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Nature and Society Quotations used in the February-March 2006 edition
Porsche’s new baby. Caption on a two-page colour spread
All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies. John Arbuthnot (1667-1735), Scottish writer, physician.
[Catton] proposes that the outpourings of proponents of unlimited growth are like confabulations (elaborately unreal stories concocted as rationalisations) and this behaviour resembles symptoms of the medical condition anosognosia (inability of stroke patients to recognise their paralysis). He concludes “Denial by opponents of human ecology seems to be a way of coping with an insufferable contradiction between past convictions and present circumstances, a defence against intolerable anomalous information”. http://www.energybulletin.net/12040.html
I know someone who would never go to a summer cottage or anything like that; she said, "I don't like outdoor smells." This reminded me of a time shortly after 9/11. I was talking to fellow worker at the time about the implications of 9/11, and her response was, "This really sucks. What if we aren't able to have Christmas this year because of terrorists bombing the shopping malls?" Found on the internet
Richard Dawkins: River Out of Eden, pages 131-132.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. Galileo Galilei
The speed of traffic on most streets is determined to a large extent by the degree to which the residents have psychologically retreated from their street … Moving the kids from the roadway to the footpath is like giving the motorist a permission slip to speed in the street ... Street signs kill intrigue. Standardised traffic control devices and signs do not require the storyteller in our head to be engaged ... The more neighbourhoods that build the social life of their street, the greater the uncertainty that is created in the motorist’s mind even when there is no social activity in the street ... Humour humanises public space, especially street spaces that have become anonymous and depersonalised. David Engwicht
My son, who was on sub duty in the Navy, said the Arctic ice averaged over 20' thick circa 1960. Joe Anderson
The Great Australian Dream ... has been created by Generation X and continued by Generation Y. Generation X had cultivated unrealistic expectations in their children by bringing forward their future income through debt to fund luxurious lifestyles. For many it’s going to be a nasty surprise when the glittering world they imagine in the future turns out to be unforgiving. Clive Hamilton
We have developed an inner psychology of speed, of saving time and maximizing efficiency, which is getting stronger by the day (p.3) Children are not born obsessed with speed and productivity – we make them that way (p. 216) Unstructured play … is not a ballet lesson or a soccer practice ...[it’s] digging for worms … It is about exploring the world, and your own reaction to it, at your own speed (p.231) … many children dash from one extracurricular activity to the next, leaving them no time to relax, play on their own or let their imaginations wander. No time to be Slow …children increasingly pay a price for leading rushed lives (p. 218) Competition spurs many parents to rush their children. We all want our offspring to succeed in life. In a busy world, that means putting them on the fast track in everything – school, sports, art, music Carl Honore
Why are we so slow, especially in the United States, so see the great peril that faces us and civilisation? What stops us from realising that the fever of global heating is real and deadly and might already have moved outside our and the Earth’s control? I think that we reject the evidence that our world is changing because we are still ... tribal carnivores. We are programmed by our inheritance to see other living things as mainly something to eat, and we care more about our national tribe than anything else. We will even give our lives for it and are quite ready to kill other humans in the cruellest of ways for the good of our tribe. We still find alien the concept that we and the rest of life, from bacteria to whales, are parts of the much larger and diverse entity, the living Earth. (p.4) Because we are tribal animals, the tribe does not act in unison until a real and present danger is perceived. (p.10) James Lovelock
Sadly many greens are now squarely behind a final solution to the problem of the rural regions [of Britain]: make them the place for industrial-scale renewable energy and let them be used for wind farming and for growing cash crops for biofuels to keep the city lights glowing and the urban transport running. how can they talk of a green world with policies as black as this? James Lovelock
At least 90 per cent of us in the first world now live in cities or in the suburban areas around them ... only those born before 1950 have seen how splendid [the English countryside] once was and could be again. Because our lives are so wholly urban, democracy ensures the election of governments almost entirely out of touch with the natural world. (p.106) The green community should have been reluctant to found lobbies and political parties; both are concerned with people and their problems and, like megaphones, they amplify the demagogic voices of their leaders. Our task as individuals is think of Gaia first. in no way does this make us inhuman or uncaring; our survival as a species is wholly dependent on Gaia. James Lovelock
All government – indeed, every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act – is founded on compromise and barter. Edmund Burke 1729 - 1797 We have made this appalling mess of the planet and mostly with rampant liberal good intentions. Even now, when the bell has started tolling to mark our ending, we still talk of sustainable development and renewable energy as if these feeble offerings would be ... an appropriate and affordable sacrifice. We are like a careless and thoughtless family member whose presence is destructive and who seems to think that an apology is enough. ...until we stop acting as if human welfare was all that mattered, and was an excuse for our bad behaviour, all talk of further development of any kind is unacceptable. James Lovelock
The humanist concept of 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 of the Earth than are goats to be gardeners. James Lovelock
We are in our present mess through our intelligence and inventiveness. It could have started as long as 100 000 years ago, when we first set fire to forests as a lazy way of hunting. We had ceased to be another animal and begun the demolition of the Earth (p.6) We have infringed the environment of other species, unknowingly declared war on Gaia. (p.10) There are so many humans now aiming for a first world lifestyle that we are displacing our partners on the planet, the other forms of life. (p.109) James Lovelock, reflecting on ‘takeover’
We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibres, our actions run as causes and return to us as results Attributed to Herman Melville
February-March 2006 edition accessible here
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