Quotes from Donald Worster

We trust ourselves, far more than our ancestors did… The root of our predicament lies in the simple fact that, though we remain a flawed and unstable species, plagued now as in the past by a thousand weaknesses, we have insisted on both unlimited freedom and unlimited power. It would now seem clear that, if we want to stop the devastation of the earth, the growing threats to our food, water, air, and fellow creatures, we must find some way to limit both.

The marketplace is an institution that teaches self-advancement, private acquisition, and the domination of nature. Its way of thinking is incompatible with the round river. Ecological harmony is a nonmarket value that takes a collective will to achieve.

All those "why" questions are rooted in culture, which is to say, in ethical beliefs. I emphasize the point not to denigrate the achievements of scientists, but only to remind that natural science cannot by itself fathom the sources of the crisis it has identified, for the sources lie not in the nature that scientists study but in the human nature and, especially, in the human culture that historians and other humanists have made their study.

We can no more get out of a relationship with nature than we can get out of history.

Historians are trained to look for personal biography in every idea, no matter how scientifically objective it is supposed to be, and to look for the influence of contemporary opinion on the rise and fall of scientific theories.

Too often science seems oblivious to the fact that human beings have been interacting with nature over a long period of time ... and that what we mean by nature is, to some extent, a product of that history.

Giving all due respect to the present generation of scientists who have worked hard to give us the most reliable account of nature they can, historians nonetheless find the scientific ideas of other eras intrinsically interesting, often as interesting as those of our own day, and for all we know, they are valid in their own way.

So we are making a pathway across the levee that separates nature from culture, science from history, matter from mind.

and harvesting