Quotations from Feb-Mar-08 Nature and Society

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Nature and Society

Quotations featured in the February - March 2008 edition

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Humans are using about 50 per cent of all the life on Earth - about half of all the microbes, insects, plants and mammals on the planet are being sucked into the systems that feed our needs. Think of every single living thing on Earth as a river. Weíre diverting half of that river to suit our needs ... While weíre busy sucking up all that net primary productivity, there are a whole mess of other critters - from little bacteria and beetles to salmon and tigers - that can't get what they need. Increasing clear-cuts, overgrazed grasslands, eroding farmlands, fishing boats strip-mining the oceans and huge toxic plumes radiating out of our cities: our current overuse of nature is driving species to extinction all around us.

Alex Steffen
Worldchanging, 2006 (p. 16)

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Aspirations
Everywhere in the world, the poor see how the rich live, if not out their window, then on TV. People who live in shanties can compare the material quality of their own lives with that of people who fly over them in jets. Itís very difficult to know that someone out there has a car and a computer, a comfortable office and a beach house, and not, at some level, want those things too, or a version of them that maps to their desires. It would be difficult to find people who would willingly and happily choose poverty when they know that others live easily and prosperously. ... There aren't a lot of teenagers clamouring for a lifestyle which - if shared equally - would enable us all to live within the Earth's capacity. No, what the kids want, from Capetown to Lagos to Novozibirsk and everywhere in between is to live like Americans, or at least Italians: they want stereos, they want refrigerators, they want cars, they want computers. They want better lives. One of the realities of our day is that we live in a young society and many of these young people know how the richest among us live, and they want, if not that, at least something better than what they've got. We can be sure that every one of the billions of kids now growing up has their own dreams.

It's worse than wrong to think that we're going to talk them out of pursuing those dreams. In fact it's hypocritical to think that we should discourage them - especially those of us in America (the land where the pursuit of happiness is written into our founding documents) should say to the two-thirds of the world living in what we consider dire poverty, "Sorry, some white guys, mostly dead now, set up a system which means that we get laptops and day spas, but y'all should be happy with an emaciated goat and a half-dry well."

Alex Steffen
Worldchanging, 2006 (p. 18)

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Comparative risks
Different people will legitimately reach their own conclusions because we do not have an agreed view of acceptable risk. We were shocked by the Bali bombing when eighty eight Australians died, most of them young people. But every three weeks on our roads about 100 Australians die, most of them young people; far from being shocked, we refer to 'the road toll', as if this carnage was the appropriate price to pay for the privilege of using roads. So there seems little prospect of there being community agreement about the acceptability of nuclear power, even if we could say accurately what the risk would be.

Ian Lowe, Reaction Time, 2007, p74

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It is neither possible nor desirable for all humans to live as wastefully as Americans now do. It is possible for all people to live at the level of resource use that prevailed in Australia in the 1960s; not a time of Neolithic privation, but a less wasteful era than the present one. We lived in smaller dwellings, each on average occupied by more people, we used less electricity and water, we were much more likely to use public transport or small efficient cars, we ate more fresh produce and less processed food.

Ian Lowe, Reaction Time, 2007, p27

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There is no objective truth about the future performance, cost and safety of nuclear reactors. There is a range of defensible opinions, as well as some that appear indefensible. Even when dealing with the history, some people are selective in choosing evidence that seems to support their position. We are all influenced by our experience, our culture and our values in trying to make sense of complex and uncertain issues. So you should read all statements about the nuclear issue - including this essay - with a critical eye.

Ian Lowe, Reaction Time, 2007

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Promoting nuclear power as the solution to climate change is like advocating smoking as the cure for obesity. That is, taking up the nuclear option will make it much more difficult to move to the sort of sustainable, ecologically healthy future that should be our goal.

Ian Lowe, Reaction Time, 2007, p19

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In the short term it is possible to create the illusion of economic progress by liquidating our natural capital, but there is a fundamental problem with such an approach. Mining operations are inevitably boom-and-bust because the resources are systematically depleted.

Ian Lowe, Reaction Time, 2007, p10

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We should also be responsible global citizens. It is our humanitarian duty to improve the lot of the poorest people of the world. It is also enlightened self interest because a world of increasing inequality will be a world of increasing tension.

Ian Lowe, Reaction Time, 2007, p11

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For most of human history, the resource that has been in shortest supply has arguably been energy. For the last three hundred years, and especially for the last three-fourths of a century, thatís been less true than ever before. Today, however, the highly concentrated and abundant energy resources stockpiled by the biosphere over the last half billion years or so are running low, and there are no other resources on or around Earth at the same level of concentration and abundance. Innovation is vital if weíre to deal with the consequences of that reality, but it canít make the laws of thermodynamics run backwards and give us an endless supply of concentrated energy just because we happen to want one.

John Michael Greer, The Archdruid Report (www)
12 September 2007

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I believe that the community - in the fullest sense, a place and all its creatures - is the smallest unit of health, and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms.

Wendell Berry on p. 52 in
The Plain Reader: Making a Simple Life (1998)

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Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.
They kill good trees to put out bad newspapers.

Found on the internet, January 2008,
author unknown

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The core concept that has to be grasped to make sense of the future looming up before us, it seems to me, is the concept of limits. Central to ecology, and indeed all the sciences, this concept has failed so far to find any wider place in the mindscape of industrial society.

The recent real estate bubble is simply another example of our cultureís cult of limitlessness at work, as real estate investors insisted that housing prices were destined to keep on rising forever.

John Michael Greer The Innovation Fallacy,
from his blog, September 2007

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Peak oil may provide an opportunity to conceptualise an environment in which children become important social agents, able to express themselves in the present rather than fulfilling parental expectations of successful investment and training for future adulthood.

Tranter and Sharpe,
in Children and Peak Oil

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The conception of children in western societies as 'vulnerable' has been underpinned by the availability of cheap oil. Cheap oil has not only profoundly influenced the lifestyles of adults and children, but it may also have reinforced the conceptualisation of children as in need of protection from the ëdangersí of modern society.

Tranter and Sharpe,
in Children and Peak Oil

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... [the Landcare group] had - and I'm making up the numbers - planted 400,000 shrubs in the year that I was out there. And of course in the day I was out there Queensland took down 418 million shrubs clearing land. So one of the things you want to watch out when youíre talking about change is, donít focus on the little success stories which show what could be done but always measure them against what the global results are, what's the overall outcome?

Paul Ehrlich extemporizing
at the Ecological Society of Australia conference, Perth November 2007

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Our economic lives underpin our sense of who we are ñ that was one of Gandhiís great insights. Change those daily habits a little and you can change our habits of life a lot. We are in enormous environmental trouble because weíve spent decades trying to meet non-material needs (for status, for affection, for respect, for camaraderie, for security) with material means.

Bill McKibben: A man for all seasons:
What we still need to learn from the example of Gandhi

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Lewis Lapham quotes with approval the title of Neil Postman's thesis for life in the technological consumer age: Amusing Ourselves to Death. He says young Americans 'think they can be anything they like - TV anchormen, surgeons, detectives, football players - because they see the role played on TV. They think they can play the role. They know the pose, the attitude. They have no idea how long it takes to perform with understanding the skill involved'.

Martin Flanagan
in The Age, 28 Dec 2007,
interviewing Lewis Lapham

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February - March 2008 edition accessible here

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