christian view of nature and man' s relation to it: he tried to substitute the idea of the quality of all creatures, including man, for the idea of man's limitless rule of creation. He failed. Both our present science and our present technology are so tinctured with orthodox Christian arrogance toward nature that no solution for our ecological crisis can be expected from them alone. Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not. We must rethink and refeel our nature and destiny. The profoundly religious, but heretical , sense of the primitive Franciscans for the spiritual autonomy of all parts of nature may point. I propose Francis as a patron saint for ecologists."

Lynn White jr.

The Dynamo & the Virgin reconsidered

 

 

"Our society abounds with people who believe that solar energy is an exotic new source of energy requiring decades of further research and development before it can be proven practical. Butti and Perlin (authors of a Golden Thread) show that, on the contrary, solar power, water heating and home heating technologies have been evolving for thousands of years. They have been passed from one culture to another- developing into forms ever more suited to social needs and ever more ingenious in their use of new scientific knowledge and better materials. This improvement continues today at an unprecedented rate; the best present-day art in most solar technologies is much improved from that of a few decades or even a few years ago. But the effectiveness of many of even the oldest solar technologies, especially the simpler ones like "passive" solar architecture, has been adequate for centuries.

The steady evolution of solar architecture and technology has been periodically interrupted by the discovery of apparently plentiful and cheap fuels such as new forests or deposits of coal, oil, natural gas and uranium. Successive civilizations have shortsightedly treated this energy capital as income. Barbara Ward reminds us that like the Spanish Empire, eventually destroyed by the unsustainable wealth from a flood of New World gold, these civilizations have taken leave of their senses when confronted by short-term fuel supplies adequate to support a few generations 'binge. This attitude persists today. We speak of "producing" oil, as if it were made in a factory; but only God produces oil, and all we know is how to mine it and burn it up. Neglecting the interests of future generations who are not here to bid on this oil, we have been squandering in the last few decades a patrimony of hundreds of millions of years. Only recently have we begun to come full circle to the same realization that similar boom-and-bust cultures have reached before us: that we must turn back to the sun and seek elegant ways to live within the renewable energy income that it bestows on us. The current energy "crisis" is nothing new, and it is very important to appreciate the lessons of earlier crises lest we repeat them. Earlier cultures-from the wood-short Greeks and Romans onward-becomes aware of the limits of their dwindling fuel resources. In the disastrous U.S. coal strikes around the end of the last century, the vulnerability of the nation to disruption in particular social groups and distribution networks became painfully apparent. These threatened cultures then rediscovered much of the earlier knowledge of permanent, practical solar energy. At several piquant moments in history-the latest of them today-wise observers of the energy scene have bemoaned the absurdity of having to rediscover and reinvent what should have been practiced continuously. They have been astonished to discover how much "novel" and "exotic" solar technology was in fact old and well understood. Today, then, we stand precisely in the place several earlier cultures have stood. We have suddenly learned the transitory and ephemeral nature, the vulnerability, and the high social, ecological and even economic costs of depending on nonrenewable hydrocarbons to hold our societies together. But still we are playing elaborate games of self- deception: we give these precious fuels-and the electricity made from them-tax and price subsidies which in the U.S. totaled roughly a hundred billion dollars in 1978 alone. These subsides are so lavish that they often outstrip such laudable efforts as California's 55% solar tax credit, and solar energy that is in reality considerably cheaper than Alaskan gas can end up looking more expensive. Further, we only require such "conventional" investments as different kinds of new power stations to compete with each other economically. But we require solar energy to compete with the heavily subsidized oil and gas which it is meant to replace. Our government therefore rejects as uneconomic-more expensive than oil at $15 a barrel-more expensive kinds of solar heating and biomass liquid fuels at $20 to $25 a barrel. But it simultaneously seeks to extract from our pockets the most lavish and bizarre subsidies for synthetic gas at $30 to $40 a barrel of nuclear electricity at $100 per barrel equivalent. Of course that's crazy. but that's just what we're doing in a frantic attempt to divert public attention away from the the economic reality of practical solar energy. Though some presently available solar technologies-not all- are somewhat more expensive than the old oil and gas, almost all cost several times less than what we would otherwise have to pay to replace them with nuclear power stations or synthetic fuels.

Amory Lovins

part of the introduction to the Golden Thread

Cheshire Books

Book: "Who Owns the Sun? People, Politics, and the Struggle for a Solar Economy" by Daniel M. Berman & John T. O'Connor

 

 

   "Apparently, the fossil-fuel industry's strategy is to convince the American people that we should just burn all the way through the last of our existing oil and coal reserves. Then we can let our freezing, stranded children figure out how to heat their homes and power their vehicles. This is no solution. at best, we will prolong the problem, not solve it. at some point, inevitably, fossil fuels will run out, and we will have to either power down or switch to something else. given the climate crisis, we need urgently to begin the transition now. Fossil fuels are a finite resource doing infinite damage. As long as we rely on fossil fuels to power our society, our economy is at risk for stagflation-and our planetary home is at risk too."

Van Jones

The Green Collar Economy: One Solution to Fix Our Two Biggest Problems

 

 

"Man-despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments-owes his existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains."

Anonymous

 

 

"Why not admit that the world is a living and rational being since it produces sensate and rational entities?"

Zeno

 

"The principle of the "survival of the fittest" has quite a different meaning than that commonly attributed to it. Darwin's conclusions were drawn from his long observations of the methods of living things, which led him to conclude that those kinds survived who were best able to adapt themselves to their environment, not those who were most competent in mass murder. It is further to be observed that when all of the larger and higher types of mammalian animals are considered, the carnivores, namely those that live upon the lives of others, are merely outliers among the great animal populations-a minority party indeed. It is estimated that the number of carnivores or killers would not exceed 1 percent of the total animal populations as they originally existed in Africa or North America-that is before man decimated the wildlife of these continents."

 

Fairfield Osborn

Our Plundered planet

Pyramid Books

 

 

"I pray my pessimism is exaggerated, and we shall recover from the folly of resenting the fact that we are to all practical intents and purposes caged on our planet; of pretending that our life on it is a temporary inconvenience in a place we have out-grown, a boarding-house we shall soon be leaving, for whose other inhabitants and whose contents we need have neither respect nor concern. "

John Fowles

The Tree

 

"Many of us have gotten so good at defining what we are against, that what we are against has started to define us."

-Julia Butterfly Hill

 

 

We read Dante's description of

the VIII Circle of Hell--"The banks were crusted with foul

scum, thrown off by the fume, and caking there, till nose

and eye were vanquished with sight and reek of the noisome

stuff."--

Book: "Cleaning Up America the Poisoned: How to Survive Our Polluted Society" by Lewis G. Regenstein

 

"There simply is very little in us that will cause us to stand up on the right side of morality if we think such a stand will cost us money or comfort. And there is where the hostility toward expansion of solar power is really roused. Because there is a growing sense that solar energy would allow US to be morally right without the inconvenience of inadequate energy or excessive energy prices."

Captain William Heronemus

U.S.N. (ret)

 

 

"We can be assured of this that the day ESSO imagines it owns the sun we will have solar energy on a mass scale, though not a cheap one."

 

Matt Fox

 

 

"Woe to those who add house to house

and join field to field

until everywhere belongs to them

and they are the sole inhabitants of the land. "

Isaiah 5:8

 

 

 

"small-scale operations, no matter how numerous, are always less likely to be harmful to the natural environment than large-scale ones, simply because their individual force is small in relation to the recuperative forces of nature. There is wisdom in smallness if only on account of the smallness and patchiness of human know- ledge, which relies on experiment far more than on understanding. The greatest danger invariable arises from the ruthless application, on a vast scale, of partial knowledge such as we are currently witnessing in the application of nuclear energy, of the new chemistry in agriculture, of transportation technology, and countless other things. "

E.F. Schumacher

 

 

 

"With a General Motors owning the Mississippi River , you can be sure that stiff effluent charges would be assessed on industries and municipalities along its banks, and that the water would be kept clean enough to maximize revenues from leases granted to firms seeking rights to drinking water, recreation and commercial fishing. "

Capitalism and the' Environment

Individualist (Mar 71)

 

 

"It is important to realize that this failure (pollution) has not been a question purely of ignorance, a simple time lag between recognizing a new technological problem and facing up to it. For if some of the modern pollutants have only recently become known , factory smoke and many of its bad effects have been known ever since the Industrial Revolution , known to the extent that the American courts , during the late-and as far back as the early-nineteenth century made the deliberate decision to allow property rights to be violated by industrial smoke. To do so, the courts had to-and did-systematically change and weaken the defenses of property right embedded in Anglo-Saxon common law. Before the mid and late nineteenth century, any injurious air pollution was considered a tort, a nuisance against which the victim could sue for damages and against which he could take out an injunction to cease and desist. "

Murray N. Rothbard

 

 

"No one can live in an isolated, privatized religion or world any longer. Inter dependence is too much a reality of every nation today and of all global struggles for growth and peacemaking. Privtized salvations sin against the cosmos itself."

Matt Fox

Original Blessing

Bear & Co , Santa Fe

 

 

"All of creation God gives to humankind to use. If this privilege

is misused, God's justice permits creation to punish humanity."

Hildegarde of Bingen

 

 

"As often as the elements of the world are violated by ill-treatment, so God will cleans them through suffering, and hardships of humankind."

Hildegarde of Bingen

 

 

"The Ancients believed that the earth was a sentient being and responded to the behavior of man upon it. As we have no scientific proof to the contrary, should we not accept this point of view and behave accordingly?

I look at it like this... if a man loses one-third of his skin he dies. the plastic surgeons say, "He's had it." If a tree loses one third of its bark it dies. 'this has been proved scientifically by botanists and dendrologists. Would it not be a reasonable to suggest that if the earth loses more than a third of its green mantle and tree cover, it will assuredly die? the water table will sink beyond recall and life will become impossible."

Richard St. Barbe Baker

My Life-My Trees

 

 

"In the United States today it takes three hundred gallons of the indispensable fluid to produce a single loaf of bread, To grow a pound of beef and to get it to your table requires at least one thousand gallons of water. About one hundred thousand gallons go into the manufacture of each automobile...,The harsh truth is that in the midst of unprecedented plenty America is running out of usable water- not slowly, but rapidly. No imaginable crisis could present a bleaker prospect, "

Congressman Jim Wright

 

' "The generosity of the earth allows us to feed all mankind; we know enough about ecology to keep the earth a healthy place; there is enough room on the earth, and there are enough materials, so that everybody can have adequate shelter; we are quite competent enough to produce sufficient supplies of necessities so that no one need live in misery. Above all, we shall then see that the economic problem is a convergent problem which has been solved already: we know how to provide enough' and do not require any violent', inhuman, aggressive technologies to do so. There is no economics problem and, in a sense, there never has been. But there is a moral problem, and moral problems are not convergent, capable of being solved so that future generations can live without the effort. No , they are divergent problems , which have to be understood and transcended. "

 

E . F. Schumacher

 

 

"We are told that the pollution and destruction caused by technology will be solved. technology, that we need more power to clean up what the generation of power has created, an argument so absurd that it merits no response. It is the rank breath of a monstrous force which feeds upon itself and breeds contemptuously. "

Paul Hawken

The Magic of Findhorn

 

"In fact, there are even people who think that big business

and big government are 'hindering' development of alternate

power sources. . . . I don't know where anyone gets such crazy

ideas. "

(excerpt from a letter written by

Jack McCormack)

 

"Green politics at its worst amounts to a sort of Zen fascism; less extreme, it denounces growth and seeks to stop the world so that we can all get off.’

Chris Patten (former secretary of state for the environment of

Britain)

 

"The present materials situation is literally reversed; all our pollutants become our major resources, and our natural, resources become our untapped resources, and become our backup supplies."

Glenn T. Seaborg (Nobel Prize winner)

 

 

"Like someone who cannot fill the bathtub because the hot water keeps running out, we need not a bigger water heater but a plug. Cost-effective plugs can double the efficiency of industrial motors, triple that of lights, quadruple that of household appliances, quintuple that of cars, and increase that of buildings tenfold or more by making them so heat tight (but well ventilated) that they need little heating or cooling."

 

Amory B . Lovins

National Geographic

Special Report Feb 1981

 

 

"Speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee."

Old Testament: Job,Xii,8

 

 

"Though they had eyes to see, they saw to no avail, they had ears, but understood not. But like shapes in dreams, throughout their time, without purpose they wrought all things in confusion. They lacked knowledge of houses built with brick that catch the sunlight's warmth . . . . "

Aeschylus (around 20OO years ago)

 

 

"I do not believe that in the long run we will solve the problem of pollution until the polluter is faced with the consequences of his own actions."

Dr, Ray Dasmann

Conservation Foundation

 

 

"What should we have thought of an early race of hunters who developed a taste for horsemeat and then proceeded to eliminate the horse from the Earth by systematically hunting and killing every one, merely to satisfy their appetite? Savage, lazy, stupid, selfish, and cruel are some of the epithets that come to mind; and what a waste to fail to recognize the possibility of the working partnership between horse and man! It is bad enough to cull or farm the whale so as to provide a constant supply of these products which whale-hunting nations are needed by their backward and primitive industries. If we hunt them heedlessly to extinction it must surely be a form of genocide, and will be an indictment of the indolent and hide-bound national bureaucracies, Marxist and capitalist alike, which have neither the heart nor the sense to comprehend the magnitude of the crime. Yet perhaps it is not too late to see the error their ways . "

J.E. Lovelock

Gaia Oxford Press

 

'I was dumbfounded. But they explained to me how it had all happened, according to the findings of the commission. They made the statement impartially, objectively, and today I would even say leniently, but categorically. The old rat I had killed fed principally on a species of wasp common in that spot. But beyond a certain age a rock rat is no longer agile enough to catch wasps on the wing. Therefore he lived for the ' most part on the sick or weak insects who dragged themselves along the ground and could barely fly. In this way he destroyed the wasps that were malformed or carriers of disease. His un- suspecting intervention protected the colonies of these insects.

Once the rat was dead, these afflictions spread rapidly and, by the following spring, there was scarcely a wasp left in the region. These wasps, visiting flowers in search of honey, also fertilized them. Without the wasps, a large number of plants which play an important part in holding the terrain in place . . "

Rene Daumal

Mount Analogue

 

"Earth provides enough to satisfy every mans need, but not for

every man ' s greed . "

Gandhi

 

" "how much more delightful to an undebauched mind is the task of making improvements on the earth, than all the vainglory which can be acquired from ravaging it, by the most uninterrupted career of conquests."

George Washington

 

 

"We are way off balance now in that organic materials, both of plant and of animal origin, are consumed or disposed of in urban or Industrial centers and not returned for the enrichment of the land from which they have been derived. The enormous and almost blind demands of the markets in great cities, sucking vast quantities and varieties of products from faraway land areas, may well be largely responsible for a process of land exhaustion that cannot continue indefinitely. One cannot help wondering whether in Russia the industrial net is not spreading so quickly as to stifle the earth."

Fairfield Osborn

Our Plundered Planet

 

"Slowly the earth is dying, and we think about what was previously un-thinkable-the end of life itself."

Queen Beatrix

Of The Netherlands

 

"I am not quite sure what the advantage is in having a few more dollars to spend if the air is too dirty to breathe, the water too polluted to drink, the commuters are losing out in the struggle to get in and out of the city, the streets are filthy and the schools so bad that the young perhaps wisely stay away, the hoodlums roll citizens for some of the dollars they saved in tax cuts."

John Kenneth Galbraith

 

"Will mankind murder Mother Earth or will he redeem her? He could murder her by misusing his increasing technological potency. Alternatively he could redeem her by overcoming the suicidal, aggressive greed that, in all living creatures, including man h himself, has been the price of the Great Mother’s gift of life. This is the enigmatic question which now confronts Man."

Arnold Toynbee

Mankind and Mother Earth

 

"We have all heard about snail darters and whooping cranes until our eyes glaze over, but what in fact is at issue here is the overall biological stability of a world. The Late Quaternary Extinction wants you.

David Quammen

Natural Acts

 

"In a broad sense the LQE began about 400 years ago, with the European age of empires, when humankind reached a stage smart enough to sail all over the planet and still stupid enough to kill much what we found when we got there."

David Quammen

Natural Acts

 

"If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed whether by private individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problem."

Rachel Carson

 

"The major problems of environmental pollution were not predicted in the laboratory. Bound in the strait-jacket of positivism, many scientists refuse to acknowledge the warnings posted by circumstantial or correlative evidence, waiting instead for the ‘scientific proof" provided only by the establishment of cause-and-effect relationships."

Frank Graham

 

 

"WE need to tire of trashing wilderness. It’s not making us happy. It’s not making us healthy. It is making us miserable and despairing. Killing trees, habitat, and animals, and separating ourselves from nature is making us all a bit crazy. We need to restore the Earth because we need to save the wild. We need to save the wild in order to save ourselves."

David Brower

Let the mountains talk….Let the Rivers Run

 

The earth belongs in usufruct* to the living."

Thomas Jefferson 1789

*Usufruct: the right to utilize and enjoy the profits and advantages of something belonging to another so long as the property is not damaged or altered in any way.

 

"The Earth belongs in use to the living….no man can by natural right oblige the lands he occupies, or the persons who succeed him in that occupation, to the payment of debts contracted by him. For if he could, he might during his own life, eat up the use of the lands for several generations to come….then the Earth would belong to the dead and not the living generation….No generation can contract debts greater than may be paid during the course of its existence."

Thomas Jefferson

 

"They call us preservationists. It’s a kind of dirty word. They say we’re trying to ‘lock up’ the land. But all we think is that some of it ought to be left completely alone."

Stewart Brandborg

Wilderness Society

 

   "The agrarian mind begins with the love of fields and ramifies in good farming, good cooking, good eating, and gratitude to God. Exactly analogous to the agrarian mind is the sylvan mind that begins with the love of forests and ramifies in good forestry, good wood-working, good carpentry, etc. and gratitude to God. These two kinds of mind readily intersect and communicate; neither ever intersects or communicates with the industrial-economic mind. The industrial-economic mind begins with ingratitude and ramifies in the destruction of farms and forests. The "lowly" and "menial" arts of farm and forest are mostly taken for granted or ignored by the culture of the "fine arts" and "spiritual" religions, they are taken for granted or ignored or held in contempt by the powers of the industrial economy. But in fact they are inescapably the foundation of human life and culture, and their adepts are capable of as deep satisfactions and as high attainments as anybody else."

Wendell Berry  The Fatal Harvest Reader: The tragedy of Industrial Agriculture   ed Andrew Kimbrell

 

"It’s a strange species of populism that declares the people’s will to be the destruction of the people’s way of life. But the crowning mind-fuck of this panorama of intellectual obscenity has to be the perversity of the label fancied by the architects of this chaos-they like to call themselves "conservatives."

Commodify your Dissent

Salvos from the Baffler

 

"Our most valuable national resource is the native species of plants, animals and microbes which are of enormous potential use to civilization."

Dr. Rezneat Darnell (Marquette University)

(Testimony to the U.S. Senate)

 

"It is a crazy situation , and I think it has some crazy human consequences. But the first thing that ought to be said about this disintegrated landscape is that it is not due to the pressure of populations.

In Western European terms the U.S. has no suburban problem at all; at the density of England and Wales-which still allows us some of the world’s greatest rural landscape and a large area of mountain-the whole population of the U.S. could comfortably be fitted into Texas.

So it is not the numbers of people but the way they are distributed that has caused this mess."

Ian Nairn

The Observer of London (after a tour of the U.S. 1967)

 

"Some half million synthetic substances have entered our biosphere since World War II, as many as one-fifth of them toxic. These are also, or course, the problems posed by radioactive wastes. Man and his inventions have always engaged in an ambivalent dance."

Napoleons’ Glands and other ventures in Biohistory

Little Brown & Co Boston & Toronto

 

"Four billion tons of hazardous materials are shipped across our nation each year. More than half of these shipments travel by rail.

While an estimated 1,654 railroad cars were involved in spills of hazardous material during 1977, a far greater number of spills – 14,270 – took place on our Country’s highways…20% radioactive.

Since the beginning of the nuclear power era, only about five thousand metric tons of nuclear wastes have accumulated. On the other hand, all other industries combined now generate 100,000 times this tonnage of toxic wastes in just one year.

Altogether, farming today is a highly polluting industry. We tend to think that farmers work in wholesome surroundings where air and water are fresh and unspoiled. Actually, the contrary is more likely to be true. A 1971-1978 study of the death certificates of more than twenty thousand Iowa farmers showed that six types of cancer occurred far more often in these men than in city dwellers.

Soviets now face up to 200,000 more people who must be uprooted and relocated because of Chernobyl radiation. Three million people are living on irradiated land. Ultimate cost of cleanup is estimated $415 billion.

‘The shock of Chernobyl still hasn’t come…we still don’t have a full picture of what’s out there.’

Lyavon Tarasenko

 

"An industrial system which uses forty percent of the world’s primary resources to supply less than 6% of the world’s population, could be called efficient only if it obtained strikingly successful results in terms of human happiness, well-being, culture, peace, and harmony. I do not need to dwell on the fact that the American system fails to do this, or that there are not the slightest prospects that it could do so if only it achieved a higher rate of growth of production, associated, as it must be, with an ever greater call upon the world’s finite resources."

E.F. Schumacher

Small is Beautiful

 

"I am utterly convinced that most of the great environmental struggles will be won or lost in the 1990’s. By the next century it will be too late."

Thomas Lovejoy

 

"There is a spirit that pervades everything, that is capable of powerful song and radiant movement, and that moves in and out of the mind. The colors of this spirit are multitudinous, a glowing, pulsing rainbow. Old Spider Woman is one name for this quintessential spirit, and Serpent Woman is another, and what they together have made is called Creation, Earth, creatures, plants and light."

Paula Gunn Allen

The Sacred Harp

 

"In short, all good things are wild and free."

Henry David Thoreau

 

"The Earth is not a lair, neither is it a prison. The earth is a Paradise, the only one we will ever know. We will realize it the moment we open our eyes. We don’t have to make it a Paradise – it is one. We have only to make ourselves fit to inhabit it. The man with the gun, with murder in his heart, cannot possibly recognize Paradise even when he is shown it."

Henry Miller

 

"Is it surprising that a system seeking to turn everything into gold ends up turning everything into garbage?"

Editor of Ramparts

 

"In other words human life is under threat from destructive forces or evil. It was one of Jung’s complaints about Christian theologians that they did not take evil seriously enough."

Christopher Bryant

 

"If most American home owners made a few key landscaping changes, the collective energy savings would be the equivalent of closing 23 large power plants or taking more than 26 million cars off the road."

Marshall Glickman

Energy Efficient and Environmental Landscaping

 

"The old Lakota was wise. He knew that man’s heart away from nature becomes hard; he know that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too."

Chief Luther Standing Bear

 

"Ecological good sense will be oppressed by all the most powerful economic entities of our time, because ecological good sense requires the reduction or replacement of those entities. If ecological good sense is to prevail, it can do so only through the work and the will of the people and of the local communities."

Wendell Berry

 

"Green politics at its worst amounts to a sort of Zen fascism; less extreme, it denounces growth and seeks to stop the world so that we can all get off."

Chris Patten

(former Secretary of State for the environment for Britain)

 

"We are close to dead. There are faces and bodies like gorged maggots on the dance floor, on the highway, in the city, in the stadium; they are a host of chemical machines who swallow the product of chemical factories, aspirin, preservatives, stimulants, relaxants, and breathe out their chemical wastes into a polluted air. The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again."

Norman Mailer

Cannibals and Christians

 

"The beauty and genius of a work or art may be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer; but when the last individual of a race of living beings breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again."

William Beebe 1906

 

"The last man of the world  city no longer wants to live – he may cling to life as an individual, but as a type, as an aggregate, no, for it is a characteristic of this collective existence that it eliminates the terror of death."

Oswald Spengler (1880-1936)

 

"The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago…had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands."

Havelock Ellis (1859-1939)

 

"If Aphrodite had to be born today from the wave, coming out of the foam, she would have boils on her bottom."

Jacques Cousteau

 

"We cannot cheat on DNA. We cannot get round photosynthesis. We cannot say I am not going to give a damn about phytoplankton. All these tiny mechanisms provide the precondition of our planetary life. To say we do not care is to say in the most literal sense that ‘we choose death.’"

Barbara Ward (1914-1981)

 

"The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself."

Franklin D Roosevelt

 

"When we behold a wide, turf-covered expanse, we should remember that its smoothness, on which so much of its beauty depends, is mainly due to all the inequalities having been slowly leveled by worms. It is a marvelous reflection that the whole of the superficial mould (topsoil) over any such expanse has passed, and will again pass every few years though the bodies of earthworms. It may be doubted if there are any other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world as have these lowly creatures."

Charles Darwin

 

"We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect."

Aldo Leopold

 

"It is clear that the immense, stupid and suicidal waste of natural resources must come to an immediate end if the human species wishes to survive on this earth. The cause of the colossal squandering of riches-of our present and future life-is the circular process of the market. The market is highly efficient but it ha no goal, its sole purpose is to produce more in order to consume more. No civilization of the past was ever ruled by such a blind, mechanized fatality."

Octavio Paz

 

"All men are brothers, we like to say, half wishing sometimes in secret it were not true. But perhaps it is true. And is the evolutionary line from protozoan to Spinoza any less certain? That also may be true. We are obliged, therefore, to spread the news, painful and bitter though it may be for some to hear, that all living things on earth are kindred."

Edward Abbey

Desert Solitaire

 

"We are just statistics, born to consume the fruits of the Earth."

Horace (65-8 B.C.)

 

"The planet’s survival has become so uncertain that any effort, any thought that presupposes an assured future amounts to a mad gamble."

Elias Canetti

 

"We will never get to the end of it, never plumb the bottom of it, never know the whole of even so small and trivial place as Aravaipa. Therein lies our redemption."

Edward Abbey

 

"Add the advent of Totalitarianism to the scenario of a disturbed climate and the collapse of much of the world’s economy, and you get a sense of the stakes of the battle."

Ross Gelbspan

 

"We are standing on the cusp of a very precarious future, as immediate as the lifetime of our children.. There are those who want to swap it for their short-term gain, and they will if we let them. But we know too much to lay the blame on the. If we passively yield control to those destroyers, we will all share the responsibility for the unspeakable consequences. If each of us chooses inaction, it will make us all accomplices in the triumph of greed and short-sightedness and selfishness."

Ross Gelbspan

 

"…However, despite assurances by some optimistic prognosticators to the contrary, it is apparent that the sea is rapidly being depleted of food resources utilized by man. This depletion arises partly from indiscriminate over fishing of such animals as crabs, lobsters, shellfish, sardines, herring, tuna, and whales, but also by the introduction of pollutants and artificial obstacles to marine reproductive cycles. Unless international conservation agreements can be reached in the near future, the sea will not only fail to feed that starving millions of the world but may degrade to the point where it cannot feed anyone!"

William G. Vandorn

Oceanography and Seamanship

 

" Pesticides that by themselves have been linked to breast cancer and male birth defects are up to one thousand times more potent when combined, according to a study.

"If you test them individually you could almost conclude that they were non-estrogenic, almost inconsequential," he (John A McLachlan of Tulane University) said. "But when you put them in combination their potency jumped five hundred-to one thousand-fold. "Instead of one plus one equaling two, we found that in some cases one plus one equals a thousand."

(AP, 6/7/96)

 

Acid Rain is responsible for 50,000 American deaths per-year according to Brookhaven National Lab….

 

"The answers to the old questions-What is the character of nature on human beings/ What is the influence of nature on human beings? What is the influence of human beings on nature? –can no longer be viewed as distinct from one another. Life and the environment are one thing, not two, and people, as all life, are immersed in one system. When we influence ourselves; when we change nature, we change ourselves. A concern with nature is not merely a scientific curiosity, but a subject that pervades philosophy, theology, aesthetic and psychology. There are deep reasons that we desire a balance and harmony in the structure of the biological world and that we seek to find the structural balance, just as our ancestors desired and sought that kind of balance in the physical world."

Daniel B. Botkin

Discordent Harmonies

 

 

The best way to reduce pollution and other damage to the environment is through taxes rather than regulations, according to a report from the Worldwatch Institute. This strategy could give U.S. taxpayers a net tax cut of roughly $500 per person.

The new Worldwatch proposal advocates the "polluter pays" principle, requiring that people and organizations be held accountable for the damage they do to the environment. It calls for a cut in government subsidies for environmentally harmful practices, such as logging and road building. It would also reduce investment and payroll taxes, while gradually increasing the tax burden on polluters.

"Using taxes instead of regulations, governments can set targets for environmental protection-and markets can do what they do best, finding the cheapest ways to hit those targets," writes David Malin Roodman, a Worldwatch researcher in his new book, The Natural Wealth of Nations.

Currently, 90% of the world’s $7.5 trillion yearly tax burden is levied on work and investment, while less that 5% comes from taxes on environmentally harmful activities, Roodman says. He notes that the fishing industry is subsidized by taxpayers in two ways:

"First, your tax dollars are being wasted on subsidies that help put so many boats and hooks out to sea that fisheries are collapsing. And then to add insult to injury, you’re paying more at the fish market for the very fish your tax dollars are driving to extinction!" Subsidies paid by governments to fishing fleets around the world cost from $14 billion to $20.5 billion a year, says Roodman.

Environmental taxes, he argues, are a more flexible tool than regulation for correcting the market’s failure to reflect the full environmental costs of our actions. The Netherlands is an example: Gradually rising government-imposed charges on emissions of organic material and heavy metals into canals, rivers, and lakes have prompted Dutch companies to find ways to cut their emissions

A benefit of more fully taxing pollution is that $1 trillion a year could be raised worldwide, Roodman estimates. This would permit a 15% cut in taxes on wages and profits.

"Since 1991, six European nations-Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom-have cut taxes on work and investment and shifted the tax burden to pollution, fossil fuels, or land filling. Denmark leads, with 3% of its taxes shifted so far."

Strongly supporting Roodman’s criticism of government subsidies is ecologist Norman Myers, a consultant for the International Institute for Sustainable Development and author of perverse Subsidies.

Myers finds subsidies to be "environmentally perverse" when they foster activities that degrade the environment directly; as in the over logging of a forest, or through secondary effects such as erosion, acid rain, and smog. Other subsidies encourage the waste of water resources, inefficient uses of fossil fuels, overexploitation of fish stocks, and excessive application of agricultural chemicals

Some subsidies, Myers concedes, can serve useful purposes, such as jump-starting the development of environmentally friendly technologies-including nonpolluting renewable sources of energy-that could later thrive in the marketplace without government support. "The same applies to recycling, dematerialization, agricultural set-asides, and a host of subsides beneficial to both the economy and the environment."

Dan Johnson

"The Futurist" Jan 1999

 

The rule of no realm is mine, but all worthy things

That are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care.

And for my part, I shall not wholly fail in my task

If anything passes through this night that can still

Grow fair or bear fruit and flower again in days to come.

For I too am a steward. Did you not know?

J.R.R. Tolkien

 

"The industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in "advanced" countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering….and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation

The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can’t make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well.

(Modern man has the sense (largely justified) that change is IMPOSED on him, whereas the 19^th century frontiersman had the sense (also largely justified) that he created change himself, by his own choice.

 

There has been a consistent tendency….for technology to strengthen the system at a high cost in individual freedom….Permanent changes in favor of freedom could be brought about only by person prepared to accept radical, dangerous and unpredictable alteration of the entire system.

 

When motor vehicles were introduced they appeared to increase man’s freedom. They took no freedom away from the walking man, no one had to have an automobile if he didn’t want one, and anyone who did choose to buy an automobile could travel faster and farther than a walking man. But when automobiles became numerous, it became necessary to regulate their use extensively. In a car, especially in densely populated areas, one cannot just go where one likes at one’s own pace; one’s movement is governed by the flow of traffic and by various traffic laws. One is tied down by various obligations: license requirements, driver test, renewing registration, insurance, maintenance required for safety, monthly payments on purchase price. Moreover….the arrangement of our cities has changed in such a way that the majority of people no longer live within walking distance of their place of employment, shopping areas and recreational opportunities, so that the HAVE TO depend on the automobile for transportation. Or else they must use public transportation, in which case they have even less control over their own movement….

The positive ideal that we propose is Nature. That is, WILD nature: those aspects of the functioning of the Earth and its living things that are independent of human management and free of human interference and control….As for the negative consequences of eliminating industrial society-well, you can’t eat your cake and have it too. To gain one thing you have to sacrifice another.

With regard to revolutionary strategy, the only points on which we absolutely insist are that the single overriding goal must be the elimination of modern technology."

The Unabomber’s worldview

"New York Times

 

"Finally and most dramatically, the Late Quaternary Extinction, during which more than a million species of living things perished within just a century. This quickest of all mass extinctions occurred (according to the local time system) in the span 1914-2014 A.D. The main cause was once again habitat loss, and the agent of that loss was the killer-primate Homo Sapiens, now itself extinct. Sapiens unaccountably violated the first rule of a successful parasite: moderation. Sapiens was suicidally rapacious.

That’s the way it will look to some being on the Planet Tralfamadore with an idle interest in the paleontology of Earth. Life has existed on this mudball for about 3 ½

Million years, and we are just now in the midst of what looks to shape up as the third great mass extinction of species. This episode threatens to be larger in consequence than the Permian and the Cretaceous and the other major die-offs put together: one-fifth of all forms of earthly organism could be done within thirty years."

David Quammens

Natural Acts

 

"The ecology craze has been in full flower, centering on that rascal man and his wicked abuse of his power. It was very difficult to distract anybody’s attention from man as tyrant over ecology rather than its serf. Far from governing the forces that shape the Earth, man is a virtually powerless creature government by that force."

Nels Winkless III & Iben Browning

 

"Unless one merely thinks man was intended to be an all-conquering and sterilizing power in the world, there must be some general basis for understanding what it is best to do. This means looking for some wise principle of co-existence between man and nature, even if it has to be a modified kind of man and a modified kind of nature."

-Charles Elton, The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants,

 

 

"Earth: isn’t this what you want, an invisible re-arising within us?"

Rainier Maria Rilke

 

We have a beautiful

Mother

Her green lap

Immense

Her brown embrace

Eternal

Her blue body

Everything

We know

Alice Walker

We have a beautiful Mother

 

   "So what makes the Earth unique? Scientists at the Bureau des Longitudes in Paris have produced a surprising answer. They found that the Moon's gravitational field keeps the Earth's climate stable by moderating its axial tilt. It must be highly unusual in the Galaxy for an Earth-sized planet to have so large a moon, and be at the right distance from its parent star."

-Adrian Berry

Galileo and the Dolphins

 

"The earth is a Paradise, the only one we will ever know. We will realize it the moment we open our eyes. We don’t have to make it a Paradise-it is one. We have only to make ourselves fit to inhabit it."

Henry Miller

 

WHY NOT PARADISE NOW?

Roberta Quest

 

"Each year in the U.S. alone 460 million wooden pallets are made….1/2 are discarded after first use. The wood used for pallets comprise 50% of the hardwood cut down in the U.S. ….altogether pallets equivalent to 300,000 average-size American homes."

Waste straw in the U.S. could build a million average size homes per year.

 

"What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, you cannot say,

Or guess, for you know only a heap of broken images,

Where the sun beats, and the dead tree give no shelter,

The cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water…..

By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept…..

T.S. Eliot

The Wasteland

 

 

If Aphrodite had to be born today from the wave, coming out of the foam, she would have boils on her bottom."

Jacques Cousteau

 

Honors to Teddy Goldsmith as the great grandfather of the Environmental movement…

Ed

 

"But the environmental crisis rises closer to home. Every time we draw a breath, every time we drink a glass of water, every time we eat a bite of food we are suffering from it. And more important, every time we indulge in or depend on, the wastefulness of our economy-and our economy’s first principle is waste-we are causing the crisis. Nearly every one of us, nearly every day of his life, is contributing directly to the ruin of this planet. A protest meeting on the issue of environmental abuse is not convocation of accusers, it is a convocation of the guilty. That realization ought to clear the smog of self-righteousness that has almost conventionally hovered over these occasions, and let us see the work that is to be done."

Wendell Berry

A Continuous Harmony

 

"The destruction of the natural world, is not the result of global capitalism, industrialization, 'Western civilization,' or any flaw in human institutions. It is a consequence of the evolutionary success of an exceptionally rapacious primate"

-John Gray

 

"The most difficult of all our retreats will take place in the war we have been waging against our biosphere since the Industrial Revolution. "

-Hans Magnus Enzenberger

The Hero as Demolition Man

                                                             ANSWER TO A BIG PROBLEM?

   "Imagine you are standing in a Kansas field of ripened corn, staring up into a blue summer sky. Imagine the acre around you extending upward, in a transparent air-filled tunnel soaring all the way to space. That long tunnel holds carbon in the form of invisible gas, carbon dioxide-widely implicated in global climate change. But the corn standing as high as an elephant's eye all around you holds four hundred times as much carbon as there is in man-made carbon dioxide-our villain-in the entire column. Yearly, we manage, through agriculture, far more carbon than is causing our greenhouse dilemma.

   Take advantage of that. The leftover corncobs and stalks from our fields can be gather up, floated down the Mississippi and dropped into the ocean, sequestering its contained carbon. Below about a kilometer depth, beneath a layer called the thermo cline, nothings gets mixed back into the air for a thousand years or more. It's not a permanent solution, but it would buy us and our descendants time to find better answers. And it is the United States which has large crop residues. It has also ignored the Kyoto accords, saying that such measures would cost too much. And so they would, if we relied purely on traditional methods, policing energy use and carbon dioxide emissions. Clinton era estimates of such costs were around $100 billion a year, a politically unacceptable sum that led Congress to reject the very notion by a unanimous vote.

   But if the United States simply used its farm waste to "hide" carbon dioxide from our air, complying with Kyoto's standard would cost about $10 billion a year, with no change whatsoever in energy use. The whole planet could do the same. Sequestering crop leftovers would offset about a third of the carbon we put into our air. The carbon dioxide we add to our air will end up in the oceans anyway, from natural absorption, but not nearly quickly enough to help us."

-Gregory Benford   physicist at the U of California at Irvine  from the book: What Is Your Dangerous Idea? ed by John Brockman

 

The most striking feature of biosecurity for New Zealand is that it is every bit as important as national security. The invaders that pose the greatest risk to our unique ecology and biotic economy will not be two-legged warriors in twenty-first-century wakas or spitfires. They are likely to have six or more legs, be microscopic, green, hard to spot on any radar screen, and great infiltrators if they slip through our defenses."

-J. Morgan Williams, New Zealand under Siege

 

"Who would have thought when the first triffid weed, Chromolaena odorata was collected bin 1961 on a hill in Hluhluwe Game Reserve, that by 1984 it would be smothering vast areas of the reserve and threatening to engulf it completely? Who would have predicted in 1940 when it was first discovered near Durban that it would have become the major challenge to all the coastal reserves of Natal?"

-Ian A. Macdonald, in African Wildlife magazine, 1988

 

"I listened carefully for clues whether the West has accepted cheat (grass) as a necessary evil, to be lived with until kingdom come, or whether it regards cheat as a challenge to rectify its past errors in land use. I found the hopeless attitude almost universal. There is, as yet, no sense of pride in the husbandry of wild plants and animals, no sense of shame in the proprietorship of a sick landscape."

-Aldo Leopold Sketches Here and There

 

"For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun....To love what was is a new thing under the sun."

-Aldo Leopold

ibid

 

 

 "What Science Does Not Study. I noted above that modern science has concentrated on empowerment and not wisdom. It might fairly be asked, what sort of wisdom is science ignoring? I would answer that human power is often won at the expense of nature, and therefore that mere empowerment is barbaric and self-endangering. No scientific project is creditable unless it involves serious attention to to environmental consequences, and no science student illiterate in the environment should receive a university degree. The programmatic incorporation of environmentalism into scientific education would not only civilize science; it would also enrich, temper and professionalize the environmental movement. Why should I call this wisdom? Because, as we learn from teachers like Aldo Leopold, environmentalism is grounded in the contemplation of nature's wisdom. Of the many questions that science asks nature, one that should be hard more often is "How can we live in greater harmony with you?"

Robert Grudein

On Dialogue

 

   "I have never really understood why some national security experts willingly accept the need to act on the basis of unquantifiable and remote threats from terrorists or the ballistic missiles of countries that do not yet have long-range systems, but at the same time ridicule the need to act against a threat that almost all reputable scientists say is real. In his book, The One Percent Doctrine, Ron Suskind tells the tale of Vice President Cheney's being willing to wage a fierce and (counterproductive, the way he waged it) war against Iraq and terrorism if there were just 1 percent possibility of a terrorist nuclear weapon going off in the United States, perhaps destroying New York, on some unknown day in the future. "The United States must act now as if it were a certainty.". Well, there is afar greater risk than 1 percent of destruction occurring in all of our coastal cities over the lifetime of children alive today, not because of an enemy, but because of our own and other nations ignoring climate change."

Richard A. Clarke

Your Government Failed You

 

"In 2007, the U.S. government devoted $4.5 billion to energy research, a stunningly low number. Just consider that in each of the first four years of the Iraq war we spent far more than that on the war every two months. In fact, certain individuals-Warren Buffett and Bill Gates spring to mind-could, if they wanted, spend $4.5 billion every year for a decade and still qualify as among the richest individuals on the planet. This pitiful sum shows that, for all the recent talk about the need for energy alternatives, we haven't begun to grasp how urgent the problem is."

-Stephen Leeb, PhD

Game Over: How You Can Prosper in a Shattered Economy

 

 

"Naive comrades, there are evil men on Earth.

If one wants to be an ecologist, one must stop being a half-wit.

Ecology totally overlooks social issues, that is, the relationships of power and wealth at the heart of societies.

   But symmetrically, the left overlooks ecology; the left, meaning those for whom the social question-justice-remains primary. Dressed in what remains of the rags of Marxism, the left incessantly repaints the chromos of the nineteenth century or sinks into the "realism" of "tempered (free-market) liberalism." Thus, the social crisis-marked by the deepening of inequality and by the dissolution of the connections, both private and collective, of solidarity-that seems to overlie the ecological crisis serves de facto to brush it aside from our field of vision.

   Consequently, we find simpleminded ecologists-ecology with no social conscience-alongside a left stuck in the old days-social conscience with no ecology; and above them all the happy capitalists: "Speak, good people, and, above all, remain divided."

   We must get out of this space and understand that the ecological crisis and the social crisis are two faces of the same disaster. And this disaster is implemented by a system of power that has no other objective than to maintain the privileges of the ruling class."

Herve Kempf

How the Rich Are destroying The Earth

 

"We have nothing to fear from the idle rich. it is the not so idle rich which should concern us."

-C.H. Douglas

 

   "In his book Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, David Rothkopf, a former managing director of Kissinger Associates and the deputy undersecretary of commerce for international trade policy in the Clinton administration, wrote openly about the many internationalist meetings he has attended, including those of the Bilder-berg Group. He quoted one regular Bilderberg attendee as saying, "I've been to most of the last twelve (meetings). It's nothing. It's a group of 120 very senior people. By senior I mean old. I'm not joking about them being old, by the way, Rockefeller is in his nineties." The regular attendee also commented that "Oprah Winfrey has more influence than anyone who goes to Bilderberg at this point." similarly, he quoted a regular attendee of Trilateral Commission meetings as saying about the same: 'It's a bunch of has-beens who do not have power except to convene themselves-and to feel a little bit more important because they have convened themselves." The attendee commented that the Trilateral Commission meetings typically consist of "useless presentations and levels of abstraction that are unconnected with reality."

-Jerome R. Corsi PhD

America For Sale

 

"Activities which are likely to cause irreversible damage to nature shall be avoided(11.a) and Activities which are likely to pose a significant risk to nature shall be preceded by an exhaustive examination; their proponents shall demonstrate that expected benefits outweigh potential damage to nature, and where potential adverse effects are not fully understood, the activities should not proceed."

-the World Charter for Nature was adopted by the UN General Assembly 1980.

 

"In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation."

United Nations Conference on Environment and Development   1992  

 

"For all the talk about the environment these days, I don't think human beings have ever been more distanced from nature. and much as I hate to say it, I don't think this trend is going to reverse itself. It just seems inevitable that people are going to continue to live more and more through technology. I think the gene-based, corporeal life we are familiar with is just the incipient stage of an evolutionary development of universal intelligence. Already you can see signs of an advent of avatarism. Humans are happy to go through synthetic self-transformations.....breast augmentation, botox, plastic surgery, tummy tucks, etc. At the same time many others neglect their physical selves, adopting (sometimes false) computer identities. Altogether people are less and less resistant to the synthetic. At the same time people do more and more online: shop, work, socialize....Inevitably there will be a huge market demand for the technology to create artificial selves, avatars, to function in the online world for us."

-Gwyn Wahlmann

adbusters  nr.6 Vol 17 #86  November/December 2009

 

"....New York is the greenest community in the United  States. The most devastating damage that humans have done to the environment has arisen from the burning of fossil fuels, a category in which New Yorkers are practically prehistoric by comparisons with other Americans, including people who live in rural areas or in such putatively eco-friendly cities as Portland, Oregon, and Boulder, Colorado. The average Manhattanite consumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn't matched since the mid-1920s, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T...

-David Owen

Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability

 

"New Yorkers trade the supposed convenience of the automobile for the true convenience of proximity. They are able to live without the ecological disaster of cars-which is caused not just by having to use a car for practically every trip, but also by the distance that you have to traverse. Bicycling, transit, and walking support each other, because they are all made possible by population density."

-Charles Komanoff  (new York City economist, environmental activist, and bicycling enthusiast)

 

"Not only do local governments absorb much of the cost of more and more local roadways, profoundly longer water and electrical lines, and much larger sewer systems to support sprawling development, they must also fund public services to the new residents who live farther and farther from the core community. These new residents used police and fire protection, schools, libraries, trash removal, and other services. Stretching all these basic services over ever-growing geographic areas places a great burden on local governments. For example, the Minneapolis/St. Paul region built 78 new schools in the suburbs between 1970 and 1990 while simultaneously closing 162 schools in good condition located within city limits. Albuquerque, New Mexico, faces a school budget crisis as a result of the need to build expensive new schools in outlying areas while enrollment in existing close-in schools declines."

-Richard M. Haughey Higher-Density Development; Myth and fact

 

"Thomas L. Friedman, in his recent book Hot, Flat, and Crowded, conveys this same basic idea in a memorable chapter title: "If It Isn't Boring, It Isn't Green"-seven words that should be adopted as a mantra by all environmentalists, as a reminder of the dangers and temptations of LEED brain."

-David Owen

Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability

 

 

-"No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves."

-Rachel Carson

 

 

See: www.environment.about.com

*****************************

Article: "A Blown Opportunity: An investment in wind power is smart, but the way we're doing it is not" by Marc Gunther Wired Mag Sept 2010

See article "Green Manhattan" by David Owen The New Yorker, oct 18,2004

Book: "The World Without Us" by Alan Weisman

Book: "The Land Grabbers: The New Fight Over Who Owns the Earth" by Fred Pearce

Book: "On a Farther Shore: The Life and LEgacy of Rachel Carson" by William Souder

Book: "Earth: The Sequel: The Race To Reinvent Energy and Stop Global Warming" by Fred Krupp & Miriam Horn

Book: "A Plague of Rats and Rubber Vines: The Growing Threat of Species Invasions" by Yvonne Baskin

Book: A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations" by Clive Ponting

Book: "Poisoned Nation: Pollution, Greed, and the Rise of Deadly Epidemics" by Loretta Schwartz-Nobel

Book: "The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution" by Carolyn Merchant

Book: "How The Rich are Destroying The Earth" by Herve Kempf

Book: "The Creation: An Appeal To Save Life On Earth" By Edward O. Wilson

Book: "Beyond the Outer Shores: The Untold Odyssey of Ed Ricketts, the Pioneering Ecologist Who Inspired John Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell" by Eric Enno Tamm

Book: "When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution" by Devra Davis

Book: Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning: How Terror, Error, And Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind's Future In This Century-On Earth and Beyond." by Martin Rees

Book: "The Dirty Dozen: Toxic Chemicals and the Earth's Future" by Bruce E. Johansen

Book: "Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution" by G. Markowitz & D. Rosner

Book: "Silent Spring" by Rachel Carson

Book: "Deep Futures: Our Prospects for Survival" by Doug Cocks

Book: "Apocalypse Soon? Warnings on Global Catastrophe" by Stephen F. Haller

Book: "Plan B: Rescuing a Planet under stress and a Civilization in Trouble." by Lester R. Brown

Book: "Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment-A Citizen's Agenda for Action" by James Gustave Speth

Book: "An Unnatural Order" by Jim Mason

"And the waters turned to Blood" by Rodney Barton

"Beyond Growth" by Herman E. Daley

"Break out" by Marc Lappe

"Case Against Global Economy" by Martin Goldsmith

"Chalice and the Blade" Riane Eisler

"The Dying of the Trees" by Charles Little

Book: The Timeless Energy of the Sun: For Life and Peace with Nature" by Madanjeet Sing

"Revolt Against the Modern World" by Juliius Evola

"When Corporations Rule the World" by David C. Korla

Book: "Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future" by Jeff Goodell

"Minding Nature: The Philosophers of Ecology" by David Macauley

Book: Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World" by Alan Weisman

Book: "Regulating Toxic Substances: A Philosophy of Science and the Law" by Carl F. Cranor

Book: "Tinkering With Eden: A Natural History of Exotic Species in America" by Kim Todd

Book: "Silent Spring" by Rachel Carson

Book: "Desert Solitaire" by Edward Abbey

Book: "Bring Back the Buffalo! A Sustainable Future for America's Great Plains" by Ernest Callenbach

Book: "Gould's Book of Fish" by Richard Flanagan

Book: "Hunting For Honey: Adventures with the Rajis of Nepal" by Eric Valli

Book: "Six Modern Plagues: And How We Are Causing Them" by Mark Jerome Walters

Book: "Garbage Land: On the secret Trail of Trash" by Elizabeth Royte

Book: :"The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth" by Benjamin M. Friedman

Book: "High Noon for Natural Gas" by Julian Darley

Book: "Boiling Point: How Politicians, Big Oil and Coal, Journalists, and Activists Are Fueling the Climate Crisis-and What We Can Do to Avert Disaster" by Ross Belbspan

Book: "Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of 'Energy Independence" by Robert Bryce

"Now is the time…for destroying the destroyers of the earth."

Rev 11:18

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