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Nature and Society

Quotations featured in the October-November 2007 edition

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We see only what we have names for.

Garret Hardin
The Ostrich Factor, 1999, p.41

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A world of facts lies outside and beyond the world of words.

Thomas H. Huxley (1825-1895)

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We can restore, by means of our imaginative reason, that secret harmony with nature which beasts, birds and plants possess, but which our civilization has done so much to eradicate from human feeling ... It flows through us, stirred by unexpected little things, a magical rapport, bringing indescribable happiness between the solitary ego and all that we behold on this green earth

John Cowper Powys
The Art of Happiness, 1935

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Creativity and innovation are measured not by what is done, but by what could have been done ... but wasn’t.

Charles Willock
Charles Sturt University

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“Journalists, editors and producers will always prefer to tackle material they know runs down dependable furrows of sentiment and can be communicated through conventional forms”. The is due to many factors – he writes at length about the commercial imperative, the concentration of media and the sheer laziness which formulaic journalism can induce, especially when second-hand news and commentary is available in truckloads at the click of a mouse.

“We are all incapable of objectivity”. It is most refreshing to see a prominent working journalist tackling that most fragile construct of the Age of Enlightenment, the subjective-objective distinction.

Richard Begbie, Canberra Times, 16 September 2007
Reviewing and quoting from David Salter’s The Media We Deserve

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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

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The essential wisdom of biocentrism, a way of coming to regard the human, as the ecotheologian Thomas Berry has put it, “at the species level”, as one more creature on the earth in essence no grander and greater than the rest, and at heart ultimately dependent upon them and their continuing healthy interactions for our very lives. We are so cocooned in our human centredness in most of our existence that this sort of humility seems well-night degrading, or juvenile, but it is of course the crucial element of a worldview that knows domination to be wrong and integration to be right.

Kirkpatrick Sale
After Eden, 2006, p.130

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[20,000 years ago our ancestors must have thought] there had always been mammoths, why would there not always be mammoths? Besides, if one tribe refrained from killing them, even if it realized that the mammoth numbers were dwindling, how would it know if another nearby tribe would make the same decision? And if the meat supply from other species was scarce, there may have been no good alternative to killing mammoths, who were, after all, a very economical source of meat.

Kirkpatrick Sale
After Eden, 2006, p86

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Extinction. that is a heavy charge to make. it proclaims that Sapiens had become a species so technologically powerful, so effectively deadly—and so psychologically fixed on its superiority to the rest of life—that it could eliminate one whole other species from its habitat. Not necessarily by intention—in fact probably by intention, not taking the time and care to figure out the long-term effects of its actions, though surely as hunters intimate with the ways of their prey they knew that mammoths took a long time to gestate and a long time to grow to reproductive age, and had arrogance not overpowered humility they might have realized their effect on the dwindling herds and switched to other animals.

Kirkpatrick Sale
After Eden, 2006, p86
on our attitude to natural resources

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A challenge. Try, if you can, to spend at least five minutes without the company of plastic sometime today. I’m warning you, it won’t be easy.

We sit on it, wash in it, eat from it, drink from it, play with it and pay with it. It is more than likely there is some residing inside you. Plastics are literally everywhere.

Daisy Dumas, in The Ecologist, 2007

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We haven’t yet learned how to factor the health of the environment into our economic paradigm. We need to get to work on this calculus quickly, because a stock market crash will pale in comparison to an ecological crash on an oceanic scale.

Charles Moore of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, 2007

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If boats of all countries respect the rules, tuna will not be finished. If only a few countries respect the rules, and others don’t respect the rules, the fisherman who respects the rules is finished.

Alfonso Consiglio
Spanish purse seine trawler owner
National Geographic magazine
April 2007, p.51

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We removed ourselves from the fundamental position in nature that we had heretofore shared with absolutely all other species since life began; we abruptly stepped out of the local ecosystem. We told Mother Nature we didn’t need her anymore; that we could take care of ourselves ....

What does it mean to live outside ecosystems? It means that our interests no longer dovetail with those of the natural world around us ... Inventing agriculture in a very real sense was tantamount to declaring war on local ecosystems.

Niles Eldridge, Dominion, 1995

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In truth, though, it’s not about who’s saying it. That’s why all the attacks on Prince Charles’ and Al Gore’s lifestyles are misplaced. So what if those who aspire to a better world don’t always attain the reach of their words? Do you? Do I? Does anyone? Are only the saintly allowed to suggest that humanity needs new – higher – standards? Are only those goals that seem immediately achievable the ones that should be given consideration? Surely the important thing is to keep trying.

Jeremy Smith
The Ecologist, May 2007

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Theories of progress are not scientific hypotheses. They are myths, which answer the human need for meaning.

John Gray
Black Mass, 2007 (p 2)

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The pursuit of a condition of harmony defines utopian thought and discloses its basic unreality. conflict is a universal feature of human life. it seems to be natural for human beings to want incompatible things – excitement and a quiet life, freedom and security, truth and a picture of the world that satisfies their sense of self-importance. A conflict-free existence is impossible for humans, and wherever it is attempted the result is intolerable to them. If human dreams were achieved, the result would be worse than any aborted Utopia. Luckily, visions of an ideal world are never realized.

John Gray
Black Mass, 2007, p 17

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The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool.

Richard Feynman

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In the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Austria, Belgium and Slovenia, patients with depression are prescribed agricultural work. Holland has 600 care farms that are part of the health service compared with 43 in the UK, none of which are aimed at mental health.

BBC News 14 May 2007

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We assume that because Americans speak English, their world is just as comprehensible to us as their own. But as George Bernard Shaw observed, Britain and the US are two countries divided by a common language. the same surely applies to Australia and the US.

Jenny Stewart, Canberra Times
30 April 2007

(Thus, in some ways it helps to understand Americans’ ways better if we imagine them as speaking a language other than English)

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With climate change, it is looking ever more likely that we will be gradually overwhelmed by repeated disasters and shocks such as bush fires, floods and storm surges and eventually a systems collapse. Perhaps this is why there are no space traveling aliens - maybe technocrats never value and consequently always destroy their environment.

June Lewis
posting to the Greenleap discussion list
on 4 September 2007

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Morgan Stanley energy analyst Stuart Baker is blunt: “I don’t think about peak oil because my clients don’t think about peak oil. To the extent that they think about it, it is something for the future, but hedge funds want to make money in six months.”

Australian Financial Review
4 August 2007

Comment: this quote exemplifies the short-term thinking mindset which imperils the environment and human societies whose timeframe extend beyond six months.

October-November 2007 edition accessible here

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Page updated 23 October 2007. To contact the editor of Nature and Society, please e-mail our office.