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Nature and Society

Quotations featured in the August - September 2007 edition

If we want to stay within the bounds of reality we must look to a more qualitative future, a future where there are no certain answers to many of the important questions we have about the future of human interactions with the earth.

OH Pilkey and Linda Pilkey-Jarvis

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People who believe that a stable population can live in balance with the productive capacity of the environment may see a slowdown in the growth of population and energy consumption as evidence of approaching equilibrium. But when one understands the process that has been  responsible for population growth, it becomes clear that an end to growth is the beginning of collapse.

….All species expand as much as resources allow and predators, parasites, and physical conditions permit. When a species is introduced into a new habitat with abundant resources that accumulated before its arrival, the population expands rapidly until all the resources are used up.

David Price, Energy and Human Evolution, in Population and Environment, 1995

Today you can live exactly as you please as long as you give your [money] to one of the companies selling indulgences. By selling us a clean conscience, the carbon offset companies are undermining the necessary political battle to tackle climate change at home.

George Monbiot 2007

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Dan Welch summed up the almost Monty Pythonesque underpinning of the industry in an article recently in Ethical Consumer magazine: “Offsets are an imaginary commodity created by deducting what you hope happens from what you guess would have happened.”

Crikey.com.au, 9 July 2007

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You can go from virtual reality to real stupidity very fast.

David Lindenmayer, 2007

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The unrecognised and repulsive truth of our time is that individuals in ‘democratic’ societies have lost control of their governments.

Compassion in the individual doesn’t ‘fail’…it becomes irrelevant.

Letter writer to New Scientist, 12 May 2007

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People ridicule ideas which they are sure are wrong. When you are sure I am deeply and irrationally wrong in my opinions, you will either pity me or laugh at me. Strong feelings of revulsion are likely to be a cover-up for weak convictions. We detest stuff when it rattles our cage - bringing up doubts and fears about which we would rather not think.

Pondurenga Das, Yahoo Group (internet, 2 July 2007)

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The point of thinking about the future is to help us think about the present. This population forecast is a vivid reminder of the assumptions that make meaningful change so hard. We can’t help believing in growth. We can’t help believing that the way to create change is simply to buy different stuff, so growth doesn’t stop. And we refuse to think seriously about the number of human beings on this planet, a kind of growth that somehow seems “natural” to us.

Verlyn Klinkenborg, New York Times,  18 July 2007

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By its nature, the future is difficult to know, and when changes in the present arise from punctuated equilibria in relentlessly complex non-linear systems, the future becomes even more difficult to plan for.

Alexander Carpenter, on the internet 3 June 2007

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The human mind is a product of the Pleistocene age, shaped by wildness that has all but disappeared. If we complete the destruction of nature, we will have succeeded in cutting ourselves off from the source of sanity itself.

David Orr, environmental philosopher, in Adbusters, September 2002

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Corporations may be seen as abstract machines designed to convert natural resources into industrial garbage.

Jay Hanson, on the internet, 10 June 2007

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There are groups of modern people still living in the Pacific basin who demonstrate that technology is one of the least important ingredients to successful existence – that the things we have been clever enough to invent have been much less important to our survival than our capacity to live together in groups, to cooperate with one another. They are proof that it is what is in our heads that is more important than what we carry in our hands.

Alan Thorne, ANU palaeoanthropologist, 2007

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For more than 50 years sane voices have called for an end to the debate. Nature versus nurture has been declared everything from dead and finished to futile and wrong—a false dichotomy,. Everybody with an ounce of common sense knows that human beings are a product of a transaction between the two.

Matt Ridley, Nature via Nurture

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Emotion is what we experience during gaps in our thinking. If there are no gaps there is no emotion.

Today people are thinking all the time and are mistaking thought (words/ language) for emotion. When society switches-over from physical work (agriculture) to mental work (scientific/ industrial/ financial/ fast visuals/ fast words ) the speed of thinking keeps on accelerating and the gaps between thinking go on decreasing.

There comes a time when there are almost no gaps. People become incapable of experiencing or tolerating gaps.

Emotion ends. Man becomes machine.

Sushil Yadev, 2006.

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It’s quite a simple theory and one that any beer drinker understands. The glass starts full and ends empty and the faster you drink it the quicker it’s gone.

Colin Campbell, referring to global oil supplies, 2007

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Popular theology is a massive inconsistency derived from ignorance. The Gods exist because nature herself has imprinted a conception of them on the minds of men.

Cicero, De Natura Deorum, I, 16

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There is something to be said about the word “depression”, which has almost entirely eliminated the word and even the concept of unhappiness from modern life. Of the thousands of patients I have seen, only two or three have ever claimed to be unhappy: all the rest have said they were depressed. This semantic shift is deeply significant, for it implies that dissatisfaction with life is itself pathological, a medical condition, which it is the responsibility of the doctor to alleviate by medical means. Everyone has a right to health; depression is unhealthy; therefore everyone has a right to be happy (the opposite to being depressed). this idea in turn implies that one’s state of mind, or one’s mood, is or should be independent of the way that one lives one’s life, a belief that must deprive human existence of all meaning, radically disconnecting reward from conduct.

Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What’s Left of It, 2005 (p9)

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Farms have replaced wastelands, cultivated land has subdued the forests, cattle have put to flight the wild beast, barren lands have become fertile, rocks have become soil, swamps have been drained, and the number of cities exceeds the number of poor huts found in former times ... Everywhere there are people, communities - everywhere there is human life! … The world is full. The elements scarcely suffice us. Our needs press ... Pestilence, famine, wars,  and earthquakes are intended, indeed, as remedies, as prunings, against the growth of the human race.

Tertullian (c. A.D. 160 - 240) in his De Anima

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Injustice is the primary enemy. It is doubtful if any major reform of the past two hundred years has succeeded without a calculated reference to injustice. For Darwinians, extinction is more disturbing than simple injustice.

Garrett Hardin, The Feast of Malthus, 1998

But what most anti-Malthusians do not realise is that our kindness, our cries of injustice, is really the unkindest cut of all. All our kindness will eventually lead to massive starvation of literally billions of people. And all that after we have destroyed, with our kindness, a huge percentage of the worlds flora and fauna. Beautiful animals and beautiful forest will be gone forever, replaced by billions of starving people who, in the final analysis, will have no recourse but to prey upon each other. To survive they will be able to show no mercy to their starving fellow man.

Ron Patterson, commenting on Hardin, 12 July 2007, internet

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Wildlife conservation is the preservation of wildlife forms and groups of forms in perpetuity, for their own sakes, irrespective of any connotation of present or future human use.

In essence, wildlife conservation is the preservation of nonhuman beings in their natural settings, unaffected by human use or activity, uncontaminated by human antibiosis, emancipated from human serfdom.

John Livingston, Canadian naturalist 1923-2006

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Of course, you can argue with the proposition that all we are is knobs and turnings, genes and environment. You can insist that there’s something...something MORE. But if you try to visualize the form this something would take, or articulate it clearly, you’ll find the task impossible, for any force that is not in the genes or the environment is outside of physical reality as we perceive it. It’s beyond scientific discourse.

Robert Wright, The Moral Animal, 1996

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It is true that in some societies at some times there have been some few people who express appreciation for nature and revel in opportunities to see the mountains, hike the trails, raft the rivers, absorb the birdsongs, and gaze on the gazelles, but that is not the same thing as having a deep understanding of nature as a benevolent force and the earth as a living, giving source of all life.

Kirkpatrick Sale, After Eden, 2006 p. 129

August - September 2007 edition accessible here

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Page updated 13 August 2007. To contact the editor of Nature and Society, please e-mail our office.