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Nature and Society Quotations used in the October-November 2005 edition
Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand. It is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy. Wendell Berry
Returning to a way of life which is balanced and which supports the earth is not going backwards; developing impressive, but ultimately destructive technology is not going forwards. Rachel Francis
Unfortunately, education at present is aimed at making you conform, fit into and adjust yourself to this acquisitive society. That is all your parents, your teachers and your books are concerned with. As long as you conform, as long as you are ambitious, acquisitive, corrupting and destroying others in the pursuit of position and power, you are considered a respectable citizen. You are educated to fit into society; but that is not education, it is merely a process which conditions you to conform to a pattern. The real function of education is not to turn you out to be a clerk, or a judge, or a prime minister, but to help you understand the whole structure of this rotten society and allow you to grow in freedom, so that you will break away and create a different society, a new world. There must be those who are in revolt, not partially but totally in revolt against the old, for it is only such people who can create a new world--a world not based on acquisitiveness, on power and prestige. J Krishnamurti
The so-called global economy was not a permanent institution, as some seemed to believe, but a set of transient circumstances peculiar to a certain time: the Indian summer of the fossil fuel era. James Howard Kunstler
These days, even people who ought to know better are wishing ardently that a smooth, seamless transition from fossil fuels to their putative replacements – hydrogen, solar power, whatever – lies just a few years ahead. This is a dangerous fantasy. The true best-case scenario may be that it will take decades to develop some of these technologies – meaning that we can expect an extremely turbulent interval between the end of cheap oil and whatever comes next. A more likely scenario is that new fuels and technologies may never replace fossil fuels at the rate, scale and manner that the world currently consumes them. James Howard Kunstler
The future will be much more about staying where you are than travelling incessantly from place to place. James Kunstler
We are about to enter an era of tremendous trauma for the human race. It is likely to entail political turbulence every bit as extreme as the economic conditions that prompt it. We will not believe that this is happening to us, that 200 years of modernity can be brought to it knees by a worldwide power shortage …. The survivors will have to cultivate a religion of hope – that is, a deep and comprehensive belief that humanity is worth carrying on. James Howard Kunstler
I would argue that Malthus was correct, but that cheap oil has skewed the equation over the past hundred years while the human race has enjoyed an unprecedented orgy of non-renewable condensed solar energy accumulated over aeons of prehistory. James Howard Kunstler
Some of the material I've read suggests that the world's total energy production's gone up by two percent per year for each year out of the last hundred years and, interestingly, so has the world's population. It's also risen by two percent a year, and that the wealth that we had in energy has allowed us to produce the food and warmth to grow the population correspondingly. If we can't continue to produce the volumes of food that we do, and if that begins to decline, then there's a necessary population decline. So, at the far end of the scale in terms of the risk, there is the risk that if we don't properly manage this issue, that over a 50 year period the world's population begins to decline by two percent a year, and that could be a very unpleasant process. Andrew McNamara MP (Qld Hervey Bay)
Technology has a peculiar fascination; it casts a spell on people which makes them believe it to be progressive if they put into practice everything that is technically possible. To me this seems not progressive but childish. Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker
October - November 2005 edition accessible here
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