Monday 30 January 2012

Tim Flannery

We actually are Earth. We really, really are just animated bits of the Earth's crust, so to talk about us and the Earth is the wrong paradigm.

Today’s Green Thought comes from Tim Flannery, Australian scientist and environmental activist.
 

Monday 23 January 2012

Frederic Benders - ‘The Culture of Extinction’.

It takes extraordinary forbearance to restrain from exploiting nature. To find nature important enough to justify the changes necessary to preserve and restore it, first we must experience it as intrinsically valuable (or sacred).

Today’s Green Thought comes from american philosopher Frederic Benders 2003 book ‘The Culture of Extinction’.

Monday 16 January 2012

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

The human capacity for reason is no more a justification for a value hierarchy among all life than is the cheetah’s speed or the eagle’s vision.
 
Today’s Green Thought comes from the American deep ecologist Andrew McLaughlin’s 1993 book ‘Regarding Nature : Industrialism and Deep Ecology’.

Monday 9 January 2012

John Muir - "Wild Wool"

"No dogma taught by the present civilization seems to form so insuperable an obstacle in the way of a right understanding of the relations which culture sustains as to wilderness, as that which declares that the world was made especially for the uses of men. Every animal, plant, and crystal controverts it in the plainest terms. Yet it is taught from century to century as something ever new and precious, and in the resulting darkness the enormous conceit is allowed to go unchallenged."

Today’s Green Thought comes from John Muir’s essay "Wild Wool" written in 1875. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Muir

Monday 2 January 2012

Val Plumwood

In the scientific fantasy of mastery, the new human task becomes that of remoulding nature to conform to the dictates of reason to achieve salvation – here on earth rather than in heaven – as freedom from death and bodily limitation.
 
 
 
Today’s Green Thought comes from Val Plumwood (1939 –2008), an Australian ecofeminist intellectual/philosopher who was prominent in the development of radical ecosophy.