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