Here are past words for the week posted on this site. I will continue to place each past quote here as I replace it with a new one:
“[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
and 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.”
“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)
[i] Robert Bly, ed., Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), pp. 12-13
