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’