Quotes to ponder

Here are past quotes with their sources  (quotes from earlier years are at the end of the list)

2012

“At some point, every society finds itself confronted by forces that the reigning worldview cannot successfully address. It is at this point that societies rise or fall, [based on the ability of] grasping the significance of such moments and making the deep shifts in thinking, perception and behavior required to succeed.”
– Bob Dopplet, in The Power of Sustainable Thinking

“Most people have forgotten how to live with living creatures, with living systems and that, in turn, is the reason why man, whenever he comes into contact with nature, threatens to kill the natural system in which and from which he lives.”

–Konrad Lorenz

“At the Land Institute, we joke, ‘If you’re working on something you can finish in your lifetime, you’re not asking the right questions.’ If we make the commitment to long-term research, we will have a whole different way of looking at the land. Virtually all of nature’s systems are based on perennials.”
–Wes Jackson, “The Seeds of a Perennial Revolution” in YES magazine, winter 2012

“Polling consistently shows that African Americans and Hispanics put a higher priority on protecting the environment than non-minority voters. And no wonder. Study after study has shown that racial minorities disproportionately bear the brunt of pollution…three out of every five Latinos and African-Americans live in a community with one or more toxic waste sites. The Latino south side of Tucson is exposed to twenty times the acceptable levels of trichloroethylene, and rates of cancer, birth defects, and genetic mutations in that neighborhood far outpace the national average.”
–Congresswoman Nydia M. Velázquez, “In Search of Justice” in Sustainable Planet: Solutions for the Twenty- First Century.

“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.”  Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, quoted on Matthew Hall’s website “One touch of nature.”

“Environmental injury is deficit spending- loading the costs of pollution-based prosperity onto the backs of the next generation.”
–Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in Crimes Against Nature

“As long as there is respect and acknowledge of connections, things continue working. When that stops, we all die.”
Joy Harjo, award-winning Mvskoke/Creek poet, quoted by Mary Pipher, “In Praise of Hometowns” in Sustainable Planet: Solutions for the Twenty-
First Century.

“Two centuries of constant planting, tending, and harvesting structured the forest. Mixing together African and native techniques, escaped slave communities in the Amazon created landscapes lush enough to be mistaken for untouched wilderness.”
Charles Mann and Susanna Hecht, “Where Slaves Ruled”, in National Geographic, April 2012

“The California landscapes that early explorers, settlers and missionaries found so remarkably rich were in part shaped, and regularly renewed, by the land management practices employed by native peoples”.
M. Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and Management of California’s Natural Resources

“Show me any civilization that believes reality exists only because man can perceive it, that man is exclusively divine, and I will predict the nature of his cities and landscapes, the sterile core, the mined and ravaged countrysides.”
–Ian L. McHarg, in Multiply and Subdue the Earth

“A lot of people have come to the conclusion that leaders are not going to lead. They’re not going to take action, and it’s up to the citizens to make them do what is right.”
–Ben Gotschall, 4th generation rancher and lead organizer for Bold Nebraska,  an anti-pipeline citizens’ group, quoted in Madeline Ostrander, “A Bold Win against Big Oil”, in YES magazine, spring 2012

“The understanding that plants are active, self-directed, even intelligent beings can be sown by science, but it must be realized through working with plants in collaborative projects of mutual benefit. The practical recognition of plants as persons puts forward the view that nature is a communion of  subjective, collaborative beings that organize and experience their own lives.”
–Matthew Hall, in Plants as Persons, A Philosophical Botany

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”

Alice Walker, quoted in YES magazine.

“Before the Europeans arrived, the peoples of Kenya did not look at trees as timber, or at elephants and see commercial ivory stock, or at cheetahs and see beautiful skins for sale.  But when Kenya was colonized– we converted our values into a cash economy.  As we were to learn, if you can sell it, you can forget about protecting it. Thus we integrated the question of culture into our (Green Belt) seminars.  Culture was a missing link in Africa’s development.”
Wangari Maathai   in Unbowed

“In a society where girls seem as useful as boys and children die infrequently, reason dictates one or two kids. In this pocket of India (Kerala) people have fewer children because life is safer, fairer, more decent.”
Bill McKibben, in Hope, Human and Wild

“Kerala is one of the the cash-poorest regions of India, but through state policy, it has become one of the richest and most socially wealthy regions in the world. Kerala has done a remarkable job of feeding its population of more than thirty million people through local food systems. Although the per capita income is around $350 per year, the life expectancy, birth rate, and overall quality of life rivals some of the richest nations on earth.”
Mark Ritchie, “Be a Local Hero”, in Sustainable Planet, Solutions for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Juliet Schor and Betsy Taylor

“The botanical knowledge of the Ju’ wasi could not be evaluated by the outside world. While many Kalahari plants had been named by Western botanists, the Ju’ wasi seemed to have named all of them, and while the properties of some plants were not understood by Western science, the properties of hundreds of plants were entirely familiar to the Ju’ wasi.”
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, in The Old Way.

“Real economy deals with real needs…Real economy is the soil, the water, seeds, housing, the fiber of our clothes, the fuel for heating our homes.”
Helena Norberg-Hodge, in Grandmothers Counsel the World

“Humans can use natural resources to meet their needs without destroying those resources.  California Indians found it possible to be both users and benefactors of plant and animal populations.”
M. Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild

2011

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone,
To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings.
All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

David Whyte From Everything is Waiting for You

“At the end of the day, everyone would like to go to bed knowing that there isn’t one person suffering, or child ill, because I had a Big Mac today.”
Kathy Martin, quoted in Stephanie Paige Ogburn,  “A Citizen Activist Forces New Mexico’s Dairies to Clean Up Their Act”,  High County News

“The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. The most you can do is live inside that hope, running down its hallways, touching the walls on both sides.”
— from Animal Dreams (Barbara Kingsolver)

“Believe that the world can change and commit to your part of the solution. Look at the world with clear eyes, but remain hopeful, and celebrate!  When you feel challenged, reach out and reach in.”.
May Boeve, 350.org organizer of Step it Up  in response to climate change. quoted in YES magazine, winter 2012

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness,
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”

~ Mary Oliver ~ From “When I Am Among the Trees”

“When the gold of a single yellow plant explodes in the sand our eyes are bound to the soil. Dust we are and to dust return.  In the end, we are neither air, nor fire, nor water, just dirt—and maybe some yellow flowers.”
Pablo Neruda, from “Ode to some yellow flowers”

“It has become increasingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”

Albert Einstein

“If you eat, the soil is your business.  Learn what good soil look, feels, and smells like.  Take a piece of land or a garden that has been abused and  rebuilt it; discover how to grow soil while growing food for yourself and your family. Believe in yourself.  You are only two or three generations removed from the land.”
Michael Ableman, On Good Land: The Autobiography of an Urban Farm

“It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know of wonder and humility.” –Rachel Carson (courtesy of Kimberlee Harrison)

“There comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground. A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other. That time is now.”Wangari Maathai (cited in Parabola newletter, 9.30.2011)

“Wangari Matthaai (1940-2011) was a true visionary whose work and life served as a powerful example to women everywhere. She showed us that the eradication of poverty, the empowerment of women, and a sustainable future for our planet are all essential building blocks of a more just and peaceful world.”
Nobel Laureates Jody Williams, Shirin Ebadi, Rigoberta Menchú Tum, and Mairead Maguire

“Despite a growing wealth gap among the races, minority voters are more willing to pay for a cleaner planet. 81% of voters of color support federal investment in conservation, compared with 54% of whites.”
– Barry Yeoman, “Facing the Future” in Audubon, Sept.-Oct. 2011

“The world gets better. It also gets worse. The time it will take you to address this is exactly equal to your lifetime.”
– Rebecca Solnit, “Hope in the Dark”, in Transforming Terror

“When men and women are rewarded for greed, greed becomes a corrupt motivator. When we equate the gluttonous consumption of the earth’s resources with a status approaching sainthood, when we define huge sections of the [global] population as subservient to an elite minority, we ask for trouble.  And we get it.”
–John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

“The effect of the Rockefeller Program [industrializing agriculture as the "Green Revolution"] was to eliminate the system of security and stability built into agriculture by thousands of years of peasant technology.”

–Angus Wright,The Death of Ramón Gonzáles: The Modern Agricultural Dilemma

——————-

“At first I thought I was fighting to save rubber trees, then I thought I was fighting to save the Amazon rainforest. Now I realize I am fighting for humanity.”

–Chico Mendes

—————-

“Where the health of large numbers of people is at stake and the harm is potentially irreversible, it is far better to err on the side of caution. We accept this [precautionary] principle in many areas of public life. We do not wait for buildings to fall down or bridges to collapse before inspecting them for safety; we do not wait for boats to sink before requiring that they carry life jackets. “
–Devra Davis, When Smoke Ran Like Water

—————

“Just as a grain of sand does not rule over an entire beach, humans do not rule or control nature.”
–Michael Sturman (OSU student)

“We recognize that we are related to everything. We have a relationship here, human being to human being. And I’m also related to the animals, to the plants, even the micro-organism. Somehow, industrialized society has not caught up with itself to really appreciate and respect what indigenous peoples have to offer, but it’s something that’s very important, I think, that’s going to save the planet.”
—Tom Goldtooth, executive director, Indigenous Environmental Network

When the wind blows, a cloud of coal ash rises from the Reid Gardner plant and blankets the nearby homes of Moapa Paiute Indians with arsenic, lead, mercury and other toxic elements.

“We are tired just sitting here and taking pollution from the plant [for energy we never even use].  So we’re gonna go ahead and do something about it. To have a solar project is to say, ‘Hey, there are alternative ways”.
William Anderson, tribal chairman of the Moapa Paiute Band

“I just feel like the Indian people are here for a reason. Maybe it’s to help do what we can to preserve the environment.”
Vickie Simmons,. Moapa resident and solar worker

Chris Jordan, An Ill Wind Blows in Moapa“,  Earthjustice 7.21.11

“Say you switched from a normal car to a big sport “ute” and drove it for one year. The extra energy you use would be the equivalent of leaving the door to the fridge open for six years. If you drive an SUV, then you’re “driving” global warming. If you care about the people in this world living closest to the margins, then you need to do everything in your power to slow the rate at which the planet warms, for they are the most vulnerable. I was naked and you did not clothe me. I was hungry and you drowned me with your Ford Explorer.”
Bill McKibben, “Driving Global Warming”, Religion Online.

“You should take a picture of this place and show it to people driving big cars in your country.  Tell them it’s a preview of what south Florida will look like in 40 years”.
Samir Rangan Gayen, Bangladesh, quoted in “The Coming Storm”, National Geographic, May 2011.

“Today, among the fourth generation of children exposed in the womb, one in three children and one in two minority children will develop diabetes; one in six children is born with neurological damage; one in 100 children has an autism spectrum disorder and among boys the occurrence is one in 58. Just this week a new study found that environmental factors play a much bigger role in causing autism spectrum disorders than previously thought.”

CNN report on a new Senate bill allowing the banning of dangerous chemicals.

“Coexistence between transgenic seed and organic seed is impossible. Soon after transgenic seed for canola was introduced, organic canola became virtually extinct as a result of transgenic seed contamination. Organic corn, soybean, cotton, sugar beet and alfalfa now face the same fate.”

Organic Seed Growers v. Monsanto, filed in federal court on June 1, 2011

“Life in the oceans is at imminent risk of the worst spate of extinctions in millions of years due to threats such as climate change and over-fishing.”

Rueters summary   of article  in Science News. 6.21.2011

“God said the earth was the mother of mankind; that nature was the law; that the animals, and fish, and plants obeyed nature, and that man only was sinful one.”

Smohalla, nineteenth century Wanapum (Columbia Plateau) “Dreamer”, quoted in Wayne Moquin ed., Great Documents in American Indian History

“You look at Taiwan today and think it must have always looked like this. All those cars and pollution and millions of people. But my grandmother tells me when the first Portuguese sailors saw Taiwan, they called it Ilha Formoa– “Beautiful Island”. Now it is a vast network of industrial roads and half of the island slopes like baggage falling off a donkey’s back. We in Taiwan feel it is our solemn duty to warn the Third World of the horror story behind our economic miracle”.

– Words of aboriginal and other Taiwanese environmentalists speaking with Diane Wilson, whom they invited for a visit after they heard of her work opposing the Formosa Corporation’s pollution in the Gulf of Mexico ( quoted in An Unreasonable Woman).

“The blithe industrial  eradication of salmon is a disaster not only for the Pacific Northwest’s tribes, but for all traditional salmon people. Medieval Christian songs and poems revere salmon as embodiments of Christ-likeness. Pre-Christian Scandinavian, Celtic, Russian, British, Central European, Alaskan, Inuit, and Icelandic myths and legends revering salmon are as ancient as the cultures themselves.”

David James Duncan, My Story as Told by Water.

“Of the 82,000 synthetic chemicals that have come into production to date, nobody is sure which ones are harmful. That is because nobody ever asked chemists to consider the question. Teachers, architects, doctors– all need to have a set of requirements for practicing responsibly.  But chemists– who design products we eat, breathe and absorb through our skin– have no such responsibility.”

–Excepted from Laura Wright Treadway, “Pure Chemistry”, ONEARTH (summer 2011)

” Defiant Gardens by Kenneth Helphand recounts the story of gardens created improbably in the midst of the viciousness of war. These gardeners do not align themselves on the same side; they might even be sworn enemies. Yet, they are all human, they all hunger for flowers and fruit, they all ache to keep alive a hint that something will grow in spite of the surrounding night of destruction.

When despair visits me, I hold on to the image of the garden. A garden that grows like memories should. A garden that grows as justice should. A garden that grows like true reconciliation should.”

Airel Dorfman, “Gardens of Hope Amidst the Darkness of Despair”‘ excerpted on Kenneth Helphand’s site, Defiant Gardens, which contains updates and additional examples of “defiant gardens” since the publication of his book.

“The U.S. National Research Council identified numerous examples of innovative farming systems that contribute to multiple sustainability goals.The slow expansion of such innovative farming systems is as much a policy and market problem as a science and technology problem. Incentives for appropriate markets, reform of U.S. farm-related policies, and reorientation of publicly funded agricultural science are needed to hasten implementation of more sustainable agricultural systems.”

SCIENCE “Transforming US Agriculture”,  5/6/11

“Many historical events, hitherto explained solely in terms of human enterprise, were actually biotic interactions between people and the land. The characteristics of the land determined the facts quite as potently as did the characteristics of the men who lived on it”.

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac.

“Despite cheap, readily available alternatives, most American sportsmen are still using lead ammunition and fishing tackle. When lead projectiles hit large mammals, they shatter, impregnating swaths of soft tissue as wide as three feet with toxic fragments; just one the size of a BB can fatally poison an eagle.”

Ted Williams, “Bad Shot”, Audubon May-June 2011

“I saw for myself that it is possible to live in a way that is truly sustainable and truly peaceful and joyous, when people are free to develop according to their own values and their own needs.”

Helena Norberg-Hodge, on her experience in Ladakh; quoted in Grandmothers Counsel the World.

“It’s time for every citizen with a good idea to get to work, to trust yourself, to start. Who’s going to fix things if it isn’t us?”

Colin Beavan, “Advice from an Accidental Activist”, YES Magazine Spring 2011.

“Natural farming methods have shown exceptional results, especially under rain-fed conditions. Natural farming increases water retention in the soil, and helps rain-fed crops that tend to be vulnerable to dry weather conditions if soil moisture is also low.” Natural farming also protects crops from pest damage.

Shirley Varghese, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy,  (Report on Women Farmers) February 2011.

“A plan awaiting approval by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that would dramatically increase permissible radioactive releases in drinking water, food and soil after “radiological incidents” is drawing vigorous objections from agency experts, according to agency documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). At issue is the acceptable level of public health risk following a radiation release, whether an accidental spill or a “dirty bomb” attack.”

PEER News Release 4.5.2011

“A handful of corporations and of powerful countries seeks to control the earth’s resources and transform the planet into a supermarket in which everything is for sale. They want to sell our water, genes, cells, organs, knowledge, cultures and future.”

Vandana Shiva. “Time to End the War against the Earth”

“The top U.S. nuclear regulator (Greg Jaczko) said today there’s no meaningful difference in safety between submerging spent nuclear fuel in water and encasing it in concrete casks.”

Press story (3.31.2011)

“The most clear-cut example of an area where additional safety margins can be gained involves additional efforts to move spent nuclear fuel from pools to dry cask storage.”

Greg Jaczko (2008)

“On Monday March 28, the radiation level of water from the Unit 2 reactor at Fukishima was high enough that an hour-long exposure would give someone a radiation dose sufficient to cause acute radiation syndrome. At an April 2 press conference Japanese officials said that this highly contaminated water is leaking into the ocean.”

David Wright, “All Things Nuclear”, Union of Concerned Scientists

“The Nuclear Regulatory Commission should order all aged spent fuel in the U.S. to be moved from pools to hardened dry storage. It should suspend all licensing and relicensing proceedings until long-term safety review is complete. It is lamentable that the NRC extended the license of the Vermont Yankee reactor, which is the same design as the stricken Fukushima units, while the Japanese crisis is still going on and there has been no time to learn its lessons. ”

Arjun Makhijani, Institute for Energy and Environmental Research

“It may seem absurd to believe that a ‘primitive’ culture in the Himalayas has anything to teach our industrialized society.  But our search for a future that works keeps spiraling back to an ancient connection between ourselves and the earth, an interconnectedness that ancient cultures have never abandoned.”

–Helen Norberg-Hodge (Quoted in Three Cups of Tea)

“Between 1993 and mid-1996, the American oil and gas industry gave $10.3 million to political campaigns and received $4 billion in tax breaks. This represents a benefit–cost ratio of about 400 to 1. Given these kinds of returns, it is little wonder that so many perverse subsidies exist.”

Robert Costanza  Bioscience May 2001

“Among 42 women who breathed the highest levels of PBO (major ingredient in RAID)– around 4 parts per trillion — nearly half had a baby with a lower-than-normal mental development score.”

Journal of Pediatrics

“For these toxic chemicals, there’s probably no such thing as a safe level during pregnancy,”

Dr. Philip Landrigan, Director, Children’s Environmental Health Center, Mount Sinai School of Medicine

“The vast majority of industrial chemicals in use today have not undergone health and safety testing. As a result, we are all treated like random guinea pigs.”

Carl Cranor, Environmental Health News, February 2011

“It is human beings who empower other human beings, and so it is women who empower other women. We can be as strong as anyone in the world; the only thing we need is unity.”

Mursal Hamraz, Afghani student

“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!”

Langston Hughes

-”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.”

Senator Ted Kennedy

“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.”

Arelene Holt

“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.”

Vaclav Havel

“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.”

Organic Bytes 11/26/2009

“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.”

Aimee Mullins

“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.”

Kory Johnson

“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.”

Hannah Arendt

“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.”

Isabel Allende

“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. “

Submission from Norway to the Third World Biosafety Network: “Risks of GMOs to Biodiversity and Human Health.

“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.”

Jim Leape, WWF Director, on the global agreement reached 10.30.2010 by the UN Convention of Biodiversity.

“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

———————————–

[i] Robert Bly, ed., Neruda and Vallejo:  Selected Poems (Boston:  Beacon Press, 1971), pp. 12-13.

<!–[if gte mso 9]> <![endif]–><!–[if gte mso 9]> Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE <![endif]–><!–[if gte mso 9]> <![endif]–> <!–[endif]–>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.

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