Paul Watson

This weeks Green Thought come from Paul Watson a Canadian animal rights and environmental activist, who was an early, influential, and outspoken member of Greenpeace and later founded the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society

Born of the Earth we return to the Earth. The soil beneath our feet contains the material reality of the ancestors of all species. Without the collective expired lives of the past, there would be less soil. For this reason the soil itself is our collective ancestry, and thus the soil should be as sacred to us.

Edward Payson Evans - ‘ Evolutional Ethics and Animal Psychology’.

Today’s Green Thought comes from Edward Payson Evans 1897 book ‘ Evolutional Ethics and Animal Psychology’.

Man is as truly a part and product of nature as any other animal, and [the] attempt to set him up on an isolated point outside of it is philosophically false and morally pernicious

On this basis Evans then branded as being wrong

maliciously breaking a crystal, defacing a gem, girdling a tree, crushing a flower, painting flaming advertisements on rocks and worrying and torturing animals

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

UK's first fatal car accident

This weeks Green Thought also concerns motorised vehicles.

The UK's first fatal car accident was in 1896, 115 years ago from Monday 17^th August. A woman was killed by a vehicle travelling at 4mph.

The coroner told her inquest that he hoped hers would be the last death in this sort of accident.

Since then more than 550,000 people have been killed on Britain's roads and almost 4,000 people are killed on the world's roads every day.

Peter Berg - ‘Turtle Talk : voices for a sustainable future’

This weeks Green Thought is taken from ‘Turtle Talk : voices for a sustainable future’ - a 1990 collection of interviews with ecological activists, organisers and visionaries from North America.

Todays Green Thought is taken from ‘Bioregional and Wild’ -an interview with Peter Berg of the San Francisco Planet Drum Foundation www.planetdrum.org

‘As cars begin to diminish, I would see a really cheery cultural prospect of tearing up streets, or at least half the street. And recreationally restoring creeks and springs in urban areas’

Aldo Leopold - 'Round River' + 'A Sand County Almanac'

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

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

(from ‘Conservation’ in Round River)

‘The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant : ‘What good is it ?’ If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good’, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts ?

To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering’.