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Nature and Society
Quotations featured in the June-July 2008 edition
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We are cutting down our world, like lumberjacks in Eden. And the consequence of that plundering will be a desert, if we do not exercise our rationality to control our Darwinian drives to consume and to reproduce as much as possible.
Peter Hall, Lumberjacks of Eden, 2007
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All of our infectious diseases came from other animals; the most recent one of course is AIDS and the chances of a transfer going on depend very heavily on not just the closeness of the contact but how big the human group is where the transfer is made. So, what are the probabilities of transfer? There’s a better probability of transfer if there are 1000 people in the area than if you have 10. After it’s in there, what are the chances of it becoming established? Again, much higher if you have 1000 people than if you have 10. You may remember work that Bob May in part did years ago showing that you had to have a city of somewhere between 50,000 and 60,000 people before measles could take hold and persist, otherwise people became either dead or immune so fast that the disease died out.
Paul Ehrlich extemporizing
at the Ecological Society of Australia conference
Perth November 2007
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How long before we’re locked into a spiral of living beyond the interest from our natural capital and eating into the capital itself? No one knows for sure, but the scientific consensus seems to be converging on a figure somewhere around twenty five years from now. If we haven’t stopped haemorrhaging natural capital by 2030, we may not have enough left to choose a different path.
Alex Steffen
Worldchanging, 2006 (p. 17)
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“If you don’t know how things are connected, then often the cause of problems is solutions.”
We repeat this succinct and powerful quotation here
to acknowledge its origin: Amory Lovins said it first
in an interview with Susan Witt of the
E F Schumacher Society on 8 September 2001.
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There is always an easy solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.
H.L. Mencken
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Just as primitive people adopt the Western mode of denationalized clothing and parliamentarism out of a vague feeling that these magic rites and vestments will at once put them abreast of modern culture and technique, so the economists have developed the habit of dressing up their rather imprecise ideas in the language of infinitesimal calculus. ... Any pretence of applying precise formulae is a sham and a waste of time.
Norbert Weiner
God and Golem Inc, 1964
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For too long we seem to have surrendered personal excellence and community value in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product now is over 800 billion dollars a year, but that gross national product, if we judge the United States of America by that, that gross national product counts air pollution, and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic squall. It counts Napalm, and it counts nuclear warheads, and armoured cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifles and Speck’s knives and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet, the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play; it does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything in short except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
Robert F Kennedy (1968)
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Why, for example, is it “economic” when a plumber fixes a leak, but not when a neighbour does it? Why do counselling and Prozac count but not the daily interactions that might reduce the need for these drugs? There is no reason, beside the astigmatism of the conventional economic mind. We are told we are nostalgics for believing in such things. To entertain the thought that a prior state of affairs might have had advantages over the current one is to be deemed psycho-emotionally deficient. Yet take a hard look around you. What are the greatest needs you see – for more stuff, or more community? Which would do more for your life: a high definition television, or a good neighbour?
Jonathan Rowe, The Ecologist, April 2007
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The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.
R. D. Laing quoted in Alex Pattakos’
Prisoners of Our Thoughts, 2004
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The use of nukes in the past 60 years would have been an economic hazard. Those days will soon be over; energy decline means economic decline. Another important consideration is that since governments are running out of energy, they are going to need more “energy efficient” means of killing the enemy — “more kill per kilowatt”. That means nukes instead of large infantry formations. First a little nuke here, then a little nuke there, then a little bigger nuke, ... Well, you know the rest of the story.
Comment on the internet
30 March 2007
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All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can’t say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do.
James Lovelock
The Guardian, 1 March 2008
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More and more people are now realising what the scientific evidence shows, and that is that modern lifestyles are profoundly dysfunctional and hostile to health and well-being. So rather than wait for the whole of society to make these changes people are making up their own minds and making the changes themselves.
…What we need to see in order to address the various problems and challenges we face is an ethic of frugality when we basically regard flaunted wealth and extravagant consumption as poor taste.
Richard Eckersley,
The Canberra Times, 12 April 2008
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Richard Klein adds that this phase of our species’ evolution [that is, the megafauna extinctions] marked the transformation of humanity from a relatively rare and insignificant member of the large mammal fauna to a geologic force with the power to impoverish nature. What greater condemnation of a way of life could be imagined?
Kirkpatrick Sale, After Eden, 2006, p90
on the origin of our attitude to natural resources and the environment
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Congratulations to us! We have optimized the efficiency of the global market by removing all the shock absorbers. We shouldn’t be surprised to get a bumpy ride.
David Ewing
www, 23 April 2008
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Evolutionary psychology is not just one more school of psychology. It is a perspective on the whole of psychology that claims that we are human animals, and that our minds, no less than our bodies, are products of the forces of nature operating on a time frame of millions of years; human nature was forged from our ancestors’ struggle to survive and reproduce.
David Livingston Smith
Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind, 2004
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As the UK’s most successful supermarket, Tesco is both an architect and reflection of the way we live in modern Britain. It has brought within our grasp vast possibilities for consumption, beyond the imagination of previous generations. Supermarkets have trained us to believe that nothing but affordability should constrain what, when or how much we consume. Unfortunately this means that we have forgotten that we live on an island planet.
Posted on the BBC “Green Room” website,
16 March 2007
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Earth stayed cool enough for life to evolve. Once that happened the planet had a super-weapon in its arsenal to combat the greenhouse effect: photosynthesis…The regulatory effect of life suggests it is a geological force in its own right, and despite man’s best efforts it is nearly impossible to push the planet into a Venus-like greenhouse while photosynthesis continues unabated. But Earth’s sister planet remains a cautionary tale on the ravishing effects of a runaway greenhouse effect on what might, at one time, have been a habitable planet.
Craig O’Neill,
lecturer in Geodynamics and Planetary Science, Macquarie University,
comparing Venus and Earth, twin planets with very different
atmospheres and temperatures. Australasian Science, April 2008
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“You cannot do only one thing.”
Garrett Hardin’s First Law of Ecology
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June-July 2008 edition accessible here
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