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’.

 

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

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/926475.Coming_Home_to_the_Pleistocene

 

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’.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_W._Orr

http://www.oberlin.edu/news-info/98sep/orr_profile.html

Jim Lovelock’s ‘The Revenge of Gaia’

The humanist concept off sustainable development and the Christian concept of stewardship are flawed by unconscious hubris. We have neither the knowledge nor the capacity to achieve them. We are no more qualified to be the stewards or developers of the Earth than are goats to be gardeners.  

This weeks Green Thought comes from Jim Lovelock’s ‘The Revenge of Gaia’ (Published 2006).

 

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

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

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

 

Sigmund Freud

“Civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means of power and coercion.”

Sigmund Freud (Austrian neurologist and Founder of psychoanalysis. 1856-1939)

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

Captain Paul Watson

I think the wholesale destruction of our oceans and forests and the incredible assault on bio-diversity is terrorism of the highest order - terrorism that is accepted by anthropocentric culture as normal.

Captain Paul Watson in the article ‘Terrorism is as Terrorism Does’

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

 

http://www.ecospherics.net/pages/watson2.htm