Quotes About Environment

What I am has been to a considerable extent determined by what my forebears were, by how they chose to treat this place while they lived in it;

That computers are expected to become as common as TV sets in "the future" does not impress me or matter to me. I do not own a TV set. I do not see that computers are bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me: peace, economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and community stability, good work.

trouble with this is that a proper concern for nature and our use of nature must be practiced, not by our proxy-holders, but by ourselves

Farming cannot take place except in nature; therefore, if nature does not thrive, farming cannot thrive. But we know too that nature includes us. It is not a place into which we reach from some safe standpoint outside it. We are in it and are a part of it while we use it. If it does not thrive, we cannot thrive. The appropriate measure of farming then is the world's health and our health, and this is inescapably one measure.

At every point in our food economy, present conditions remaining, we must expect to come to a time when demand (for quantity or quality) going up will meet the culture coming down. The fact is that we have nearly destroyed American farming, and in the process have nearly destroyed our country. from the essay Nature As Measure

He turned to his own place then . . . and began to ask what might be the best use of it. How might a family live there without reducing it?

As Sir Albert Howard, a British agrarian much admired by Berry, once put it in The Soil and Health: "The using up of fertility is a transfer of past capital and of future possibilities to enrich a dishonest present: it is banditry pure and simple.

The global economy is built on the principle that one place can be exploited, even destroyed, for the sake of another place.

We haven't accepted—we can't really believe—that the most characteristic product of our age of scientific miracles is junk, but that is so.

The females hear the call. The male hugs his mate. He fertilizes her eggs as she lays them in the water.

The land here is being carelessly killed. (pp 54)

winds and is affected by altitude, moisture content

Successful system builders cannot work with a rigid demarcation between the system and the environment in which the system develops. They continuously seek to mold that environment so that the growth of the system is facilitated, often incorporating what was previously environment into the system, as happened when electrical supply companies came to control the regulative agencies set up to police them.

and listening to the jackals squabbling

There was always a pass through the reef where the sweet water inhibited the growth of the coral. As

Perhaps our supercilious disgust with existence is a cover for a secret disgust with ourselves: we have botched and bungled our lives, and we cast the blame upon the environment, or the world, which have no tongues to utter a defense.

It is perhaps the best fruit of philosophy that through it we unlearn the lesson of endless acquisition which an industrial environment so insistently repeats. "Philosophy directs us first to seek the goods of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied, or not much wanted."69 A bit of wisdom is a joy forever.

Let us provisionally define progress as "increasing control of the environment by life," and let us mean by environment "all the circumstances that condition the coordination and realization of desire." Progress is the domination of chaos by mind and purpose, of matter by form and will.

Empedocles (fl. 445 B.C., in Sicily) developed to a further stage the idea of evolution.17 Organs arise not by design but by selection. Nature makes many trials and experiments with organisms, combining organs variously; where the combination meets environmental needs the organism survives and perpetuates its like; where the combination fails, the organism is weeded out; as time goes on, organisms are more and more intricately and successfully adapted to their surroundings.

Kill not the moth nor butterfly, For the last judgment draweth nigh.

The world is a giant ashtray we put things into.

We must redefine the American dream so that it does not rest on the assumption that we can throw old places away and create new ones in the middle of nowhere.

Bevor man bei Sich eine Depression oder geringes Selbstwertgefühl diagnostiziert... sollte man sicher gehen, dass man nicht nur von Arschlöchern umgeben ist.

Situational awareness.