'To
recover from our disease of limitlessness, we will have to give up the idea
that we have a right to be godlike animals, that we are at least potentially
omniscient and omnipotent, ready to discover “the secret of the
universe." We will have to start over, with a different and much older
premise: the naturalness and, for creatures of limited intelligence, the
necessity of limits. We must learn again to ask how we can make the most of
what we are, what we have, and what we have been given. If we always have a
theoretically better substitute available from somebody or some place else, we
will never make the most of anything. It is hard enough to make the most of one
life. If we each had two lives, we would not make much of either. One of my
best teachers said of people in general: “They’ll never be worth a
damn as long as they’ve got two choices."'
Monday, 3 February 2014
Monday, 27 January 2014
Stephen Gould - Eight Little Piggies
"We
cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an
emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well—for we will not fight
to save what we do not love."
From the essay Unenchanted evening by the late (1941 – 2002 ) American geologist,
paleontologist,
evolutionary biologist
Stephen Gould in the 1993 collection of his essays Eight Little Piggies.
Monday, 20 January 2014
Professor Philip Cafaro - Life on the Brink
Modern
economic theory reads as if cancer had found a voice.
From the epilogue of the 2012 book Life on the Brink edited by Professor Philip Cafaro an Environmental Virtue Ethicist.
Monday, 13 January 2014
Henry David Thoreau - ‘Huckleberries’
"Most
men, it appears to me, do not care for Nature, and would sell their share in
all her beauty, for as long as they may live, for a stated and not very large
sum. Thank God they cannot yet fly and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.
We are safe on that side for the present. It is for the very reason that some
do not care for these things that we need to combine to protect all from the
vandalism of the few."
Written by the late, great Henry David
Thoreau (1817 –1862), in the 1861 essay
‘Huckleberries’.
Monday, 6 January 2014
Andrew McLaughlin - ‘Regarding Nature : Industrialism and Deep Ecology’
……with
the current human population, we must disinhabit significant portions of the
Earth, leaving them with fewer humans. Although this does not mean that
indigenous peoples cannot live in such areas, it does mean that they cannot
pursue industrial paths within those areas.
This weeks Green Thought comes from the American deep
ecologist Andrew McLaughlin’s 1993 book ‘Regarding Nature : Industrialism and Deep Ecology’.
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’.
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