Monday 27 October 2014

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.
 

Monday 20 October 2014

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.
 
 

Monday 13 October 2014

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.
 
 

Monday 6 October 2014

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 3rd 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  
 
 
 

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