Monday 31 December 2012

Andrew McLaughlin - ‘Regarding Nature : Industrialism and Deep Ecology

 ….some individuals can psychologically free themselves from the dominion of an economic system by becoming less attached to the rewards of conformity and the pains of nonconformity. If such nonconforming behaviour becomes commonplace, the socioeconomic system will collapse, but unless this sort of disengagement becomes general, the system will continue.

Today’s Green Thought comes from Andrew McLaughlin’s 1993 book ‘Regarding Nature : Industrialism and Deep Ecology’.
 
 

Monday 24 December 2012

Theodore Roszak - Person/Planet

There is no way to treat the planet and the non-human things upon it as our disenfranchised proletariat without perpetuating the exploited human proletariat.
 
This weeks Green Thought comes from the late, great Theodore Roszak (1933 – 2011), the author of some unsung, yet highly influential books that were partly responsible for “The ‘Greening’ of present society” – The Making of the Counterculture (1969), Where the Wasteland Ends (1972), Person/Planet (1978), The Voice of the Earth (1992),  among others.
This is from page 317 of  the 1978 book Person/Planet   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Roszak scholar

Monday 17 December 2012

Paul Shepard - ‘Coming Home to the Pleistocene’

Our human ecology is that of a rare species of mammal in a social, omnivorous niche. Our demography is one of a slow breeding, large, primate. To shatter our population structure, to become abundant in the way of rodents, not only destroys our ecological relations with the rest of nature, it sets the stage for our mass insanity.
 
This weeks Green Thoughts are taken from from page 169 of the 1998 book  ‘Coming Home to the Pleistocene’ by the late american ecologist Paul Shepard (1925 – 1996). 
He then goes on to quote from Konrad Lorentz and Paul Leyhausen’s 1973 book ‘Motivation of Human and Animal Behaviour : An Ethological View’
 
Space … is indispensable for the psychological and mental health of humans … Overcrowding is a menace to mankind long before general and insurmountable food shortages set in. The increase in human numbers is not primarily a food problem, it is a psychological, sociological, mental health problem … We have to realise that human nature sets a far narrower limit to human adaptability to overcrowding than is commonly believed.

Monday 10 December 2012

A.N.Whitehead - ‘Science and the Modern World’

‘almost all really new (or paradigmatically revolutionary) ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced’

Today’s Green Thought comes from the English
mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whiteheads 1925 book ‘Science and the Modern World’. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._N._Whitehead

Monday 3 December 2012

George Orwell

To see what is front of ones nose requires constant struggle.

 Today’s Green Thought comes from George Orwell.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell

Monday 26 November 2012

Aldo Leopold - “A Sand County Almanac”

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

Todays Green Thought comes the Forward to Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac”.
 

Monday 19 November 2012

John Maynard Keynes - ‘The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money’

'Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences’ are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back’.
 
Todays Green Thought is taken from ‘The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money’, by John Maynard Keynes (1936).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes

Monday 12 November 2012

Marshall Sahlins - 'Stone Age Economics'

 there are two possible courses to affluence. Wants may be ‘easily satisfied’ either by producing much, or desiring little.
From page 1 of the American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins 1974 book Stone Age Economics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Sahlins
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html

Monday 5 November 2012

John Gray - Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

 'humans ... cannot destroy the Earth, but they can easily wreck the environment that sustains them.'

John Gray (philosopher and author, formerly School Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics) wrote in Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, (2002).
 
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gray

Monday 29 October 2012

Stan Rowes - ‘Home Place : Essays on Ecology’

To imitate Nature, to join her and to be bound to her rather than seeking always to transform her, is the goal that could rescue the race from barbarism and darkness……….If, within Nature, humans are conscious, ought we not consciously strive to be the consciousness of Nature?

This weeks Green Thought comes from the essay ‘Nature, Self and Art’ in Stan Rowes 1990 book ‘Home Place : Essays on Ecology’. http://www.ecospherics.net/index.html 

 

Monday 22 October 2012

Mary McCann - ‘Working for Moloch

The cleaners are scrubbing the Institute lavatories
because women are supposed to do that
the girls are typing in the Institute offices because women are dedicated and careful
the women are assembling printed circuits because women are good at delicate work and women's eyes are expendable
the young men are doing their PhD's because young men are obedient and ambitious
and someone wants warheads
laser rangefinders
hunt and destroy capabilities
multichannel night seeking radar
and science is neutral
back home the wives of the PhD students are having babies
because women are maternal and loving
and who else can have children but women?
at the top of the tower the old men and the middle aged men
and sometimes one woman professor
meet to form plans, cadge funds and run the place

because obedient young men turn into obedient old men
and it's all for the good of the country
and defence funds are good for science
and science is neutral
and no one notices Moloch
the women bring them
clean toilets
cups of coffee
typescripts
micro circuits oh so neatly assembled
and children
and it's hard to see Moloch because he is both far away
and
everywhere

and no one asks to whom they are all obedient
and they say, "Who's Moloch? Never heard of him"
as out in the dark Moloch belches
and grows redder and redder
and fatter and fatter
as he eats the children
                                              
This weeks Green Thought  is ‘Working for Moloch’ by Mary McCann (1992). First published by Pomegranate Women's Writing Group  found in Alastair McIntosh's Soil and Soul: People versus Corporate Power.
Moloch was a deity worshipped by the people of Jordan in Old Testament times (see
Leviticus 20: 2-5). The chief feature of such worship was the sacrifice of children to
secure power and riches. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moloch

Monday 15 October 2012

R.D.Laing

 “Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.’s if possible. From the moment of birth, when the Stone Age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father, and their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities, and on the whole this enterprise is successful. By the time the new human being is fifteen or so, we are left with a being like ourselves, a half-crazed creature more or less adjusted to a mad world. This is normality in our present age.”

This weeks thought comes from R.D.Laing (1927–1989) the Scottish psychiatrist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._D._Laing

Monday 8 October 2012

Mick Farr - ‘Kick out the Gyms’

"……close all the gyms in the world – so that there would be no idiots driving to go to them (think about it) so that all their energy consuming equipment, heating, and environmental control, would be switched off for ever.
As an alternative, people can go out shovel and hard brush in hand in droves, to clean and sweep away the litter, clean away the junk infested roads land and streets, weed the gutters, by hand, have speed competitions on these activities, and that speed gutter cleaning would be introduced as an Olympic sport immediately."
 
 
This weeks Green Thought comes from ‘Kick out the Gyms’ an e-mail sent in October 2012 by Mick Farr of Yeovil – commenting on the poor quality of last weeks Green Thought.

Monday 1 October 2012

Stephen Dedalus - Ulysses by James Joyce

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

This weeks Green Thought comes from the character Stephen Dadalus, in Ulysses the 1922 book by James Joyce. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_joyce

Monday 24 September 2012

Derrick Jensen - ‘A Language older than Words’

In order for us to maintain our way of living, we must, in a broad sense, tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves. It is not necessary that the lies be particularly believable. The lies act as barriers to truth. These barriers to truth are necessary because without them many deplorable acts would become impossibilities. Truths must at all costs be avoided.

Todays Green Thought comes from the American author and environmental activist Derrick Jensens 2000 book ‘A Language older than Words’.
 

Monday 17 September 2012

Rachel Carson - Silent Spring

The “control of nature” is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man”.
 
Today’s Green Thought comes from the 1962 book that alerted the industrialised world to the dangers of unregulated pesticide use -  Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.

Monday 10 September 2012

C.A.Bowers - Educating for Eco-Justice and Community

It is possible that educational theorists continue to frame the issue of social justice in ways that continue to exclude environmental issues because they write from a largely urban perspective.  ……
 
The source of water, the condition of the soil that yields the fruits and vegetables, the ecosystems and human communities displaced or degraded by the technologies that provide the city’s energy are out of sight, and thus largely out of mind. …..
 
Without an everyday awareness of the complex relationships between ecosystems and the political economy of transforming Nature into goods and services, the average urban dweller’s perception of reality depends largely on images designed to promote consumerism.
 
Today’s Green Thought comes from the introduction of the 2001 book ‘Educating for Eco-Justice and Community’ by the american education-theorist C.A.Bowers.

Monday 3 September 2012

Stan Rowe - Home Place : Essays on Ecology

Biology by itself is incomplete. Organisms do not stand on their own; they evolve and exist in the context of unified ecological systems that confer those properties called life. Life is not a property of protein molecules nor of protoplasm; it is a property of the ecosystems that the planetary Ecosphere comprises
 
Today’s Green Thought comes from Stan Rowe writing about the science of ecology in the 1990 book ‘Home Place : Essays on Ecology’ .

Monday 27 August 2012

Lew Welch


Step out onto the planet.
Draw a circle a hundred feet round. 
Inside are three hundred things nobody understands, and, maybe, nobody's ever really seen.
 
How many can you find?
 
 
Today’s Green Thought comes from the American ‘beat’ poet Lew Welch (1926 — May 23, 1971?) 
 

Monday 20 August 2012

Greenpeace - Exxon Valdez

It wasn't the Exxon Valdez captain's driving that caused the Alaskan oil spill.  It was yours.
 
a Greenpeace advertisement in the New York Times of 25th  February 1990.
 

Monday 13 August 2012

Andrew McLaughlin - ‘Regarding Nature : Industrialism and Deep Ecology’

Unless we find effective ways of curtailing our numbers, all hopes of creating decent human societies, much less ones that allow the rest of nature to flourish, will be frustrated…….We are in danger of becoming a lonely but numerous species, scratching away at increasingly harsh and dusty Earth, eking out a livelihood that is increasingly more difficult to secure.
 
Today’s Green Thought comes from Andrew McLaughlin’s 1993 book ‘Regarding Nature : Industrialism and Deep Ecology’.

Monday 6 August 2012

Hazel Henderson

“The problem is, of course, that not only is economics bankrupt but it has always been nothing more than politics in disguise … economics is a form of brain damage.”

This weeks Green Thought comes from the American futurist, economist and author Hazel Henderson. Hazel is described as a futurist and an economic iconoclast.
 

Monday 30 July 2012

Stan Rowes - ‘Home Place: Essays on Ecology’.

An unshakeable ethic for the Ecosphere will emerge when we believe in our heart and minds our worldly environment is a reality more important than me, you and all of us. When such a conviction about Nature becomes second nature, we will know that we are part of the ecological whole that produced us and sustains us.
 
Today’s Green Thought comes from Stan Rowes 1990 book ‘Home Place: Essays on Ecology’.
 

Monday 23 July 2012

T.S.Eliot - ‘Choruses from the Rock’

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of heaven in twenty centuries
Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.
 
This weeks Green Thought comes from ‘Choruses from the Rock’ (1934) by T.S.Eliot.

Monday 16 July 2012

Christabel Pankhurst

We got further smashing windows than we ever got letting them smash our heads.
 
This weeks Green Thought comes from the suffragette Christabel Pankhurst (1880 – 1958), daughter of Emmeline Pankhurst and sister to Sylvia Pankhurst and Adela Pankhurst.
 

Monday 9 July 2012

Aldo Leopold - ‘The Conservation Ethic’

We of the machine age admire ourselves for our mechanical ingenuity; we harness cars to the solar energy impounded in carboniferous forests; we fly in mechanical birds; we make the ether carry our words or even our pictures. But are these not in one sense mere parlor tricks compared with our utter ineptitude in keeping land fit to live upon? Our engineering has attained the pearly gates of a near millennium, but our applied biology still lives in nomad’s tents of the Stone Age. If our system of land-use happens to be self-perpetuating, we stay. If it happens to be self-destructive we move, like Abraham, to pastures new.
 
This weeks Green Thought comes from ‘The Conservation Ethic’ – an essay written in 1933 by Aldo Leopold. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldo_Leopold

Monday 2 July 2012

George Eliot - Middlemarch

Sane people did what their neighbours did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.
 
This weeks Green Thought comes from Mary Anne Evans’s (pen name George Eliot) 1872 book ‘Middlemarch : a study of provincial life’. This is a description of the typical mindset of the time and place.

Is it familiar ?
 

Monday 25 June 2012

Kenneth Boulding

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.
 
Today’s Green Thought comes from the English economist,  peace activist Quaker and philosopher Kenneth Boulding (1910–1993).
 

Monday 18 June 2012

Alice Walker


Some of us have become used to thinking that woman is the nigger of the world, that a person of colour is the nigger of the world, that a poor person is the nigger of the world………But, in truth, Earth itself has become the nigger of the world.
 
Today’s Green Thought comes from Alice Walker, an African American author, poet, and activist.
 


Monday 11 June 2012

John Muir

Brought into right relationships with the wilderness, man would see that his appropriation of Earth's resources beyond his personal needs would only bring imbalance and begat ultimate loss and poverty by all.
 
This weeks Green Thoughts are taken from the writings of John Muir (1838 – 1914) a Scottish-born American naturalist, author, and early advocate of preservation of wilderness in the United States.
 

Monday 4 June 2012

Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay - ‘What we leave behind’

Industrial civilisation is incompatible with life. It is systematically destroying life on this planet, undercutting it’s very basis. This culture is, to put it bluntly, murdering the earth. Unless it’s stopped – whether we intentionally stop it or the natural world does, through ecological collapse or other means – it will kill every living being.
            We need to stop it.

Today’s Green Thought are the opening lines of the preface of ‘What we leave behind’ by Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay (2009).
 
 

Monday 28 May 2012

David Bohm’s - ‘Wholeness and the Implicate Order’ .

"The essential new quality implied by the quantum theory is... that a system cannot be analyzed into parts. This leads to the radically new notion of unbroken wholeness of the entire universe. You cannot take it apart. For if you do, what you end up with is not contained within the original whole. It is created by the act of analysis."

Today’s Green Thought comes from the British quantum physicist David Bohm’s 1980 book ‘Wholeness and the Implicate Order’ .
 

Monday 21 May 2012

Chris Hedges - 'The World As It Is’

 “There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs.”
 
Today’s Green Thought comes from the 2011 book  'The World As It Is’ by  Chris Hedges. (The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. is an American multinational  investment banking and securities firm).
 

Monday 14 May 2012

Andrew McLaughlin - ‘Regarding Nature : Industrialism and Deep Ecology’

A radical critique that questions society’s belief system and also wishes to gain assent from members of that society must confront the fact that any appeal to ‘common sense’ or intuitions will not go deeply enough because our ‘common sense’ is part of the problem.
 
 Today’s Green Thought comes from Andrew McLaughlin’s 1993 book ‘Regarding Nature : Industrialism and Deep Ecology’.

Monday 7 May 2012

Stan Rowes - ‘Home Place: Essays on Ecology’

Neither philosophical liberalism champ-ioning liberty nor philosophical socialism championing equality will save us from ourselves. Human ecology will end in ecology, or nothing.

Today’s Green Thought comes from Stan Rowes 1990 book ‘Home Place: Essays on Ecology’.

Monday 30 April 2012

John_Maynard_Keynes

Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.  

Today’s Green Thought comes from John Maynard Keynes (1883 –1946), the brilliant and revolutionary British economist who initiated ‘Keynesian Economics’.

Monday 23 April 2012

Michel de Montaigne

There is a kind of respect and duty in man as a genus which links us not merely to the beasts, which have life and feelings, but even to trees and plants. We owe justice to men; and to other creatures that are able to receive them we owe justice and kindness. Between them and us there is some sort of intercourse and a degree of mutual obligation.
 
Today’s Green Thought comes from Michel de Montaigne 1533 –1592, ‘Father of the Essay’. His massive volume Essais (translated literally as "Attempts") contains, to this day, some of the most widely influential essays ever written.
 

Monday 16 April 2012

Pentti Linkola - Can Life Prevail?

"At times, technology is justified on the basis of seemingly rational arguments…..The foundational argument for technology is that it makes life easier : easier and easier, invention after invention. In reality, man has been dominating the globe without rivals ever since the discovery of the stone axe, and our life has been unnaturally and hopelessly comfortable. Since then, our only real problems have been our physical ease, meaninglessness, rootlessness and frustration."

Todays is taken from Can Life Prevail? : A Radical Approach to the Environmental Crisis. The 2009 book of Pentti Linkola, a radical Finnish deep ecologist, polemicist, and fisherman.

Monday 9 April 2012

John Muir - ‘The Yosemite’

These temple-destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar. Dam Hetch Hetchy!  As well dam for water-tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.
 
This weeks Green Thoughts are taken from the writings of John Muir (1838 – 1914) a Scottish-born American naturalist, author, and early advocate of preservation of wilderness in the United States. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Muir
 
Today’s is taken from ‘The Yosemite’ (1912)  partly written in response to the proposed damming of the beautiful Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park , in order to provide water for San Francisco. The Hetch Hetchy reservoir is held back by the O’Shaunessy Dam, finished in 1923.

Monday 2 April 2012

Patrick Curry - 'Ecological Ethics'


….the attempt currently gathering pace in the global North to stave off ecological disaster and save our selfish and unsustainable lifestyles by reducing everything to issues of carbon and creating a corresponding financial market is only the latest abstract monism, and a particularly iniquitous one in that it sacrifices the natural world in the name of ecology.
  
Todays Green Thought comes from page163 in Patrick Curry’s 2011 book ‘Ecological Ethics’
 

Monday 26 March 2012

Rudolf Bahro - ‘Building the Green Movement’

‘We’re in the process of industrialising the world to death and destruction …
…..we must break with the entire logic of this social formation. Even the institutions of the left are among the things that have to be overcome.
 After all they all want to solve the old questions…….They want to repair a system that we must leave behind.’
 
 
This weeks Green Thoughts are taken from Rudolf Bahro’s book ‘Building the Green Movement’. 1986. ( from the essay ‘Human beings are not ants’.)
 
 
Philosopher Rudolf Bahro (1935 – 1997) was thrown out of East Germany because of his dissident views and soon became a central figure in the founding of the West German Green party (Die Grünen). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Bahro

Monday 19 March 2012

David Orr - ‘Earth in Mind’

‘We cannot know what sustainability means until we have decided what we intend to sustain and how we propose to do so. For some, sustainability means maintaining our present path of domination, only with greater efficiency’.

 This weeks Green Thoughts are taken from David Orr’s 1994 book ‘Earth in Mind’  (from part 4 - Destinations.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_W._Orr

Monday 12 March 2012

Paul Ehrlich

The main hope for changing humanity's present course may lie ... in the development of a world view drawn partly from ecological principles - in the so-called deep ecology movement.
 
Todays Green Thought comes from the American biologist Paul Ehrlich http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_R._Ehrlich

Monday 5 March 2012

Donella Meadows

"Once again I stopped listening to the news this week. "


Today’s Green Thought comes from the blog of the late Donella Meadows (1941 – 2001) http://www.sustainer.org/?page_id=90 , a pioneering American environmental scientist who is best known as lead author of the influential book The Limits to Growth, which made headlines around the world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth

Monday 27 February 2012

Andrew McLaughlin - ‘Regarding Nature : Industrialism and Deep Ecology’

Once industrialism is viewed from a nonanthropocentric perspective, then it is obviously a horrendous crime against the rest of nature.
 
Today’s Green Thought comes from Andrew McLaughlin’s 1993 book ‘Regarding Nature : Industrialism and Deep Ecology’.
 
 

Monday 20 February 2012

John Muir - A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf

On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death...Let children walk with nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life, and that the grave has no victory, for it never fights. All is divine harmony.
 
This weeks Green Thoughts are taken from the writings of John Muir (1838 – 1914) a Scottish-born American naturalist, author, and early advocate of preservation of wilderness in the United States.
 
Todays’ is taken from  Muir’s ‘A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf, p:41-42

Monday 13 February 2012

George Perkins Marsh - Man and Nature

Man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned into discords.
 
Today’s Green Thought comes from Man and Nature (1864) by George Perkins Marsh  (1801 – 1882), an American diplomat and philologist considered by some to be America's first environmentalist.