Jesus - Matthew 7:1

Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You

This weeks Green Thought comes from just about every ancient writing about behavioural precepts (including the New Testament (Matthew 7:1), Talmud, Koran, and the Analects of Confucius).

Albert Bartlett

 It is an inconvenient truth that all proposals or efforts to slow global warming or to move toward sustainability are serious intellectual frauds if they do not advocate reducing populations to sustainable levels at the local, national and global scales.

This weeks Green Thought comes from  the late Albert Bartlett [1923 – 2013] former Professor Emeritus of Physics, University of Colorado.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Allen_Bartlett

A must-see video – The Most IMPORTANT Video You'll Ever See       A talk by Professor Bartlett – Arithmetics, Population and Energy.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY&list=PL6A1FD147A45EF50D

 

Lao Tzu

A person that knows that enough is enough will always have enough.

This weeks Green Thought comes from Lao Tzu, the 6^th century BC philosopher and poet of ancient China.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laozi

 

Garrett Hardin

A finite world can support only a finite population; therefore, population growth must eventually equal zero.

This weeks Green Thought comes from Garrett Hardin (1915 – 2003) was an American ecologist who warned of the dangers of overpopulation.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garrett_Hardin

Karl Popper

The alleged clash between freedom and security …….. turns out to be a chimera. For there is no freedom if it is not secured by the state; and conversely, only a state which is controlled by free citizens can offer them any reasonable security.

This weeks Green Thought comes from Karl Popper an Austrian-British^[5] philosopher and professor at the London School of Economics. He is generally regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century.

 

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper

Adam Smith

To feel much for others and little for ourselves; to restrain our selfishness and restrain our selfishness and exercise our benevolent affections, constitute the perfection of human nature.

 

This weeks Green Thought comes from Adam Smith (1723 – 1790) the Scottish moral philosopher and a pioneer of political economy.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Smith

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations

Gregory Bateson

"The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think."

 

Gregory Bateson (1904 –1980) was an English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Bateson

 

Robert Kuttner - ‘The Role of Governments in the Global Economy’

"In (the Global Economy), a Democratic President, a Labour Prime Minister or a Social-Democratic Chancellor can snub the unions, but he’d better not offend Wall Street or the City of London or Frankfurt. Even the nominally left party begins behaving like the right party."

This weeks Green Thought is taken from ‘The Role of Governments in the Global Economy’ by Robert Kuttner in ‘Global Capitalism’ by Hutton& Giddens (eds) (2000). 

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_economy

I.H.Pearce and L.H.Crocker - The Peckham Experiment, a study of the living structure of society

Health is not a state. It is a process; a mutual synthesis of organism and environment. This implies that a self-sustaining ecological balance underlies health.

Unless both man and his environment are obeying the biological law of mutual synthesis, there can be no health. To cultivate health one must cultivate and maintain a healthy environment

This weeks Green Thought comes from I.H.Pearce and L.H.Crocker, The Peckham Experiment, a study of the living structure of society. 1943.

 

.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peckham_Experiment

http://thephf.org/

http://www.marylangmanprize.org.uk/books-about-the-peckham-experiment

Michael Bakunin - Statism and Anarchy

‘Every state power, every government, by its very nature places itself outside and over the people and inevitably subordinates them to an organisation and to aims which are foreign to and opposed to the real needs and aspirations of the people’.

This weeks Green Thought is taken from Statism and Anarchy (1873) by Michael Bakunin.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Bakunin

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statism_and_Anarchy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism

http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/index.html

http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/

Stan Rowe - Home Place : Essays on Ecology’

"The world was not created for people only, but for purposes that transcend the human race with its limited foresight and imagination; therefore it behoves all conscious inhabitants of this superb planet to nurture it as a garden, maintaining it in health, beauty and diversity for whatever glorious future its denizens may together share.  "

 

This weeks Green Thought comes from the 1990 book ‘Home Place : Essays on Ecology’ by Stan Rowe.

 

http://econet.ca/sk_enviro_champions/rowe.html

http://www.ecospherics.net/pages/aboutauthors.html

 

For Reasons of State - Noam Chomsky

 ‘Today …….. it is almost axiomatic that that in ‘free market’ democracies, public opinion is manufactured just like any other mass market product – soap, switches or sliced bread.

In the ‘free’ market, free speech has (also) become a commodity like everything else……available only to those who can afford it.

This weeks Green Thought is taken from  ‘The Loneliness of Noam Chomsky’ by Arundhati Roy (2003) ); the forward to the 2003 reprint of Noam Chomsky’s 1973 book For Reasons of State.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arundhati_Roy

 

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky

George Monbiot - The Kink in the Human Brain

"We care ever less for the possessions we buy, and dispose of them ever more quickly. Yet the extraction of the raw materials required to produce them, the pollution commissioned in their manufacturing, the infrastructure and noise and burning of fuel needed to transport them are trashing a natural world infinitely more fascinating and intricate than the stuff we produce. The loss of wildlife is a loss of wonder and enchantment, of the magic with which the living world infects our lives……….Is this not the point at which we shout stop? At which we use the extraordinary learning and expertise we have developed to change the way we organise ourselves, to contest and reverse the trends that have governed our relationship with the living planet for the past two million years, and that are now destroying its remaining features at astonishing speed? Is this not the point at which we challenge the inevitability of endless growth on a finite planet? If not now, when?"

 

This weeks Green Thought is taken from the on-line article on 3^rd October 2014 The Kink in the Human Brain by George Monbiot – on hearing the news that in the past 40 years the world has lost over 50% its vertebrate wildlife  

 

http://www.monbiot.com/2014/10/02/the-kink-in-the-human-brain/    -     The Kink in the Human Brain

 

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/sep/29/earth-lost-50-wildlife-in-40-years-wwf

 

The Convention on Biological Diversity - http://www.cbd.int/convention/

David Morris - ‘Free Trade’:The Great Destroyer

Economists like to talk about externalities.

The costs of job dislocalisation, rising family violence, community breakdown, environmental damage, and cultural collapse are all considered ‘external’.

 

External to what, one might ask ?

 

This weeks Green Thought is taken from ‘Free Trade’:The Great Destroyer by Morris D.(1996), in Mander J. & Goldsmith E. (eds.)(1996) ‘The Case against the Global Economy and for a turn towards the Local’.

 

Article:http://www.converge.org.nz/pirm/free.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Mander

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Goldsmith

Stan Rowe - Home Place : Essays on Ecology

"Efficiency and risk reduction in the service of humanity, the inner motivations of technological change, must be rethought from an ecosystem perspective."

This weeks Green Thought comes from the 1990 book ‘Home Place : Essays on Ecology’ by Stan Rowe.

 

http://econet.ca/sk_enviro_champions/rowe.html

http://www.ecospherics.net/pages/aboutauthors.html

President Lyndon B. Johnson

"If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it."

        -President Lyndon B. Johnson  (Upon signing of the Wilderness Act, 1964)

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_Johnson

 

Fifty years ago, on September 3, 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Wilderness Act into law, establishing the National Wilderness Preservation System and setting aside 9.1 million acres of wild lands for the use and enjoyment of the American people.

Damon L. Hoppe

“We’re only a fag, a pint and a football match away from revolution”.

Damon L. Hoppe.

A special Birthday Green Thought in honour of Damon's birthday.

David J C McKays - Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air

"If everyone does a little, we’ll achieve only a little."

 

This weeks Green Thought comes from Chief Scientific Advisor of the Department of Energy and Climate Change, David J C  McKays  2009 free online book  Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air. http://www.withouthotair.com/

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._C._MacKay

 

Anon. qouted by Hugo Chavez - UN Climate Change Talks

" If the climate was a bank, they (the US) would already have saved it."

This weeks Green Thought was a slogan on a protesters banner at the U.N. Climate Change Talks in December 2009 in Copenhagen. The words were later repeated before the delegates at the actual conference by the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez.

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_United_Nations_Climate_Change_Conference

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Ch%C3%A1vez

Edward Abbey - Desert Solitaire

Revealing my deepest thoughts to a visitor one evening, I was accused of being against civilization, against science, against humanity. Naturally I was flattered.... With his help I discovered that I was not opposed to mankind but only to mancenteredness, anthropocentricity, the opinion that the world exists solely for the sake of man.

 Taken from Desert Solitaire, the 1968 book by the late American author Edward Abbey, (1927 –1989).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Abbey

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Solitaire

 

Pentti Linkola - Can Life Prevail? : A Radical Approach to the Environmental Crisis

"By decimating its woodlands, Finland has created the grounds for prosperity. We can now thank prosperity for bringing us – among other things – two million cars, millions of glaring, grey-black electronic entertainment boxes, and many unnecessary buildings to cover the green earth. Wealth and surplus money have led to financial gambling and rampant social injustice, whereby ‘the common people’ end up contributing to the construction of golf courses, classy hotels, and holiday resorts, while fattening Swiss bank accounts. Besides, the people of wealthy countries are the most frustrated, unemployed, unhappy, suicidal, sedentary, worthless and aimless people in history. What a miserable exchange."

 

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.

 

 

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentti_Linkola

 

http://www.amerika.org/books/can-life-prevail-by-pentti-linkola/

 

Holmes Rolston III - Challenges in Environmental Ethics

There is something Newtonian, not yet Einsteinian, besides something morally naïve, about living in a reference frame where one species takes itself as absolute and values everything else relative to its utility. If true to their specific epithet, ought not Homo sapiens value this host of life with something of a claim to care in its own right? Man may be the only measurer of things, but is man the only measure of things?

 

Taken from the 1990 essay ‘Challenges in Environmental Ethics’ by the american philosopher Holmes Rolston III. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holmes_Rolston_III

Richard Reese

“We’re a mining society. We mine the soils, the groundwater, the forest, the minerals, the fish… We’re destroying non-renewable resources. There’s no future in it.”

 

Richard Reese, author of What is Sustainable? Remembering Our Way Home and Sustainable or Bust,

 

See 27 minute video at: http://peakmoment.tv/videos/what-is-sustainable-271/#sthash.mghZXNWG.dpuf

Ansel Adams

"It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment."

 

Attributed by I. Satpathy in his 2005 book Environment Management to 

Ansel Adams (1902 – 1984) the American fine art photographer most famous for his wilderness landscapes.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansel_Adams

Colin Tudge - ‘Why Genes are not Selfish and People are Nice’.

This weeks Green Thought comes from Colin Tudges  2013 book ‘Why Genes are not Selfish and People are Nice’.

 

(We) have allowed ourselves to be dominated by people whose vision of the future, if vision it can be called, is crass. Thus progress is conceived in materialist terms. The number one goal of all present governments is to generate wealth, irrespective it seems of how that wealth is created, or who hags on it, or what it is used for. The rising tide of wealth is called ‘economic growth’. Progress, too, is perceived as an exercise in control. Nature as a whole must be treated as a resource which in turn can be turned into commodities to be sold for money. All human affairs, the minutiae of our lives, must be documented and cross-referenced – so progress emerges as a giant exercise in bureaucracy, reinforced by high-tech surveillance. People who won’t subscribe to this view of progress are written off as hippies or backsliders or hopeless romantics, and countries that fail to follow the path that has been chosen for them are deemed to have ‘failed’.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Tudge

Herman Daly - Toward some Operational Principles of Sustainable Development’

Three important operating rules that a long-term steady-state economy must incorporate –

1.      Exploit renewable resources no faster than they can be regenerated.

2.      Deplete non-renewable resources no faster than the rate at which renewable substitutes can be developed.

3.      Emit wastes no faster than they can be safely assimilated by ecosystems.

Taken from ‘Toward some Operational Principles of Sustainable Development’ by Herman Daly in Ecological Economics 2 no.1 (1990).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady_state_economy

http://www.efm.bris.ac.uk/het/mill/book4/bk4ch06

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_daly

http://dalynews.org/learn/blog/

Marshall Sahlins - ‘The Original Affluent Society’

"Wants may be “easily satisfied” either by producing much or desiring little."

 

This weeks Green Thought comes from the first page of Marshall Sahlins essay ‘The Original Affluent Society’ in his 1974 insufficiently influential classic book ‘Stone Age Economics’.

Consider in this light the current ‘Energy Crisis’ and the co-crisis of ‘Climate Change’.

 http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Sahlins

Mark Nathan Cohen - The Food Crisis in History : overpopulation and the origins of agriculture.

Perhaps it will aid us in our economic transition to realise that human populations once faced the notion of eating oysters and later the prospect of eating wheat with much the same enthusiasm that we now face the prospect of eating seaweed, soy protein, and artificial organic molecules.

The last sentence of the american anthropologist Mark Nathan Cohen’s 1977 book The Food Crisis in History : overpopulation and the origins of agriculture.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Nathan_Cohen

 

Aldo Leopold - A Sand County Almanac

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

 

 

This weeks Green Thought is taken from Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac ( written in the 30’s and 40’s).

 

 (From ‘The Land Ethic’ in ‘A Sand County Almanac’.)

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sand_County_Almanac

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldo_Leopold

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_ethic

John Zerzan

"People could just be so conditioned that they won’t even notice there’s no natural world anymore, no freedom, no fulfilment, no nothing. You just take your Prozac every day, limp along dyspeptic and neurotic, and figure that’s all there is.”

This weeks green thought comes from American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author.John Zerzan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_anarchism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Zerzan

James Lovelock - The Revenge of Gaia

from page 132 – we need a warning placed on every bulldozer, chainsaw, and on all large energy-using devices ‘Do nothing that would harm the earth’

 

from page 141 – I think we would be wise to aim at a stabilized (human) population of about ½ to 1 billion

 

from page 142 – Our role is to teach and set an example by our lives. In purely human affairs, Gandhi showed how to do it; his modern equivalents might come from the Deep Ecology movement, founded by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess.

 

and from page 154 – ….we should listen to the Deep Ecologists and let them be our guide

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lovelock

 

Naomi Klein

“Sub-Saharan Africa, the poorest place on earth, is also its most profitable investment destination: It offers, according to the World Bank’s 2003 Global Development Finance report, ‘the highest returns on foreign direct investment of any region in the world.’ Africa is poor because its investors and its creditors are so unspeakably rich.”

Naomi Klein, a Canadian author and social activist known for her political analyses and criticism of corporate globalization.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Klein