Here are past quotes with their sources (quotes from earlier years are at the end of the list)
“People’s need for food and water can be met only if nature’s capacity to provide food and water is protected. Dead soils and dead rivers cannot give food and water.
Defending the rights of Mother Earth is therefore the most important human rights and social justice struggle. It is the broadest peace movement of our times.”
–Vandana Shiva, “Time to End War Against the Earth”, in National Times (theage.com.au) 11/4/2010
“We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers
The mountains and the endless plain –
All, all the stretch of these great green states –
And make America again!”
-”The land determines the values of the human landscape. The hard lands of the prairie helped to make the Lakota tribal communities austere and generous, where giving and sharing were first principles. The people needed the land and each other too much to permit wanton accumulation and ecological impairment to the sources of nourishment.”
Frank Pommersheim, Braid of Feathers: American Indian Law and Contemporary Tribal Life
“Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”
–Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Feeling uprooted and disconnected can cause a desire to conquer or dominate others to establish self-worth and a sense of belonging. This includes attempting to dominate the physical world by over-consuming material goods when we lose a meaningful and fulfilling kinship with Earth and each other.”
– Osprey Oreille Lake, Uprisings for the Earth
“So far, the world has always managed to meet the challenge of food productivity. In fact, today we have 25% oversupply measured in calories after losses. The challenge is to provide access to food for the poor. The strategy of ecological-intensification using organic principles and practices is a new paradigm to feed the world while empowering the poor and mitigating climate change and biodiversity loss.”
-Anne English, The Financial Times’ Food Security Briefing, October 14, 2010
2009-2010
“[T]he affection that comes from those whom we do not know,…who are watching over our sleep and solitude, over our danger and weaknesses…is something… that widens the boundaries of our being and unites all living things.” [i]
–Pablo Neruda
“ Learning how to do something in your hometown is the most important thing… If there’s a world here in a hundred years, it’s going to be saved by tens of millions of little things. “ (Interview in YES magazine)
–Pete Seeger
“If the success or failure of this planet, and of human beings, depended on how I am and what I do, how would I be? What would I do?”
–R. Buckminster Fuller (quoted on the Guardians of the Future website)
“I don’t believe in magic. I believe in the sun and the stars, the water, the tides, the floods, the owls, the hawks flying, the river running, the wind talking. They’re measurements. They tell us how healthy things are. How healthy we are. Because we and they are the same thing.”
–Billy Frank, Nisqually (Message from Frank’s Landing)
“Someday the land will be our eyes and skin again”.
–Lizzie Pitt, Warm Springs Indian Reservation (Faces of a Reservation)
“Human have turned the atmosphere, biosphere, and the briny deep into something that, until now, only volcanoes and colliding continental plates have been able to achieve…by tapping the Carboniferous Formation and spewing it up into the sky, we’ve become a volcano that hasn’t stopped erupting since the 1700s. “
Alan Weisman (The World Without Us)
“The language of life won’t be silenced”.
– Linda Hogan (Dwellings)
“A human being is a part of a whole, called by us “universe”, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest… a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
Albert Einstein
“While so much seems to be going wrong in this world, so much is also going right. Let us recognize and link up with the vast, diverse, and joyful movement for change that is all around us and rowing ever more creative, spontaneous and courageous. “
– Paul Hawken (Blessed Unrest)
“Yes…is the only word a tree knows”.
– Naomi Shihab Nye (The Words Under the Words)
“I travel to a lot of different lands being a voice for hte voiceless. All things created need a voice”.
–Takelma Siletz Grandma Agnes Pilgrim Baker (Taowhywee)
“A man is rich in proportion to the things he can do without”.
– Henry David Thoreau
“If you wanted to create global pandemics, you’d build as many of these factory farms as possible. That’s why the development of swine flu isn’t a surprise to those in the public health community. In 2003, the American Public Health Association–the oldest and largest in world–called for a moratorium of factory farming because they saw something like this would happen. It may take something as serious as a pandemic to make us realize the real cost of factory farming.”
Dr. Michael Greger, Humane Society of the U.S.
“Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.”
Paul Hawken (2009 University of Portland commencement address )
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
— Maya Angelou
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately…and see if I could not learn what it had to teach [so that I would] not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
–Thoreau
“Abundance comes not from stuff. In fact, stuff is an indication of non-abundance. Abundance is in the sacred; it’s in the connection of love. We will find abundance through hard times when we find each other.”
–Rebecca Adamson, founder of the First Nations Development Institute (interviewed in YES magazine, summer 2009).
“It is quite a thrill to discover that the birds you are studying are not simply specimens of the species Larus argentatus but that they are personal acquaintances…individuals that you know personally. Somehow, you feel, you are at home, you are taking part in their lives, and their adventure becomes part of your own life.”
– Niko Tinbergen (The Herring Gull’s World)
“The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.”
Thomas Berry (1914-2009)
“On the return trip home, gazing though 240,000 miles of space toward the stars and the planet from which I had come, I suddenly experienced the universe as intelligent, loving, and harmonious. My view of the planet was a glimpse of divinity.” Edgar Mitchell, US astronaut
each pond with its blazing lilies/
is a prayer heard and answered/
lavishly, /
every morning, /
whether or not/
you have ever dared to be happy, /
whether or not/
you have ever dared to pray. /
From Mary Oliver’s “Morning Poem”
“The evidence is in: Climate change is real, it’s causing changes in our own backyard…Being in this job has only reinforced the importance of communicating scientific information in a way that is understandable and relevant …all too many scientists assume that everybody knows what they know.”
Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ( in Yale e360).
“The great obstacle is simply this: the conviction that we cannot change because we are dependent upon what is wrong. But that is the addict’s excuse, and we know that it will not do. “
-Wendell Berry
“To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.”
Mary Oliver
“Those of us who came from this land can see before our eyes and in our own bodies that what has happened to this land and the animals is the same thing as what has happened to us.”
Linda Hogan (Intimate Nature)
“The infamous potato famine or Southern Corn Leaf Blight catastrophe could happen again any day now, in any place where people are once again foolish enough, or poor enough to be coerced (as was the case in Ireland), to plant an entire country in a single genetic strain of a food crop.”
Barbara Kingsolver (Small Wonder)
“When the Pleiades and the wind in the grass are no longer a part of the human spirit, a part of very flesh and bone, man becomes, as it were a kind of cosmic outlaw, having neither the completeness and integrity of the animal nor the birthright of a true humanity.”
Henry Beston (The Outermost House).
“We sing the song of our home because we are animals, and an animal is no better or wiser or safer than its habitat and its food chain. Among the greatest of all gifts is to know our place.”
Barbara Kingsolver (Small Wonder)
“The opposite of war is not peace, it’s creation.” Jonathan Larson (In the musical, Rent)
“For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”
“Today the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the immigrant movement and the gay communities have lost a friend. Our friend and a great American hero, Sen. Ted Kennedy, has left us…
Like so many of my generation, my life is full of memories of the Kennedy brothers, John, Bobby and Teddy. When I think about these brothers, I cannot help but return to that day 46 years ago when I stood with my mother in the parking lot across from the Texas Hotel in Fort Worth, Texas, as President Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy came out to the crowd anxiously awaiting to see them. When we left the parking lot that morning—my mother, to catch her bus so that she could get to her job as a domestic worker, and me, to my spelling class at I.M. Terrell Jr. High School—we would have never dreamed that, by the time my mother would be halfway through her domestic duties of that day and me through three class periods, President Kennedy would be assassinated in Dallas. On that day, for my mother and our family, our spirits were darkened, and at that moment, the hope for the promise that President Kennedy symbolized was diminished. We mourned, we cried and we remembered the lessons of our faith; faith is the evidence of things hoped for and not yet seen. We would soon see the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
As a high school student in 1968, I once again was full of hope and promise. We had the dreamer, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who spoke of America as he hoped it one day would be—and there was another Kennedy, Bobby, who would run for president and renew the hope of Camelot. Little would I know that 1968 would have such an impact on me. My father died in a car accident on March 9, 1968; April 4, 1968, would be the day the Dreamer would be killed and June 6, 1968, Bobby, like his brother, would lose his life as the result of an assassin’s bullet. Once again, hopes and dreams crushed…
On Sept. 21, 2007, when I became executive vice president of the AFL‑CIO, Sen. Kennedy called me at home that evening and congratulated me. After some small talk and a Kennedy joke, we spoke about workers’ rights and health care…Ted Kennedy will always be in my heart—and today I mourn him but, unlike 1963 and 1968, I am not hopeless. On this day, I am filled with hope and a fighting determination to see Sen. Kennedy’s dream of health care reform become America’s reality.”
“We can no longer accept the old a priori distinction between scientific and ethical values.”
Nobel prize winning physicist Ilya Prigogine and chemist Isabel Stengers (Order out of Chaos)
“Wildness puts us in our place. It reminds us that our plans are small and somewhat absurd. It reminds us why, in those cases in which our plans might influence many future generations, we ought to choose carefully.”
Barbara Kingsolver (Small Wonder)
“Either all the earth is holy or none of it is. Either every square foot of it deserves our respect or none does…It is possible to love a small acreage in Kansas as much as John Muir loved the entire Sierra Nevada. This is fortunate, for the wilderness of the Sierra will disappear unless little pieces of nonwilderness become intensely loved by people. In other words, Harlem and East Saint Louis and Iowa and Kansas and the rest of the world where wilderness has been destroyed must come to be loved by enough of us, or wilderness too is doomed.”
Wes Jackson (Becoming Native to this Place).
It is only an “arrogant belief that the world is merely a puzzle to be solved, a machine with instructions for use waiting to be discovered, a body of information to be put into a computer with the hope that, sooner or later, it will spit out a universal solution.”
“We know it is important to take care of nature, because we understand that nature is life. To know this is the beginning of understanding God.”
Tomas Aguilar (Cabescar people, Costa Rica, quoted in Shadowcatchers)
“To commit to a particular place…is to signal one’s faith that it harbours the sources of life…This means not only greening its streets and open spaces, providing habitat for a variety of nonhuman species and growing food for local people; it also means discovering the power of the place — harnessing its potential sources of energy, such as sunlight, wind and compost, rather than relying on external sources, or ‘power plants’, for one’s needs.”
Freya Mathews, “Becoming Native” (In Worldviews: Culture, Environment, Religion, v.3:3)
“The world as we know it has only been possible because of …climatic grace…our dangerous disruption of the Earth system, most notably by our burning of coal and oil, is bringing it to an end. We could lose far more than coastal cities and cultural treasures to extreme weather and rising seas; the ultimate stakes in this planetary gamble is the stable climate that has made civilization possible.”
Dianne Dumanoski (Daily Climate)
“The earth wants peace…Nothing wants to suffer. The wind does not want to carry the stories of death.”
Linda Hogan ((Dwellings)
“We have inherited and developed a …worldview based on the assumption that we can accumulate enough knowledge to bend nature pliantly and to run the world.”
Wes Jackson (Becoming Native to this Place)
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? “
Mary Oliver (“The Summer Day”)
“The first law is to understand and to live in balance with the natural world”.
(From We Get Our Living Like Milk from the Land, Okanagan traditions)
“We face a stark choice: we can destroy the conditions for human life on the planet by clinging to ‘free-market’ fundamentalism, or we can secure our future by bringing commerce within the laws of ecological sustainability and social justice .”
Vandana Shiva, “The Poor are Burdened Twice”, New Statesman, Sept. 2009
“We are now creating all that is to come”
Ysaye Barnwell, In Unity
“There are plenty of superstitious people in the world, but they live in agricultural and industrial societies, removed from the natural world and afraid of it. In contrast, the hunter-gatherers of the Old Way accepted the natural world as it was. The Ju/Wasi (Kalahari Bushmen) knew almost everything that was observable, and knew so well how to manage themselves that there was nothing about the natural world that seemed disturbing.”
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Old Way.
“The New World Gardens of Eden, mindlessly exploited by the European conquerors, were the product of the wisdom, hard work, and perseverance of millions of Native Americans, caring for a “sacred Earth” and an interconnected web of life. In a similar manner, an organic and healthy life for present and future generations will require the dedicated work and perseverance of millions. We will either stop the deadly assaults on our biodiversity, our food chain, our health, and our climate, or else the biological carrying capacity of the Earth will collapse, along with “modern civilization” as we know it.”
“The question isn’t whether we have the off-the-shelf technologies, the proven policies, the funds and the social stability to avert disastrous climate change– we have all that. The question is whether we can overcome the power of corporations and anti-government ideologues to mobilize ourselves and our elected officials in time”.
Sarah van Gelder, YES Magazine (winter 2010: special issue on climate action)
“Conservation of wildlife communities is not possible in the long term without simultaneously meeting the basic needs of local human communities.”
- Hammer Simwinga (Zambian winner of the Goldman Prize).
“Simwinga has recognised that women are the backbone of a community. By empowering them, he has helped villages grow strong…Empowered villages do not breed poachers.”
- Alexandra Fuller, Zambian author
“The biggest culprit in the massive mistreatment of the earth by humankind is business and industry, which happens to be where I have spent the last 52 years. Thanks to Interface Carpet I have become a recovering plunderer. I once told Fortune magazine that someday people like me would go to jail [since] theft of our children’s future is a crime. Tomorrow’s child has spoken to me with this message: ‘We are each and everyone a part of the web of life and we have a choice to make on our brief visit to this beautiful blue and green living planet. To hurt it or to help it.”
–Ray Anderson (CEO of Interface Carpet in his TED talk)
“We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When property rights and profit motives are considered more important than persons, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
Martin Luther King
“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
— Albert Einstein
“These fragile spheres of nature are the holy realms, the spirit regions. The seeds of our source seem to dwell here. Regions where the trees talk to men, and animals are symbols of the inner journey. The mysteries of our ancient psyches dwell in these places and once destroyed, they never return.”
James Stephenson, The Language of the Land: Living among the Hadzabe in Africa.
“American Indians today are still teaching America to solve perplexing problems of land-use, education, government and human relations, problems to which Europe never did find adequate answers”.
Felix Cohen, “Americanizing the White Man“.
“Tending to others is as natural, as biologically based, as searching for food or sleeping, and its origins lie deep in our social nature.”
Shelly Taylor, The Tending Instinct
“How is it possible that suffering that is neither my own nor of my concern should affect me as though it were my own, and with such force that it moves me to action? My own true inner being actually exists in every living creature.”
Arthur Schopenhauer, “On the Basis of Morality“
“The advertising industry and the public relations industry have now become specialists at tapping into the emotional core that drives people. So the open question right now is whether or not human beings are ever going to get to that stage where we will be able to save ourselves and the planet before our economic models destroy the environment, or our weapons and wars destroy everything. This, I think, is the great question of the 21st century: Can we save ourselves from unprecedented dangers in the face of unprecedented propaganda bombardments that keep us numb and uninformed?”
Sut Jhally, Media Education Foundation
“if you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
Aboriginal activist group, Queensland, Australia
“You can’t have survival of the fittest when the definition of ‘fittest’ keeps changing, based on fluctuations in the climate. I prefer to think of human evolution as ‘survival of the versatile”.
Rick Potts, Director, Human Origins Program, Museum of Natural History in Smithsonian, March 2010.
“This life is my windfall. That it happens to be a human life is the one chance in a trillion to be able to realize That Which Matters.”
Frederick Franck, The Zen of Seeing
“There is no such thing as reforestation; a forest cannot be replanted tree by tree. A forest is a society. Only a forest can give birth to a forest.”
W.S. Merwin
(In response to a query about his work to restore native forest on Maui at a reading at the Eugene Public Library 2010).
“The only true disability is a broken spirit.”
“It is time we recognize that traditional agricultural methods can make strong contributions to biodiversity conservation. We should encourage it and value it as a way to produce healthy foods that conserve and care for the environment.”
Jesús León Santos, winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize
“In order to survive, help others to survive.”
Motto of Hayrettin Karaca, Turkish environmental leader
“Young people everywhere are entitled to environmental justice, no matter what their color or socioeconomic status. My sister died when I was nine and a half, and that is when I started Children for a Safe Environment. Ten years later, with a lot of victories behind us, we still fight the same fight every day: environmental justice.”
“In his later years, Darwin himself seems to have become convinced that love (or altruism) was a stronger force than the survival instinct. Groups of animals learned long ago that working together in cooperation greatly increases their long-term chances for survival.”
Ross Conrad, Natural Beekeeping
“We have no right to use GMOs until we understand the possible adverse effects, not only to ourselves but to future generations as well. We definitely need fully detailed studies to clarify this. Any type of contamination has to be tested before we consume it, and GMO is just one of them.”
Alex Surov, commenting on a forthcoming study he conducted in which hamsters fed Monsanto’s genetically engineered soy for three generations lost their ability to reproduce.
“The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is by far the biggest funder of work on childhood obesity, and it’s now spending $100 million a year on the problem. The food industry spends that much every year by January 4th to market unhealthy food to children. There is no way the government can compete with that just through education.
If parents ate every meal with their children, that would amount to 1,000 teaching opportunities per year. Yet the average child sees 10,000 food ads each year.
I don’t think we have much of a chance of succeeding with the obesity problem unless the marketing of unhealthy foods is curtailed.”
– Kelly Brownell, Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, Yale University (interview in Nutrition Action Newsletter May 2010).
“For excellence, the presence of others is always required.”
“The Panel was particularly concerned to find that the true burden of environmentally induced cancer has been grossly underestimated. The American people—even before they are born—are bombarded continually with myriad combinations of these dangerous exposures. The Panel urges you most strongly to use the power of your office to remove the carcinogens and other toxins from our food, water, and air that needlessly increase health care costs, cripple our Nation’s productivity, and devastate American lives.”
–Letter to the President, President’s Cancer Panel Report, April 2010
“”Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to crippling of the social consciousness of individuals. This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism.”
Albert Einstein, Monthly Review: thanks for Molly Saranpaa for sharing this article with me.
“In setting standards that everyone must follow, regulations level the playing field. While they can and do add additional expenses to businesses that are in the business of generating the most pollution, they provide fertile ground for the growth of new “greener” companies whose growth will improve our economy – even in the short term.”
Jeffrey Hollender, Chairman, Seventh Generation, in “Regulate Me, Please.”
“It is a wonderful truth that things we want most in life — a sense of purpose, happiness and hope — are most easily attained by giving them to others.”
“I’m not in blanket opposition to the use of pesticides, but methyl iodide alarms me. When we come across a compound that is known to be neurotoxic, as well as developmentally toxic and an endocrine disruptor, it would seem prudent to err on the side of caution, instead of putting it into use, in which case the test animals will be the children of the state of California.”
Theodore A. Slotkin, professor of pharmacology and cancer biology, Duke University Medical Center, testimony before the California State Senate Food and Agriculture Committee
“It can take five times more water to supply 10 grams of protein from beef than from rice. If all US residents reduced their consumption of animal products by half, the nation’s total dietary water requirement in 2025 would drop by a savings equal to the annual flow of fourteen Colorado Rivers.”
Sandra Postel, “Will There be Enough? How to Change our Habits to Make Water Last”, Yes Magazine, summer 2012
“Slavery is alive and well in our modern-day world, and it isn’t hidden away in distant locales. There is a good chance that slavery is a part of your daily life, in the things you buy, or the services you receive. An estimated 12 to 27 million people are victims of slavery and other forms of forced labor around the world.”
Verité Report: “Help Wanted: Hiring, Human Trafficking, and Modern-Day Slavery in the Global Economy” from the website of the Well Made Initiative.
“You are, at best, only ten per cent human.”
Bonnie Bassler, “Listening to Bacteria”, Smithsonian (July/August 2010)
“Perhaps now we can put the manufactured controversy known as Climategate behind us and turn to the task of actually doing something about global warming.”
New York Times, “A Climate Change Corrective”
“In civilized societies, government is the voice and hand of the people. When business says it wants less ‘intrusion,’ it’s really saying it wants less democracy and more oligarchy. Regulations, when used and designed properly, are simply the tool we the people use to rein in corporate power, private wealth, and the influence they buy in order to ensure a level playing field and a fair game.”
Jeffrey Hollender (Chair, Seventh Generation), “Regulations I’d Love to See.”
“Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.”
- James Joyce
“Much of the evidence gives compelling insights into the difficulty in establishing the safety of modern biotechnologies in agriculture, medicine, and animal husbandry. “
“The Creator and Creation cannot be separated. Thus, what destroys, degrades or enhances one does the same to the other.”
Robert Sperry, Nobel Prize winning neurobiologist: “Changed Concepts of Brain and Consciousness: Some Value Implications”, Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 20:1 (1985), p. 26.
“A strong body of evidence from Europe demonstrates that antibiotic use in animals is linked with antibiotic resistance in humans. We have thoroughly reviewed these studies and have found them to be well-designed and rigorous, and to establish a clear link between antibiotic use in animals and antibiotic resistance in humans.”
Thomas R. Frieden, Director, Center for Disease Control
“The placenta, which does such an admirable job at keeping bacteria and viruses out of the womb’s watery habitat, is ill-equipped to serve as a barrier to toxic chemicals. Pesticides that are made up of smaller molecules are afforded free passage. Pesticides made of bigger, heavier molecules are partially broken down by the placenta’s enzymes before they pass though. But, ironically, this transformation often renders them more toxic.”
Sandra Steingraber, The Organic Manifesto
“The Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes designated 92,000 acres as wilderness in 1979. Earlier, three grandmother elders, or yayas, appeared at a tribal council meeting. They straightened their scarves, spoke of their concern for generations to come, and refused to leave until the council banned logging.”
Charles Bowden, in “Reviving Native Lands”, in National Geographic, August 2010.
“Ordinary taxpayers should not have to foot the bill for excessive executive compensation. And yet a variety of tax and accounting loopholes that encourage excessive pay add up to a cost of more than $20 billion per year in foregone revenue.”
Sarah Anderson, “Executive Pay and Social Responsibility
“We humans are awakening to the reality that we are living beings and that life, by its nature, can exist only in community. Our future depends on getting with the program and organizing our economics in ways that mimic healthy living systems.”
David Korten, Agenda for a New Economy
“Most people who go to bed hungry, both in rich and in poor countries, do so in places where markets are filled with food that they cannot have.
The problem is unequal access to food, land, and wealth, and any discussion must begin not from fantasies of massive yield increases, but from the truth that the hunger of the poor is in part a choice of the rich.
Inequity and politics, not food shortages, were at the root of almost all famines in the 20th century.”
Sharon Astyk and Aaron Newton, from A Nation of Farmers, Defeating the Food Crisis on American Soil (excerpted in the Utne Reader)
“I don’t feel the bear has to live with us; we have to learn to live with the bear”,
–third generation rancher Karl Rappols, stating how “proud he that was, that except for the buffalo, his land is still home to all the species present when Lewis and Clark passed through this area.”
Quoted in “Yukon to Yellowstone” exhibit, UO Museum of Natural History (on loan from the Burke Museum at the University of Washington).
“Since the biggest cause of climate change is industrial emissions from coal-fired power plants and large manufacturing facilities, the essential step is a cap—a mandatory, declining limit on the amount of global warming pollution we send into the skies. Imposing a cap would put a price on carbon, thus making dirty energy more expensive and clean energy more economically viable. That would unleash a flood of private investment in alternative energy technologies, and speed the path to a clean energy economy.”
Eric Pooley, The Climate War
“In recent years, scientists who work for and advise the federal government have seen their work manipulated, suppressed, and distorted, while agencies have systematically limited public and policy maker access to critical scientific information.”
Union of Concerned Scientists: The A to Z guide to Political Interference in Science.
“Exposures to toxic chemicals produce a tremendous drag on the U.S. economy. Exposures linked to cancer, learning and developmental disabilities, reproductive health and fertility problems, and asthma lower worker productivity. raise corporate health care costs, and weaken consumer confidence.”
–Investor Environmental Health Network (representing 51 organizations managing $35 billion in assets, in a press release supporting S.3209 (Safe Chemicals Act) and HR 5820 (Toxic Chemicals Safety Act).
“Governments have sent a strong message that protecting the health of the planet has a place in international politics, and countries are ready to join forces to save life on Earth.”
“As in measures of general intelligence, groups better at one task perform better on other tasks as well. Group performance is not correlated with either the average intelligence of group members or the intelligence of a group’s smartest member, but to three other group characteristics: the average social sensitivity of group members, the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking, and the proportion of females in the group”.
Anita Wolley (podcast interveiw) et.al. “Evidence for a Collective Intelligence”, October 2010 Science.
“Experience the beauties of nature, and in doing so, learn about yourself.”–Japanese proverb
(courtesy of Sayed Husaini)
“For years, humans have tried to conquer nature, but in doing so, they themselves became conquered. They lost their connection with the earth. They destroyed the land they were tilling. In Buddhist belief, there are no pesticides, no bad insects, no good ones. There is only imbalance in the world. We must restore that balance.”
-Han Guojie, water-quality engineer turned farmer, quoted in “Sowing Seeds for an Organic Revolution,” by William Wan in the Washington Post, November 2, 2010 (quoted in Organic Bytes, #249, November 4,2010)
“The world is a gift”.
Frank LaPena, Wintu artist
If we had only one prayer and it was ‘thank you’, it would be enough.”
Master Eckhardt (Medieval Christian mystic)
“Care for the trees like they are your family, and they will pray for you and give you fruits and shade”.
Syed Kazmi, traditional Pakistani farmer (quote courtesy of Khurram Kazmi)
“No electorate ever voted to split atoms or splice genes; no legislature ever authorized the iPod or the internet. Our civilization, consequently, is caught in a profound paradox: we glorify freedom and choice, but submit to the transformation of our culture by technoscience as a virtual fate.”
David Cayley, interview with Brian Wynne in CBC’s “How to Think About Science” series.
“Dear plant, do not think you are alone.
This stream of water comes from the Earth and sky,
This water is the Earth.
We are together for countless lives.”
~Thich Nhat Hanh, excerpt from “Earth Gathas“
(Courtesy of Joanna Lee)
“The land is our life. You can’t sell your life.”
Bernadette Bedor, Palau, in Reclaim the Earth, Women Speak out for Life on Earth, Leonie Caldecott and Stephanie Leland, eds.,
“In 1997 and 1998, Palau lost at least one-third of its coral reefs due to climate change related weather patterns. We also lost most of our agricultural production due to drought and extreme high tides. Please do no tell us that these were theoretical scientific losses. They were the losses of our resources and our livelihoods… our destinies may very well be the window to your own future and the future of our planet. Listen to us – hear our alarm. We are under attack – not by our enemies, but by our friends. We do not blame you. We only seek your assistance, for your own good as well as ours.”
Former President Remengesau, Jr., Palau
“When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
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[i] Robert Bly, ed., Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), pp. 12-13.
