Monday 25 April 2011

John Maynard Keynes


Today’s Green Thought comes from John Maynard Keynes.


Instead of using their vastly increased resources to build a wonder city, the men of the nineteen century built slums….[which] on the test of private enterprise, ‘paid,’ whereas the wonder city would, they thought, have been an act of foolish extravagance, which would, in the imbecile idiom of the financial fashion, have ‘mortgaged the future’…….The same rule of self-destructive financial calculation governs every walk of life. We destroy the beauty of the countryside because the un-appropriated splendours of nature have no economic value. We are capable of cutting off the sun and the stars because they do not pay a dividend.

Monday 18 April 2011

Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Discourse on Inequality’


Todays Green Thought is taken from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ‘Discourse on Inequality’ (What is the Origin of Inequality among men, and is it authorised by Natural Law ), 1754


The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine," and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody. ”  

Monday 11 April 2011

James Lovelock


Today’s Green Thought comes from James Lovelock (2009)

Do we really believe that we humans, untrained as we are, have the intelligence or capacity to manage the earth.

Monday 4 April 2011

E.F. Schumacher - ‘Small is Beautiful’

Today’s Green Thought comes from E.F. Schumacher’s 1973 book ‘Small is Beautiful’. After quoting the following passage from Vernon Carter and Tom Dale’s Topsoil and Civilisation (1955),



‘Civilised man has despoiled most of the land he has lived on for long. This is the main reason his progressive civilisations have moved from place to place’
  Schumacher then adds –
The “Ecological problem”, it seems, is not as new as it is made out to be. Yet there are two decisive differences: the earth is now much more densely populated than it was in earlier times and there are, generally speaking, no new lands to move to.