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Nature and Society Quotations featured in the April - May 2008 edition ••••••• Wall Street Journal ••••••• We don’t teach [kids] how to think mathematically outside the classroom. We live in a world awash with dodgy numbers. We’re fed statistics, body mass indexes, interest rates, carbon dioxide levels, crime rates and more daily. We are told how much coffee, salt, fat and alcohol we should consume each day and we don’t seem to care if the study only involved seven anorexic rats fed lattes for a week, we swallow such numbers whole. Kerry Cue ••••••• In our case, this cry must be: “I am scared as hell, and I am not going to be silent anymore!” This book is my scream, for here in Nevada, on that day when heat was at its usual quotidian force of death, we sat on the remains of a greenhouse extinction, and it was not pretty, this graveyard, the evidence in these dirty rocks utterly demolishing any possibility of hyperbole. Is it happening again? Most of us think so, but there are still so few of us who visit the deep past and compare it to the present and the future. Thus this book, words tumbling out powered by rage and sorrow but mostly fear, not for ourselves but for our children – and theirs. Peter Ward ••••••• 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 ••••••• What is the point of “labour-saving” if by making work effortless we make it poor, and if by doing poor work we weaken our bodies and lose conviviality and health? Wendell Berry on p. 54 in ••••••• Not enough time? On your deathbed, what if someone told you you could have ten years more of your life? Too late, you’ve spent them staring at a piece of furniture! Just think ...
Get a Life!: The Little Red Book of the White Dot ••••••• If any society tries to resist globalisation, then it would be out of the loop. I mean, the people will have lost their ability to, say, grow their own food, and they’ll be told “Okay, if we can’t have your forest for raw material, you can’t have access any more to the world food market”. ... But it is intolerable to the global system that people be allowed to remain in their traditional cultural and economic spheres, because they are the market. Jerry Mander p.28, ••••••• “Your Stuff: If It Isn’t Grown, It Must Be Mined”. Where does your stuff come from? Before the store, before the factory, where did it really begin? If it isn’t made of wood, cloth, or other living matter, it was dug out of the ground. Jeremy Faludi, ••••••• In effect, oil has been like free energy. I don’t think any of us can fully grasp just how much of a leap it has been for humanity to move from a society that relies on the daily solar income to living off the capital of ancient stored sunlight. Having oil has been simply magic. You push the button, things work. We fly around the world and buy any kind of exotic fruit whenever we want. [This energy bonanza has lead to] extraordinary injustice and inequality caused by this global industry of greed which benefits only a minority of humanity. Graham Strouts ••••••• In the 1950s, oil producers discovered about fifty barrels of oil for every barrel invested in drilling and pumping. Today, the figure is only about five for one. Sometime soon, that figure will become one for one. Under that latter scenario, even if the price of oil reaches $500 a barrel, it wouldn’t be logical to look for new oil because it would consume more energy than it would recover. Jay Hanson ••••••• From the moment of birth, when the stone-age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father have been, and their parents and their parents before them. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities. This enterprise is on the whole successful. R D Laing ••••••• ... The masters of bespoke are Bentley and Rolls Royce ... a significant part of Bentley’s business is making its cars bullet proof to AK47 standard. ... Cigar humidors and refrigerators are common inclusions as are pop-up drink decanters, office equipment, dividers to exclude the chauffeur ... [The $1.2m] Maybach is built only after extensive meetings with each buyer... One European client who bought a number of Maybachs to be placed around the world wanted them upholstered and trimmed to match the interior of his Boeing. AFR magazine ••••••• If we resist doing what reality commands, our trouble is certain to be worse. What does reality command? Well, first of all (and especially for the benefit of the enviro-progressives I have met recently, who want gold medals for buying hybrid cars) we’d better drop the idea that there is any way whatsoever to preserve our system of happy motoring. The car as a mass market phenomenon, and enabler (dictator, really) of all our daily life arrangements, is finished. We’d better find something else to talk about. James Kunstler ••••••• Progress — the theory that you can get something for nothing; the theory that you can gain in one field without paying for your gain in another; the theory that you alone can understand the meaning of history; the theory that you know what’s going to happen fifty years from now; the theory that, in the teeth of all experience, you can foresee all the consequences of your present actions; the theory that Utopia lies just ahead and that, since ideal ends justify the abominable means, it is your privilege and duty to rob, swindle, torture, enslave and murder all those who, in your opinion (which is, by definition, infallible), obstruct the onward march to the earthly paradise. Aldous Huxley ••••••• The ideology of constant growth is the ideology of the cancer cell... Edward Abbey ••••••• April - May 2008 edition accessible here Back to top
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