Monday 30 December 2013

Paul Shepard - ‘Coming Home to the Pleistocene’

…. the City continues to depend on the material production (of the countryside), but also on the social practices that create an explosive democracy that feeds the corporate and industrial exploitation of the earth.

This weeks Green Thought is taken from pages 4 - 5 of the late (1925-1996) American ecologist and author Paul Shepard’s 1998 book  ‘Coming Home to the Pleistocene’.
 
 

Monday 23 December 2013

David Orr - ‘The Nature of Design’

Whatever their particular causes, environmental problems all share one fundamental trait: with rare exceptions they are unintended, unforeseen and sometimes ironic side effects of actions arising from other intentions.
Our ecological troubles have variously been attributed to Judeo-Christian religion (White 1967), our inability to manage common property resources  such as ocean fisheries (Hardin 1968), lack of character (Berry (1977), gender imbalance (Merchant 1980), technology run amuck (Mumford 1974), disenchantment (Berman 1989), loss of sensual connection to nature (Abrams 1996), exponential growth (Meadows 1998) and flaws in the economic system (Daly 1996)
 
This weeks Green Thought is taken from David Orr’s  2002 book ‘The Nature of Design’.
 

Monday 16 December 2013

Jim Lovelock’s ‘The Revenge of Gaia’

The humanist concept off sustainable development and the Christian concept of stewardship are flawed by unconscious hubris. We have neither the knowledge nor the capacity to achieve them. We are no more qualified to be the stewards or developers of the Earth than are goats to be gardeners.  

This weeks Green Thought comes from Jim Lovelock’s ‘The Revenge of Gaia’ (Published 2006).
 
 

Monday 9 December 2013

Sigmund Freud

“Civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means of power and coercion.”

Sigmund Freud (Austrian neurologist and Founder of psychoanalysis. 1856-1939)

Monday 2 December 2013

Captain Paul Watson

I think the wholesale destruction of our oceans and forests and the incredible assault on bio-diversity is terrorism of the highest order - terrorism that is accepted by anthropocentric culture as normal.
Captain Paul Watson in the articleTerrorism is as Terrorism Does

 
 

Monday 25 November 2013

Otto Ulrich - The Development Dictionary

The need to renounce the use of atomic energy, the chlorine industry, most aspects of synthesizing chemistry, reliance on the automobile, and industrialised and chemicalised agriculture has become self-evident to ecologically conscious people.
 
This weeks green thought comes from Otto Ulrich on Technology  in The Development Dictionary (1992), edited by Wolfgang Sachs.
 

Monday 18 November 2013

Tim Jackson - Prosperity without Growth

… the market was not undone (in the 2008 crisis) by isolated practices carried out by rogue individuals … The market was undone by growth itself.
 
Tim Jackson, Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet, Earthscan, 2009
 
 
 
 

Monday 11 November 2013

Ozzie Zehners - Green Illusions : The Dirty Secrets of Green Energy and the Future of Environmentalism

….journalist(s) go so far to claim that alternative-energy production is the only option, insisting that producing greenhouse-gas emissions ”requires” that we immediately deploy “other sources of energy, such as windmills and nuclear plants”.
Hogwash.
…….these technologies generate greenhouse-gas, instigate negative side effects of their own, encounter limitations, and most problematically, act to further stimulate overall power demand.

 
This weeks green thought also comes from Ozzie Zehners’ 2012  green-myth shattering book Green Illusions :  The Dirty Secrets of Green Energy and the Future of Environmentalism.
 
 

Monday 4 November 2013

Ozzie Zehners - Green Illusions : The Dirty Secrets of Green Energy and the Future of Environmentalism

Upon closer inspection, the benefits of green automobiles start to appear synonymous with the benefits of smoking low-tar cigarettes. Both seem healthy only when compared to something framed as being worse…….It isn’t acceptable for doctors to promote low-tar cigarettes. Should environmentalists promote alternatively fuelled automobiles ?
 
This weeks green thought comes from Ozzie Zehners’ 2012  green-myth
shattering book Green Illusions :  The Dirty Secrets of Green Energy and the Future of Environmentalism.     
 
 

Monday 28 October 2013

Wolfgang Sachs - The Development Dictionary (1992)

Calls for securing the future of the planet are often, on closer inspection, nothing else than calls for the survival of the industrial system.
 
This weeks green thought comes from Wolfgang Sachs’s essay Environment in The Development Dictionary (1992), which he edited.
 

Monday 21 October 2013

Enrique Penalosa - Mayor of Bogota

This weeks green thought comes from the former Mayor of Bogota, Mr Enrique Penalosa
 
“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars, it’s where the rich ride public transportation”.
During his term of office, Enrique Penalosa built 300km of protected bike lanes, and said:
“When we build very high quality bicycle infrastructure, besides protecting cyclists, it shows that a citizen on a $30 bicycle is equally as important to one in a $30,000 car.
Every Sunday and on public holidays, motor vehicles are banned from 18 out of 20 districts of the city of Bogota. Since 1976 (i.e. for more than 35 years), the “Ciclovía“, the day of the week, when almost the whole city becomes a bike lane, is carried out.  In 1980, the Ciclovia was enshrined in law.
 
Besides the bicycle infrastructure, the former mayor established the TransMilenio, a bus rapid transit system, which provides “public transportation that improves traffic flow and reduces smog at a fraction of the cost of building a subway.” The TransMilenio and the bike infrastructure are interlinked: “TransMilenio stations at each end of a line have huge bicycle parking facilities to facilitate bicyclists using the system.”
 
Just like Stafford !
 
 
 

Monday 14 October 2013

Neil Evernden - ‘Natural Alien’

‘As a member of industrial society it is difficult for any environmentalist to step fully outside that society’s assumptions, or to make sense of it if he does’.
 
 
This weeks Green Thoughts are taken from page 37 of Neil Everndens’ ‘Natural Alien’ (2nd Edit. 1993).
 
 

Monday 7 October 2013

Ivan Illich - Energy and Equity

"Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calories. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man’s metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well. The bicycle lifted man’s auto-mobility into a new order, beyond which progress is theoretically not possible."
"Bicycles are not only thermodynamically efficient, they are also cheap. With his much lower salary, the Chinese acquires his durable bicycle in a fraction of the working hours an American devotes to the purchase of his obsolescent car. The cost of public utilities needed to facilitate bicycle traffic versus the price of an infrastructure tailored to high speeds is proportionately even less than the price differential of the vehicles used in the two systems."

From the 1978 book "Energy and Equity by the late Austrian philosopher and ‘maverick social critic’ Ivan Illich (1926 – 2002). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Illich

Sunday 29 September 2013

Patrick Curry - Ecological Ethics

( An Ethics based on an enlightened human self-interest) denies any responsibility for the effects of our behaviour on the millions of other species and many millions of living individuals with whom we share the Earth : not exactly an ethically impressive position.
 
Taken from Patrick Currys excellent Ecological Ethics (2nd edition 2011). He is arguing for the replacement of ‘human-centred ethics with an ethics centred on nature – Ecocentrism.
 
 

Monday 23 September 2013

Wangari Maathai

I just have something inside me that tells me there is a problem and I must do something about it, so I am doing something about it.

This weeks green thought comes from the Right Livelihood Award winner Wangari Maathai
. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_Livelihood_Award

Monday 16 September 2013

Edward Abbey

 “Growth for the sake of growth, is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
This weeks green thought comes from the American author Edward Abbey (1927 – 1989).
 
 

Monday 9 September 2013

Jack Turner - The Abstract Wild

Perhaps what I fear most is that the destruction of the natural world to serve human needs and ideals will become an issue decided by opinion polls and surveys that track the gentle undulations of the true, the good and the beautiful among a people now ignorant of what was once their wild and beautiful home.
 
Taken from the 1996 book The Abstract Wild written by the American mountaineer and philosopher Jack Turner. 

Monday 2 September 2013

Thursday 29 August 2013

John Gale - Badger Genocide

Badger Genocide


In blighty the so-called ‘alliance’ government of the Imperialist Invaders, with the backing of the Germanic royalty, the Norman aristocracy and the general human populace (over 60 million mongrel descendants of Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Vikings, Normans, etc) have launched a genocidal attack on the mere 250,000 population one of the oldest inhabitants (Meles meles aka Brock, grey pate, bawson, baget ; broch, pryf penrith, pryf llwyd [Welsh] ;  brochlach [Scottish Gaelic] ; broc [Irish Gaelic]) of this sacred isle.
The politicians have decided that for this ‘cull’ to be affective, at least 70% of the population have to be slaughtered.
 
P.S.  In 1998 the Government undertook a 9-year[1] large scale field experiment to ascertain the effectiveness of badger culling and Bovine TB. The result was “culling of Badgers increased the incidence of infection in cattle”
The results are discussed at length in a 287-page UK government study and in numerous scientific papers, including several in Nature 2
, 3.
 
So is the government’s decision to let farmers shoot badgers scientifically sound?
 
No, says John Krebs, a zoologist, member of the House of Lords, and principal of Jesus College at the University of Oxford, who recommended running the 9-year study. “They went against the science on political grounds.”
1.      Independent Scientific Group on Cattle TB Bovine TB: the Scientific Evidence (ISG, 2007); available at http://go.nature.com/7gdmdh
2.      Donnelly, C. A. et al. Nature 426, 834837 (2003).
3.      Donnelly, C. A. et al. Nature 439, 843846 (2006).
http://www.nature.com/news/badger-battle-erupts-in-england-1.11595#/b1

Monday 26 August 2013

Iroquois. Confederacy

Think not forever of yourselves, O Chiefs, nor of your own generation. Think of continuing generations of our families, think of your grandchildren and those yet unborn, whose faces are coming from beneath the ground.
 
This weeks green thought comes from the founders of the Iroquois. Confederacy, c.1000 AD
 
 

Monday 19 August 2013

Wolfgang Sachs

The quest for fairness in a finite world means in the first place changing the rich, not the poor. Poverty alleviation, in other words, cannot be separated from wealth alleviation.
 
This weeks green thought comes from the 2010 preface of the new edition of the 1992 The Development Dictionary edited by Wolfgang Sachs.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Sachs

Monday 12 August 2013

Jiddu Krishnamurti

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

This weeks green thought comes from Jiddu Krishnamurti
(1895 – 1986 )
 
 

Monday 5 August 2013

Neil Evernden - ’ ‘Natural Alien’

 ‘In combating exploitation, environmentalists have tutored the developer in the art of careful exploitation’.
 
This weeks Green Thoughts are taken from page 23 of Neil Everndens’ ‘Natural Alien’ (2nd Edit. 1993).
 
 
 

Monday 29 July 2013

Arnold Toynbee - A Study of History

The destruction which has overtaken a number of civilizations in the past has never been the work of any external agency, but has always been in the nature of an act of suicide.

This weeks green thought comes from the British historian Arnold Toynbee’s 1961 book A Study of History.
 
 

Monday 22 July 2013

Vanadana Shiva - Outsourcing pollution and energy-intensive production

We can either destroy the conditions for human life on this planet while clinging to “free market” fundamentalism or we can secure our future and create climate justice by requiring that commerce works within the laws of ecological sustainability and within the laws of social justice.

Taken from Vanadana Shivas essay ‘Outsourcing pollution and energy-intensive production’ in the 2012 book The Energy Reader edited by Tom Butler, Daniel Lurch and George Wuerthner and published by The Foundation for Deep Ecology in collaboration with Watershed Media and the Post Carbon Institute.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Energy-Reader-ebook/dp/B00AXS5IRE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1370460662&sr=8-1&keywords=The+Energy+Reader

Monday 8 July 2013

Ivan Illich - Deschooling Society


School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.
 
Taken from 1971 book Deschooling Society by the late Ivan Illich (1926 – 2002) an Austrian philosopher and "maverick social critic"

Monday 1 July 2013

Samuel Langhorne Clemens

“civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.”
 
Todays Green Thought comes from Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835 -1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, the American author and humorist.
 

Monday 24 June 2013

Doug Tompkins - The Energy Reader

In any conversation about the future direction of energy policy, it is crucial to face the hard reality that the loss of biodiversity and the unfolding global extinction crisis are the direct result of the overdevelopment of civilisation, including the human demographic explosion. Our insistence on continually growing the economy has left the natural world, upon which civilisation is wholly dependent, in a precarious and degraded condition. The ugly manifestation of planetary overshoot are to be seen across the globe. Overscaled, outsized, overdeveloped are the adjectives of the age. If one cannot see it, then one is not looking.
 
Doug Tompkins in the forward to the 2012 book  edited by Tom Butler, Daniel Lurch and George Wuerthner and published by The Foundation for Deep Ecology in collaboration with Watershed Media and the Post Carbon Institute.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Energy-Reader-ebook/dp/B00AXS5IRE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1370460662&sr=8-1&keywords=The+Energy+Reader

Monday 17 June 2013

The evolutionary health principle - Biosensitive Futures

"The principle that if an animal or plant is removed from its natural habitat, or if the environment changes in some significant way, it is likely that it will be less well adapted to the new conditions, and will consequently show some signs of physiological or behavioural maladjustment. This principle applies to all species including Homo sapiens."
 
Todays Green Thought is “The evolutionary health principle” taken from the excellent Biosensitive Futures web site
 
 http://www.biosensitivefutures.org.au/

Monday 10 June 2013

The Energy Reader

For the wild creatures whose habitat is being destroyed by a rapacious energy economy, and for the children whose breathing is laboured due to pollution from fossil fuels. May a future energy economy that mirrors nature’s elegance arrive soon enough to relieve their sufferings.
 
The dedication at the front of the 2012 book  edited by Tom Butler, Daniel Lurch and George Wuerthner and published by The Foundation for Deep Ecology in collaboration with Watershed Media and the Post Carbon Institute.
 
 

Monday 3 June 2013

Derrick Jensen - A Language Older Than Words

"Every morning when I awake I ask myself whether I should write or blow up a dam. I tell myself I should keep writing, though I'm not sure that's right"
 
Todays Green Thought comes from the American author and environmental activist Derrick Jensen’s 2000 book  A Language Older Than Words
 
http://www.derrickjensen.org/