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