Ecology

1:Physics is the most fundamental, and least significant, of the sciences. ~ Ken Wilber, Sex Ecology Spirituality, p.93,

2:the Many returning to and embracing the One is Good, and is known as wisdom; the One returning to and embracing the Many is Goodness, and is known as compassion. ~ Ken Wilber, Sex Ecology Spirituality,

3:I like to think (it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace.
~ Richard Brautigan,

4:... maintains that, along with Aurobindo's Life Divine, Heidegger's Being and Time, and Whitehead's Process and Reality, Wilber's Sex Ecology Spirituality [SES] is 'one of the four great books of this [twentieth] century'
~ Michael Murphy, Integral, 2004.,

5:The great and rare mystics of the past (from Buddha to Christ, from al-Hallaj to Lady Tsogyal, from Hui-neng to Hildegard) were, in fact, ahead of their time, and are still ahead of ours. In other words, they most definitely are not figures of the past. They are figures of the future. ~ Ken Wilber, Sex Ecology Spirituality,

6:There is more spirituality in reason's denial of God than there is in myth's affirmation of God, precisely because there is more depth... even an "atheist" acting from rational-universal compassion is more spiritual than a fundamentalist acting to convert the universe in the name of a mythic-membership god. ~ Ken Wilber, Sex Ecology Spirituality, p. 250,

7:When we love a person, we love all that belongs to him; we extend to the children the affection we feel for the parent. Now every Soul is a daughter of the [Godhead]. How can this world be separated from the spiritual world? Those who despise what is so nearly akin to the spiritual world, prove that they know nothing of the spiritual world, except in name. ~ Ken Wilber, Sex Ecology Spirituality,

8:It marshals a vast amount of scientific evidence, from physics to biology, and offers extensive arguments, all geared to objectively proving the holistic nature of the universe. It fails to see that if we take a bunch of egos with atomistic concepts and teach them that the universe is holistic, all we will actually get is a bunch of egos with holistic concepts. Precisely because this monological approach, with its unskillful interpretation of an otherwise genuine intuition, ignores or neglects the "I" and the "we" dimensions, it doesn't understand very well the exact nature of the inner transformations that are necessary in the first place in order to be able to find an identity that embraces the manifest All. Talk about the All as much as we want, nothing fundamentally changes. ~ Ken Wilber, Sex Ecology Spirituality,

9:
An Informal Integral Canon: Selected books on Integral Science, Philosophy and the Integral Transformation
Sri Aurobindo - The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo - The Synthesis of Yoga
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin - The Phenomenon of Man
Jean Gebser - The Ever-Present Origin
Edward Haskell - Full Circle - The Moral Force of Unified Science
Oliver L. Reiser - Cosmic Humanism and World Unity
Christopher Hills - Nuclear Evolution: Discovery of the Rainbow Body
The Mother - Mother's Agenda
Erich Jantsch - The Self-Organizing Universe - Scientific and Human Implications of the Emerging Paradigm of Evolution
T. R. Thulasiram - Arut Perum Jyothi and Deathless Body
Kees Zoeteman - Gaiasophy
Ken Wilber - Sex Ecology Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution
Don Edward Beck - Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership, and Change
Kundan Singh - The Evolution of Integral Yoga: Sri Aurobindo, Sri Ramakrishna, and Swami Vivekananda
Sean Esbjorn-Hargens - Integral Ecology: Uniting Multiple Perspectives on the Natural World
~ M Alan Kazlev, Kheper,

10:It's a strange world. It seems that about fifteen billion years ago there was, precisely, absolute nothingness, and then within less than a nanosecond the material universe blew into existence.

Stranger still, the physical matter so produced was not merely a random and chaotic mess, but seemed to organize itself into ever more and complex and intricate forms. So complex were these forms that, many billions of years later, some of them found ways to reproduce themselves, and thus out of matter arose life.

Even stranger, these life forms were apparently not content to merely reproduce themselves, but instead began a long evolution that would eventually allow them to represent themselves, to produce sign and symbols and concepts, and thus out of life arose mind.

Whatever this process of evolution was, it seems to have been incredibly driven from matter to life to mind.

But stranger still, a mere few hundred years ago, on a small and indifferent planet around an insignificant star, evolution became conscious of itself.

And at precisely the same time, the very mechanisms that allowed evolution to become conscious of itself were simultaneously working to engineer its own extinction.

And that was the strangest of all. ~ Ken Wilber, Sex Ecology Spirituality, p. 3,

11:The Twenty Tenets of Holons
1. Reality as a whole is not composed of things, or processes, but of holons.
2. Holons display four fundamental capacities:
a. self-preservation,
b. self-adaptation,
c. self-transcendence.
d. self-dissolution.
3. Holons emerge.
4. Holons emerge holarchically.
5. Each emergent holon transcends but includes its predecessor.
6. The lower sets the possibilities of the higer; the higher sets the probabilities of the lower.
7. "The number of levels which a hierarchy comprises determines whether it is 'shallow' or 'deep'; and the number of holons on any given level we shall call its 'span'" (A. Koestler).
8. Each successive level of evolution produces greater depth and less span.
9. Destroy any type of holon, and you will destroy all of the holons above it and none of the holons below it.
10. Holarchies coevolve.
11. The micro is in relational exchange with the macro at all levels of its depth.
12. Evolution has directionality:
a. Increasing complexity.
b. Increasing differentiation/integration.
c. Increasing organisation/structuration.
d. Increasing relative autonomy.
e. Increasing telos.
~ Ken Wilber, Sex Ecology Spirituality, 1995, p. 35-78.,

* WISDOM TROVE *

1:The highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences. ~ frank-herbert, @wisdomtrove

2:Ecology and spirituality are fundamentally connected, because deep ecological awareness, ultimately, is spiritual awareness. ~ fritjof-capra, @wisdomtrove

3:A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest. ~ ursula-k-le-guin, @wisdomtrove

4:Ecology is a dirty seven-letter word to many people. They are like heavy sleepers refusing to be aroused. "Leave me alone! It's not time to get up yet!" ~ frank-herbert, @wisdomtrove

5:Ecology is often confused with environmentalism, while in fact, environmentalism often leaves out the fact that people, too, can be a legitimate part of an ecosystem. ~ frank-herbert, @wisdomtrove

6:I give you the chameleon, whose ability to blend itself into the background tells you all you need to know about the roots of ecology and the foundations of a personal identity ~ frank-herbert, @wisdomtrove

7:Deep ecology does not see the world as a collection of isolated objects but rather as a network of phenomena that are fundamentally interconnected and interdependent. It recognizes the intrinsic value of all living beings and views humans—in the celebrated words attributed to Chief Seattle—as just one particular strand in the web of life. ~ fritjof-capra, @wisdomtrove

8:Capitalism’s grow-or-die imperative stands radically at odds with ecology’s imperative of interdependence and limit. The two imperatives can no longer coexist with each other; nor can any society founded on the myth that they can be reconciled hope to survive. Either we will establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or her status. ~ ursula-k-le-guin, @wisdomtrove

9:Shallow ecology is anthropocentric, or human-centred. It views humans as above or outside nature, as the source of all value, and ascribes only instrumental, or &

* NEWFULLDB 2.4M *

1:Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions. ~ Tony Kushner,

2:Relationships are the core message of ecology. ~ Frances Moore Lappe,

3:There can be no ecology without an adequate anthropology. ~ Anonymous,

4:Archeology and ecology can go hand in hand. ~ Carlos Salinas de Gortari,

5:When you pursue great flavor, you also pursue great ecology. ~ Dan Barber,

6:His mouth is full of ecology, his mind is full of fumes. ~ Wallace Stegner,

7:The highest function of ecology is understanding consequences. ~ Anonymous,

8:Ecology is boring for the same reason that destruction is fun. ~ Don DeLillo,

9:Our spiritual ecology simply does not permit private awakening. ~ Ervin Laszlo,

10:The highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences. ~ Frank Herbert,

11:the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences. ~ Frank Herbert,

12:Continuity is at the heart of conservatism: ecology serves that heart. ~ Garrett Hardin,

13:All I ask is that we compare human consciousness with spirochete ecology. ~ Lynn Margulis,

14:Ecology is the overall science of which economics is a minor speciality. ~ Garrett Hardin,

15:The word ecology is derived from the Greek oikos, the word for home. ~ Robin Wall Kimmerer,

16:The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else. ~ Barry Commoner,

17:Economists don't seem to have noticed that the economy sits entirely within the ecology. ~ Carl Safina,

18:Only an elaborate treatise in ecology could do justice to the subject of what went wrong, ~ James C Scott,

19:Trees stand at the heart of ecology, and they must come to stand at the heart of human politics. ~ Richard Powers,

20:Cognitive evolution is marked by many peaks of specialization. The ecology of each species is key. The ~ Frans de Waal,

21:Physics is the most fundamental, and least significant, of the sciences. ~ Ken Wilber, Sex Ecology Spirituality, p.93,

22:By ecology we understand the total science of the connections of the organism to the surrounding external world. ~ Ernst Haeckel,

23:The tragedy is that there is so much more incentive - money - to destroy the ecology than there is to preserve it. ~ Paul Watson,

24:With laissez-faire and price atomic, ecology's uneconomic, But with another kind of logic economy's unecologic. ~ Kenneth E Boulding,

25:I do see a lot of the hard end of ecology, and my feeling is that we live on a super-exciting planet but a super-fragile one. ~ Bear Grylls,

26:Ecology and spirituality are fundamentally connected, because deep ecological awareness, ultimately, is spiritual awareness. ~ Fritjof Capra,

27:Ecology, like genetics, is not about equilibrium states. It is about change, change and change. Nothing stays the same forever. ~ Matt Ridley,

28:That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics. ~ Aldo Leopold,

29:I think still it is very fine not to want children. There are far too many people in the world. It is my contribution to ecology. ~ Helen Mirren,

30:All zoology is really ecology. We cannot fully understand the lives of animals without understanding our microbes and our symbioses with them. ~ Ed Yong,

31:The free-range chickens and Priuses are great, but they alone aren’t adequate tools for creating a truly different society and ecology. ~ Rebecca Solnit,

32:The ecological principle of unity in diversity grades into a richly mediated social principle; hence my use of the term social ecology. ~ Murray Bookchin,

33:Economy without ecology means managing the human nature relationship without knowing the delicate balance between humankind and the natural world ~ Satish Kumar,

34:I've always liked trees. And then, growing up, I took an interest in ecology, hedges being destroyed, the landscape being turned into prairies. ~ Clive Anderson,

35:A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest. ~ Ursula K Le Guin,

36:Probably the most visible example of unintended consequences, is what happens every time humans try to change the natural ecology of a place. ~ Margaret J Wheatley,

37:I have hope that humanity will be cured of our collective ecological insanity and that we adapt to living within the boundaries of the laws of ecology. ~ Paul Watson,

38:If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well. ~ Susan Sontag,

39:Ecology is a dirty seven-letter word to many people. They are like heavy sleepers refusing to be aroused. "Leave me alone! It's not time to get up yet!" ~ Frank Herbert,

40:A balance between sustainable ecology and sustainable human life, on the one hand, and the unfettered drive for profit, on the other, is just an oxymoron. ~ David Suzuki,

41:Wildlife is something which man cannot construct. Once it is gone, it is gone forever. Man can rebuild a pyramid, but he can't rebuild ecology, or a giraffe. ~ Joy Adamson,

42:If a product is more expensive than another one and more sustainable in ecology, consumers will not buy it. We're in a very sharp competitive market. ~ Jean Claude Van Damme,

43:The dubious niche Case had carved for himself in the criminal ecology of Night City had been cut out with lies, scooped out a night at a time with betrayal. ~ William Gibson,

44:The site I landed on feels much more isolated than it really is; it's almost magical. Within its limited radius, there was a whole range of the local ecology. ~ Martin Puryear,

45:Gottlieb’s MKULTRA project would fund the offshoot of QKHILLTOP, the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology (later shortened to the Human Ecology Fund). ~ H P Albarelli,

46:In an ecology of love, people can relate in trust and face the future without fear. They do not need to play it safe. They can take uncertainty in their stride. ~ Jonathan Sacks,

47:The world's deteriorating ecology poses as great a danger to mankind today as did the nuclear standoff between the superpowers at the height of the Cold War. ~ Mikhail Gorbachev,

48:The two most important things to remember in business are: to be aware of the consequential impact on ecology, and a caring relationship between employer and employee. ~ Dalai Lama,

49:Ecology is often confused with environmentalism, while in fact, environmentalism often leaves out the fact that people, too, can be a legitimate part of an ecosystem. ~ Frank Herbert,

50:Fair rules and competition within a marketlike ecology of states promoted capital investment, innovation, and rational cooperation in a context of low transaction costs. ~ Josiah Ober,

51:I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our concept of the richness in human capacity. ~ Ken Robinson,

52:If an economy is to sustain progress, it must satisfy the basic principles of ecology. If it does not, it will decline and eventually collapse. There is no middle ground ~ Lester R Brown,

53:We need to renegotiate our contract with nature. Ecology is a unifying force that can diminish intolerance and expand our empathy towards others - both human and animal. ~ Gregory Colbert,

54:However, I think the major opposition to ecology has deeper roots than mere economics; ecology threatens widely held values so fundamental that they must be called religious. ~ Garrett Hardin,

55:If we don't preserve forest habitat for spotted owls, then soon we won't have trees to refresh the air we breathe. And we're realizing that this applies to social ecology, as well. ~ Sam Keen,

56:I give you the chameleon, whose ability to blend itself into the background tells you all you need to know about the roots of ecology and the foundations of a personal identity ~ Frank Herbert,

57:Given the War on Bacteria so culturally prominent in our time, the well-being of our microbial ecology requires regular replenishment and diversification now more than ever. ~ Sandor Ellix Katz,

58:Biologists often talk about the “ecology” of an organism: the tallest oak in the forest is the tallest not just because it grew from the hardiest acorn; it is the tallest also ~ Malcolm Gladwell,

59:The testimony of DMT, for me, is that there is a nearby dimension, teeming with intelligences, that from one of the more conservative perspectives seems like an ecology of souls. ~ Terence McKenna,

60:As a word, ecology has been so debased by recent political usage that many people employ it to identify anything good that happens far from cities and without human interference. ~ Stephen Jay Gould,

61:key competencies match a given organization's reality. Each company and each industry has its own emotional ecology, and the most adaptive traits for workers will differ accordingly. ~ Daniel Goleman,

62:The land of Feyland didn't seem to have a discernible ecology – instead, rushing waves and sunny beaches gave way in the space of moments to snowy mountainsides and harsh, jutting cliffs. ~ Kailin Gow,

63:...when food is shared in a fair way, with solidarity, when no one is deprived, every community can meet the needs of the poorest. Human ecology and environmental ecology walk together. ~ Pope Francis,

64:the Many returning to and embracing the One is Good, and is known as wisdom; the One returning to and embracing the Many is Goodness, and is known as compassion. ~ Ken Wilber, Sex Ecology Spirituality,

65:scenius.” Under this model, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals—artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers—who make up an “ecology of talent. ~ Austin Kleon,

66:There should be more attention paid to scientific research in the ecology area, and I think that such attention to proper environmental concerns would make the public feel much better about it. ~ Thomas Cech,

67:I have a certain pool of subject matter that I like to write about, things that interest me: politics, religion, ecology, and relationships between men and women. And that's usually what I focus on. ~ Don Henley,

68:Of course, since we don't see the Indian as a living figure - having turned the Indian into a kind of mascot for the ecology movement, a symbol of prehistory - we can't see the Indian among us. ~ Richard Rodriguez,

69:The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny. ~ Albert Ellis,

70:The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny. ~ Albert Ellis,

71:I had always been fascinated by the whole idea that Australia was this different ecology and that when rabbits and prickly pears and other things from Europe were introduced into Australia, they ran amok. ~ David Gerrold,

72:The greenhouse is driven by three things: economy, flavor, ecology. Where ecology is what's being grown in this micro-ecology that can simultaneously thrive and better the soil/rotation, not just the flavor. ~ Dan Barber,

73:Man aspires to govern nature, but the more one studies ecology, the
more absurd it seems to speak of any one feature of an organism, or of
an organism/environment field, as governing or ruling others. ~ Alan W Watts,

74:That's it on the maps; nature doesn't acknowledge frontiers. Neither can ecology... Where to begin to understand what we've only got a computerspeak label for, ecosystem? Where to decide it begins. ~ Nadine Gordimer,

75:Evolution is now understood to be the triumphant march out of chaos into order, connectedness, self-expression, and self-reflection that begins with the first moments following the big bang. ~ Terence McKenna, Ecology of Souls,

76:I like to think (it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace.
~ Richard Brautigan,

77:The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.
Albert Ellis ~ Albert Ellis,

78:We must set an example now and move environmentalism from being the philosophy of a passionate minority ... to a way of life that automatically integrates ecology into governmental policy and normal living standards. ~ Leonardo DiCaprio,

79:In my book Radical Reform I made it clear that we cannot talk about the environment or ecology if we don't also deal with the economy. There is a direct link between how we deal with the economy and how we deal with nature. ~ Tariq Ramadan,

80:You would have thought that our first priority would be to ask what the ecologists are finding out, because we have to live within the conditions and principles they define. Instead, we've elevated the economy above ecology. ~ David Suzuki,

81:The time has come to link ecology to economic and human development. When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all. What is happening to the rain forests of Madagascar and Brazil will affect us all. ~ E O Wilson,

82:The Yomeshta would say that man’s singularity is his divinity.’ ‘Lords of the Earth, yes. Other cults on other worlds have come to the same conclusion. They tend to be the cults of dynamic, aggressive, ecology-breaking cultures. ~ Ursula K Le Guin,

83:We are not scripting ourselves into some kind of machine future, we are designing the future that we want to have rather than allowing the blunders of our grandparents to dictate the kind of future we will have. ~ Terence McKenna, Ecology of Souls,

84:I hope that in its richness, as well as in its incompleteness, Gyn/Ecology will continue to be a Labrys enabling women to learn from our mistakes and our successes, and cast our Lives as far as we can go, Now, in the Be-Dazzling Nineties. ~ Mary Daly,

85:Ecology is the new theology. Big history is the new Genesis. Those who fail to understand that evidence is modern-day Scripture, and that the world we live in is an honorable world, betray God and humanity in the most egregious of ways. ~ Michael Dowd,

86:I think now, with our technology, our capacity to grow food, our ability to stop raping the Earth and destroying the ecology and killing off fellow creatures, we have a chance to bring a new harmony and a new path to human development. ~ Harry Belafonte,

87:When one of a culture's guiding credos is that "all men are created equal," any person who, say, becomes an expert on, say, nuclear weapons or, say, ecology, i.e., anyone who distinguishes himself through mental excellence, is a nuisance. ~ Sarah Vowell,

88:I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace. ~ Richard Brautigan,

89:In The Ecology of Freedom, my critique of what is called civilization and industrial society is massive, and my attack upon [Karl] Marx's commitment to it as a necessary stage in human progress and the domination of nature is very sharp. ~ Murray Bookchin,

90:A large-scale wind, water and solar energy system can reliably supply the world’s needs, significantly benefiting climate, air quality, water quality, ecology and energy security ... [T]he obstacles are primarily political, not technical. ~ Mark Z Jacobson,

91:... maintains that, along with Aurobindo's Life Divine, Heidegger's Being and Time, and Whitehead's Process and Reality, Wilber's Sex Ecology Spirituality [SES] is 'one of the four great books of this [twentieth] century'
~ Michael Murphy, Integral, 2004.,

92:An Ecology
We drop in the evening like dew
upon the ground and the living
feel it on their faces. Death
soft, moist everywhere upon us,
soon to cover the living
as they drop. This explains
the ocean and the sun.
~ David Ignatow,

93:Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been - what people needed protection from. Now nature tamed, endangered, mortal - needs to be protected from people. ~ Susan Sontag,

94:The way I think of it, economics and ecology occupy two intellectual silos, isolated from each other. Even when they do take each other into consideration, it's not uncommon for ecologists to spout absolute nonsense about economics, and vice versa. ~ Charles C Mann,

95:World trade depends on differences among countries, not similarities. Different countries are in different stages of development. It is appropriate for them to have different patterns, different policies for ecology, labor standards, and so forth. ~ Milton Friedman,

96:If there are favourable habitats and favorable forms of association for animalsand plants, as ecology demonstrates, why not for men? If each particular natural environment has has its own balance; is there not perhaps an equivalent of this in culture? ~ Lewis Mumford,

97:The sleeping style of each organism is exquisitely
adapted to the ecology of the animal. It is conceivable that animals who are too stupid to be quiet on their own initiative are, during periods of high risk, immobilized by the implacable arm of sleep. ~ Carl Sagan,

98:A particular cellular automaton, devised by the British mathematician John Conway in 1970 and known appropriately enough as The Game of Life, has become quite fashionable, and exhibits a remarkably rich and complex ecology of shapes that move and interact. ~ Paul Davies,

99:I was also struck by how little attention was paid to their accomplishments and aspirations; whom they cared for, loved, or hated; what motivated and engaged them, what kept them stuck, and what made them feel at peace—the ecology of their lives. ~ Bessel A van der Kolk,

100:The planting of [orchards] represents a reduction of a complex ecology into the monocultural grid of modern agriculture, and the transformation of a complex symbiosis with the land into the simpler piecework or agricultural labour for surplus and export. ~ Rebecca Solnit,

101:If anyone wants to save the planet, all they have to do is just stop eating meat. That's the single most important thing you could do. It's staggering when you think about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty. ~ Paul McCartney,

102:On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 9: 35 a.m., I am usually in a lecture hall at the university, expounding about botany and ecology— trying, in short, to explain to my students how Skywoman’s gardens, known by some as “global ecosystems,” function. ~ Robin Wall Kimmerer,

103:The call to wholeness is a call to a psycho-spiritual ecology, in which body, mind and spirit are held in relationship. Just as we have endangered the ecology of the world, and brought it to imbalance and crisis, so we can say the same of our internal relations. ~ David Tacey,

104:The answers to the human problems of ecology are to be found in economy. And the answers to the problems of economy are to be found in culture and character. To fail to see this is to go on dividing the world falsely between guilty producers and innocent consumers. ~ Wendell Berry,

105:It was in the work that she came closest to finding herself, by which we don’t mean gaining “self-knowledge” or understanding one’s “true nature” but rather how at some point you can see most plainly that this is what you do, this is how you fit in the wider ecology. ~ Chang rae Lee,

106:There are lots of wonderful cognitive adaptations out there that we don’t have or need. This is why ranking cognition on a single dimension is a pointless exercise. Cognitive evolution is marked by many peaks of specialization. The ecology of each species is key. The ~ Frans de Waal,

107:Above the podium stood a decorated board showing the agenda for the day. The first item of business was the world urban crisis, the second—the ecology crisis, the third—the air pollution crisis, the fourth—the energy crisis, the fifth—the food crisis. Then adjournment. ~ Stanis aw Lem,

108:Social justice has to do with issues such as poverty, inequality, war, racism, sexism, abortion, and lack of concern for ecology because what lies at the root at each of these is not so much someone's private sin but rather a huge, blind system that is inherently unfair. ~ Ronald Rolheiser,

109:Today more than ever, the traditional boundaries between politics, culture, technology, finance, national security and ecology are disappearing. You often cannot explain one without referring to the others, and you cannot explain the whole without reference to them all. ~ Thomas L Friedman,

110:Well I think on a simple ecological level that the diversity of this planet is important for our survival, that all of our different cultures, people are important to the health of the whole the same way that a species of animal should be saved and at a simple ecology level. ~ Richard Gere,

111:The issue is not just that land developers have unbalanced the ecology and made much of the geography ugly. What strikes so painfully is, at least in the perspective of our brief lives, they have destroyed the places where we became, and would like to continue to become, ourselves. ~ Robert Adams,

112:The human person is in danger: this is certain, the human person is in danger today, here is the urgency of human ecology! And it is a serious danger because the cause of the problem is not superficial but profound: it is not just a matter of economics, but of ethics and anthropology. ~ Pope Francis,

113:In the vocabulary of ecology there is a term for this type of human activity: “fishing down the food web.” With the apex predator out of the way, species that are lower on the pyramid explode in abundance and become the new human harvest. It’s a nearly universal phenomenon in the sea. ~ Trevor Corson,

114:We cannot wholly rely, as though it were Medieval times, [on the notion that] the only reality is what we see in front of us. There are germs. There are changes that are happening in our planet's ecology that are happening over such a long period of time that we cannot see the changes. ~ John Hodgman,

115:I think part of the reason that I have been successful, though, despite maybe not always fitting my message into the pre-packaged formulas, is there is this whole other media ecology out there of the Internet and Instagram and memes and talk shows and comedy, and I'm pretty good at that. ~ Barack Obama,

116:Like a shadow that does not permit us to jump over it, but moves with us to maintain its proper distance, pollution is nature's answer to culture. When we have learned to recycle pollution into potent information, we will have passed over completely into the new cultural ecology. ~ William Irwin Thompson,

117:There are a thousand ways of inhabiting it, but the aether, that in-between, is always what it is; and ghosts, spirits, the souls of lucid dreamers squeeze past each other in complex asomatic ecology. Who better to close in on Wati the bodiless subversive than bodiless forces of the law? ~ China Mi ville,

118:Life in its infinite forms exists as one organic unity. We are part of it: the part should feel reverence for the whole. That is the idea of vegetarianism. It simply means: don't destroy life. It simply means: life is God - avoid destroying it, otherwise you will be destroying the very ecology. ~ Rajneesh,

119:Politicians need a better understanding of global ecology. We need to be freed from our species-specific arrogance. No evidence exists that we are chosen, the unique species for which all the others were made. Nor are we the most important one because we are so numerous, powerful and dangerous. ~ Lynn Margulis,

120:Launched in 1954, QKHILLTOP’s central purpose was to carefully study Chinese Communist brainwashing techniques and to incorporate the best of these techniques into Project ARTICHOKE. Much of the QKHILLTOP research was conducted at the Cornell University Medical School Human Ecology Study Program. ~ H P Albarelli,

121:No closed ecology can be one-hundred-per-cent efficient; there is always waste, loss—some degradation of the environment and build-up of pollutants. It may take billions of years to poison and wear out a planet, but it will happen in the end. The oceans will dry up; the atmosphere will leak away. ~ Arthur C Clarke,

122:Woman as sinner The word ‘sin’ is derived from the Indo-European root ‘es’ meaning ‘to be.’ When I discovered this etymology, I intuitively understood that for a [person] trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, ‘to be’ in the fullest sense is ‘to sin’. Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology ~ Lucy H Pearce,

123:Chaga is significant in ethnomycology, forest ecology, and increasingly in pharmacognosy. Its long-term human use and cultural eastern European and Russian acceptance should awaken serious researchers to its potential as a reservoir of new medicines, and as a powerful preventive ally for protecting DNA. ~ Paul Stamets,

124:Vegetarianism preserves live, health, peace, the ecology, creates a more equitable distribution of resources, helps to feed the hungry, encourages nonviolence for the animal and human members of the planet, and is a powerful aid for the spiritual transformation of the body, emotions, mind, and spirit. ~ Gabriel Cousens,

125:I came to see that man finds meaning in his existence only through the active demonstration of his human self, a cosmos comprising the entire constellation of life's factors: culture, civilization, tradition, history, ideals, facts, physical conditions, one's mental state, the ecology, and so on. ~ Pramoedya Ananta Toer,

126:The great and rare mystics of the past (from Buddha to Christ, from al-Hallaj to Lady Tsogyal, from Hui-neng to Hildegard) were, in fact, ahead of their time, and are still ahead of ours. In other words, they most definitely are not figures of the past. They are figures of the future. ~ Ken Wilber, Sex Ecology Spirituality,

127:Reality, in its quantitative aspect, must be considered as a system of populations... The general study of the equilibria and dynamics of populations seems to have no name; but as it has probably reached its highest development in the biological study known as 'ecology,' this name may well be given to it. ~ Kenneth E Boulding,

128:Until we get this higher perspective we are going to continue to rattle the bars of our cage. The higher perspective depends on seeing things on a scale of thousands of years and potentially millions of light-years. A cosmic scale—the correct scale; the scale on which we are truly operating. ~ Terence McKenna, Ecology of Souls,

129:The territorial body has been polluted by roads, elevators, etc. Similarly, our animal body starts being polluted. Ecology no longer deals with water, flora, wildlife and air only. It deals with the body itself as well. It is comparable with an invasion: technology is invading our body because of miniaturisation. ~ Paul Virilio,

130:Historically, very few discoveries were made out of thin air. Most of the greatest insights depended upon the intellectual ecology in which the scientists lived. A certain critical mass of "new findings" occurred, and bright people all over the world found out about it, and several read the tea leaves the same way. ~ John Medina,

131:All around us, aspects of the modern world - diet, exercise, medicine, art, work, family, philosophy, economics, ecology, psychology - have begun a long circle back toward their former coherence. Whether they can arrive before the natural world is damaged beyond repair and madness destroys humanity, we cannot tell. ~ Paul Shepard,

132:Every year the literary press praises dozens if not hundreds of novels to the skies, asserting explicitly or implicitly that these books will probably not be suffering water damage in the basements of their authors' houses 20 years from now. But historically, anyway, that's not the way the novelistic ecology works. ~ Lev Grossman,

133:Contrary to popular belief, we do not face a choice between economy and ecology, It is often said that protecting the environment would constrain or even undermine economic growth. In fact, the opposite is true: unless we protect resources and the earth's natural capital, we shall not be able to sustain economic growth. ~ Kofi Annan,

134:Look at systematic patterns of cultural variation as they pertain to the best and worst of our behaviors. Explore how different types of brains produce different culture and different types of culture produce different brains. In other words, how culture and biology coevolve.3 See the role of ecology in shaping culture. ~ Robert M Sapolsky,

135:This is a crucial point, because it alerts us to the fact that, no matter how high-minded, idealistic, or altruistic a cause might appear—from ecology to cultural diversity to spirituality to world peace—the simple mouthing of intense support for that cause is not enough to determine why, in fact, that cause is being embraced. ~ Ken Wilber,

136:Hippies started the ecology movement. They combated racism. They liberated sexual stereotypes, encouraged change, individual pride, and self-confidence. They questioned robot materialism. In four years they managed to stop the Vietnam War. They got marijuana decriminalized in fourteen states during the Carter Administration. ~ Timothy Leary,

137:What man does for his own desires and comforts affects the complex total-of-life, the ecology, and his short-term gains can bring long-term disadvantages. The Machines taught us to set up a human society which would minimize that, but the near-disaster of the early Twenty-first Century has left mankind suspicious of innovations. ~ Isaac Asimov,

138:Restoration ecology is experimental science, a science of love and altruism. In its attempts to reverse the processes of ecosystem degradation it runs exactly counter to the market system, to land speculation, to the whole cultural attitude of regarding the Earth as commodity rather than community. It is a soft-souled science. ~ Stephanie Mills,

139:Wilson’s way of keeping in mind the dual aspects of the Furby’s nature seems to me a philosophical version of multitasking, so central to our twentieth-century attentional ecology. His attitude is pragmatic. If something that seems to have a self is before him, he deals with the aspect of self he finds most relevant to the context. ~ Sherry Turkle,

140:Humility is born in wildness. We are not protecting grizzlies from extinction; they are protecting us from the extinction of experience as we engage with a world beyond ourselves. The very presence of a grizzly returns us to an ecology of awe. We tremble at what appears to be a dream yet stands before us on two legs and roars. ~ Terry Tempest Williams,

141:If we don’t believe in the devil, sooner or later we won’t believe in God. Try as we might, and as awkward as it might be for our own peace of mind, we can’t cut Lucifer out of the ecology of salvation. The supernatural is real, and his existence is near the heart of this world’s confusion, fears, sufferings, and spiritual struggles. ~ Charles J Chaput,

142:The goal is to reveal things and their deeply interfused, radiating relations: fields in physics, food webs and energy flows in ecology, money exchanges in economics, ocean oxygen fluxes in earth system science, crop responses to sunlight in agronomy, and on to a near-infinity of human concerns. ~ Tyler Volk, Metapatterns - Across Space, Time, and Mind,

143:We are reaping the fruits of ten thousand, fifty thousand years of sowing of the fields of mind. And it is being dropped into our laps for us to create human-machine interfacing, control of genetic material, redefinition of social reality, re engineering of languages, revisioning of the planetary ecology, all these things fall upon us. ~ Terence McKenna,

144:Deep ecology does not see the world as a collection of isolated objects but rather as a network of phenomena that are fundamentally interconnected and interdependent. It recognizes the intrinsic value of all living beings and views humans—in the celebrated words attributed to Chief Seattle—as just one particular strand in the web of life. ~ Fritjof Capra,

145:I think our intelligence is a source of toxicity to nature and discomfort to ourselves unless our values are based on planetary values, are linked to the values of the rest of nature. Intelligence is not a license to trample. The proper role of intelligence in a planetary ecology is that of gardener, caregiver and maintainer of balance. ~ Terence McKenna,

146:The campaign against economic growth and overconsumption should have no place on the left. While its current austerity-ecology incarnation appears to many progressives as a fresh, new argument fit for the Anthropocene, it is in fact the descendent of a very old, dark and Malthusian set of ideas that the left historically did battle with. ~ Leigh Phillips,

147:There is more spirituality in reason's denial of God than there is in myth's affirmation of God, precisely because there is more depth... even an "atheist" acting from rational-universal compassion is more spiritual than a fundamentalist acting to convert the universe in the name of a mythic-membership god. ~ Ken Wilber, Sex Ecology Spirituality, p. 250,

148:In our own time, through integrative sciences like ecology and animal behavior and psychology we have re-understood what was forgotten during the reduction centuries of modern science. We've re-understood that the world is one thing, and it's a living thing. It's a thing with an intent and a spirit within it, and this is the key concept. ~ Terence McKenna,

149:Ecology's implications for capitalism are too momentous for the capitalist to contemplate. The plutocrats are more wedded to their wealth than to the Earth upon which they live, more concerned with the fate of their fortunes than with the fate of humanity. The present ecological crisis has been created by the few at the expense of the many. ~ Michael Parenti,

150:The climate change debate is basically not about science; it is about ideology. It is not about global temperature; it is about the concept of human society. It is not about nature or scientific ecology; it is about environmentalism, about one - recently born - dirigistic and collectivistic ideology, which goes against freedom and free markets. ~ Vaclav Klaus,

151:Exhaustive celebration of and in and through our suffering, which is neither distant nor sutured, is black study. That continually rewound and remade claim upon our monstrosity—our miracle, our showing, which is neither near nor far, as Spillers shows—is black feminism, the animaterial ecology of black and thoughtful stolen life as it steals away. ~ Fred Moten,

152:He shook his head at the bright world in the sky. He would have to get over the habit of regarding the heavens as a chart with a glittering pinhead for each planet, and so many thousand Thresholders, ex-Earth-born, bred for the ecology of alien worlds, pinned up there upon the black velvet backdrop for study and control. It wasn’t his problem any more. ~ C L Moore,

153:The generosity of the Earth allows us to feed all mankind; we know enough about ecology to keep the Earth a healthy place; there is enough room on the Earth, and there are enough materials, so that everybody can have adequate shelter; we are quite competent enough to produce sufficient supplies of necessities so that no one need live in misery. ~ Ernst F Schumacher,

154:When the study of the household (ecology) and the management of the household (economics) can be merged, and when ethics can be extended to include environmental as well as human values, then we can be optimistic about the future of humankind. Accordingly, bringing together these three ‘E's' is the ultimate holism and the great challenge for our future. ~ Eugene Odum,

155:If gold has been prized because it is the most inert element, changeless and incorruptible, water is prized for the opposite reason -- its fluidity, mobility, changeability that make it a necessity and a metaphor for life itself. To value gold over water is to value economy over ecology, that which can be locked up over that which connects all things. ~ Rebecca Solnit,

156:Biologists often talk about the “ecology” of an organism: the tallest oak in the forest is the tallest not just because it grew from the hardiest acorn; it is the tallest also because no other trees blocked its sunlight, the soil around it was deep and rich, no rabbit chewed through its bark as a sapling, and no lumberjack cut it down before it matured. ~ Malcolm Gladwell,

157:When climate change gets some attention in a 100-page document, the most important parts of which will have to do with the theology of stewardship and the theology of "human ecology," it's almost certainly going to be rapturously embraced, or bitterly opposed, as a "global-warming encyclical," despite the evidence that it's much more broadly gauged than that. ~ George Weigel,

158:In recent years it has become impossible to talk about man's relation to nature without referring to "ecology"...such leading scientists in this area as Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, Eugene Odum, Paul Ehrlich and others, have become our new delphic voices...so influential has their branch of science become that our time might well be called the "Age of Ecology". ~ Rachel Carson,

159:Unlike television, reading does not swallow the senses or dictate thought. Reading stimulates the ecology of the imagination. Can you remember the wonder you felt when first reading The Jungle Book or Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn? Kipling’s world within a world; Twain’s slow river, the feel of freedom and sand on the secret island, and in the depths of the cave? ~ Richard Louv,

160:And there is this fact of the twelve baskets: why twelve? What does it mean? Twelve is the number of the tribes of Israel, symbolically it represents all the people. And this tells us that when food is shared equally, with solidarity, nobody is devoid of the necessary, each community can meet the needs of the poorest. Human ecology and environmental ecology go hand in hand. ~ Pope Francis,

161:For the Amahuaca, the Koyukon, the Apache, and the diverse Aboriginal peoples of Australia - as for numerous other indigenous peoples - the coherence of human language is inseparable from the coherence of the surrounding ecology, from the expressive vitality of the more-than-human terrain. It is the animate earth that speaks; human speech is but a part of that vaster discourse. ~ David Abram,

162:We can get a sense of it, to be sure, though it will upgrade our ideas of "real" and "thing" to boot. Ecology shows us that all beings are connected. The ecological thought is the thinking of interconnectedness. The ecological thought is a thought about ecology, but it's also a thinking that is ecological. Thinking the ecological thought is part of an ecological project. The ~ Timothy Morton,

163:When we love a person, we love all that belongs to him; we extend to the children the affection we feel for the parent. Now every Soul is a daughter of the [Godhead]. How can this world be separated from the spiritual world? Those who despise what is so nearly akin to the spiritual world, prove that they know nothing of the spiritual world, except in name. ~ Ken Wilber, Sex Ecology Spirituality,

164:Capitalism’s grow-or-die imperative stands radically at odds with ecology’s imperative of interdependence and limit. The two imperatives can no longer coexist with each other; nor can any society founded on the myth that they can be reconciled hope to survive. Either we will establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or her status. ~ Ursula K Le Guin,

165:Starting from the very reasonable, but unfortunately revolutionary concept that social practices which threaten the continuation of life on Earth must be changed, we need a theory of revolutionary ecology that will encompass social and biological issues, class struggle, and a recognition of the role of global corporate capitalism in the oppression of peoples and the destruction of nature. ~ Judi Bari,

166:All nations are degrading and consuming their environment to a point beyond capacity. In the past 15 years in the U.S. we have added 1300 cities with populations over 100,000. When the environment is forced to file Chapter 11, the ecology collapses. Nations recover from war but not from a failed eco-system. The status of our environment is more threatening than all wars. It is forever. ~ Gaylord Nelson,

167:Clearing away the superficial structure of the reigns of emperors and the dates of battles, there was the deeper rhythm of history's ebb and flow not as the deeds of great men, but as the lives lived by ordinary men and women wading through the currents of the natural world around them: its geology, its seasons, its climate and ecology, the abundance and scarcity of the raw material for life. ~ Ken Liu,

168:Entheogens (or psychedelics, to be more historically correct) have now been recognized as the mother of our Western ecology and conservation movements, as well as the entire field of transpersonal psychology and our apparent desire to return to some firsthand spiritual and/or mystical understanding of G/d (rather than blindly accepting traditional religious dogma without an experiential basis. ~ James Oroc,

169:Considering that we live in an era of evolutionary everything---evolutionary biology, evolutionary medicine, evolutionary ecology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary economics, evolutionary computing---it was surprising how rarely people thought in evolutionary terms. It was a human blind spot. We look at the world around us as a snapshot when it was really a movie, constantly changing. ~ Michael Crichton,

170:Put simply, our inner ecology is a mess. Somehow we think that fixing outer conditions will make everything okay on the inside. But these past 150 years are proof that technology will only bring comfort and convenience to us, not well-being. We need to understand that unless we do the right things, the right things will not happen to us: this is true not just of the outside world, but also the inside. ~ Sadhguru,

171:Writing in Library Journal, Ben Vershbow of the Institute for the Future of Book envisioned a digital ecology in which "parts of books will reference parts of other books. Books will be woven toghether out of components in remote databases and servers." Kevin Kelly wrote in The New York times Magagzine: "In the the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages. ~ Jeff Jarvis,

172:The photographer is now charging real beasts, beleaguered and too rare to kill. Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been - what people needed protection from. Now nature - tamed, endangered, mortal - needs to be protected from people. When we are afraid, we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures. ~ Susan Sontag,

173:Cities should function more like ecosystems, or even metabolisms. When we build, we should be thinking about how we can integrate into the ecosystems around us, but without sacrificing all the niceties of civilization like good restaurants, concert halls, and high-speed Internet access. I'm saying that partly tongue-in-cheek, but I'm also deadly serious. The future of technology is sustainable ecology. ~ Annalee Newitz,

174:When human beings lose their connection to nature, to heaven and earth, then they do not know how to nurture their environment or how to rule their world - which is saying the same thing. Human beings destroy their ecology at the same time that they destroy each other. From that perspective, healing our society goes hand in hand with healing our personal, elemental connection with the phenomenal world. ~ Ch gyam Trungpa,

175:When human beings lose their connection to nature, to heaven and earth, then they do not know how to nurture their environmect or how to rule their world - which is saying the same thing. Human beings destroy their ecology at the same time that they destroy one another. From that perspective, healing our society goes hand in hand with healing our personal, elemental connection with the phenomenal world. ~ Chogyam Trungpa,

176:We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabulary of science we desire. We want a language of that different yield. A yield rich as the harvests of the earth, a yield that returns us to our own sacredness, to a self-love and resort that will carry out to others. ~ Linda Hogan,

177:Frank Ryan comments that The microbes that kill people, particularly those that kill huge numbers in sweeping epidemics, follow, in many ways, the same universal law of predator and prey. It is part of this complex gestalt that the balance is shaped by the behavior of the prey. If the prey moves—if it changes, if its numbers increase or decrease, if its ecology alters—the predator must move with it.29 ~ Stephen Harrod Buhner,

178:Einstein's secretary once said that if Einstein were born among the polar bears, he would still be Einstein. But unless polar bears were well versed in theoretical physics, that is not true. Einstein would not be Einstein. Which is not to take anything away from Einstein, or the polar bears, but simply to point out that he was part of a creative ecology, and trying to isolate him from it is not only silly but futile. ~ Eric Weiner,

179:When one’s world was impermanent, difficult endeavors, like procuring justice or balancing the ecology, need never be attempted. One need only make contributions to the ascendant hierarchy, cast one’s eyes heavenward with an awed and anticipatory expression, while continuing to behave as selfishly as one liked. When everything is going to go pop, one needn’t bother to provide for or preserve for the grandchildren. ~ Sheri S Tepper,

180:Zoological physiology is the doctrine of the functions or actions of animals. It regards animal bodies as machines impelled by various forces, and performing a certain amount of work which can be expressed in terms of the ordinary forces of nature. The final object of physiology is to deduce the facts of morphology on the one hand, and those of ecology on the other, from the laws of the molecular forces of matter. ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

181:Our human dependence on the living processes of the earth was largely forgotten with the growth of industrial civilization. Now we are being forced to remember that Gaia is greater than we are and that the human economy is embedded within the ecology of the biosphere. So, in what sense is Gaia alive? And what difference does it make if we think of her as a living organism, as opposed to an inanimate physical system? ~ Rupert Sheldrake,

182:The ecology of the valley was complex beyond our understanding, and it began to die as we went on manipulating it in ever more frantic ways. As it went dead and empty of the old life it became a place where no one wanted to live. In our right minds we want to seek out places that reek of complexity. Our drive to industrialize soured and undercut the intimacies that drew most people to country life in the first place. ~ William Kittredge,

183:A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States...De-development means bringing our economic system (especially patterns of consumption) into line with the realities of ecology and the global resource situation...Redistribution of wealth both within and among nations is absolutely essential, if a decent life is to be provided for every human being. ~ John Holdren,

184:The thing that bothers me the most is the recklessness and greed of the local ranchers, who run too many cattle back here, choking with waste the creek that runs through my property. There's certain times of day that the cowboys like to send them turds down the river. Them f**kers piss me off. if you gotta mess up the ecology of the world in order to raise a bunch of cows, well eat somethin else. I'm not a fan of the cowboys. ~ Merle Haggard,

185:As director Brad Bird sees it, every creative organization—be it an animation studio or a record label—is an ecosystem. “You need all the seasons,” he says. “You need storms. It’s like an ecology. To view lack of conflict as optimum is like saying a sunny day is optimum. A sunny day is when the sun wins out over the rain. There’s no conflict. You have a clear winner. But if every day is sunny and it doesn’t rain, things don’t grow. ~ Ed Catmull,

186:Ecology movements, futurism, feminism, urbanism, protest and disarmament, personal individuation cannot alone save the world from the catastrophe inherent in our very idea of the world. They require a cosmological vision that saves the phenomenon 'world' itself, a move in soul that goes beyond measures of expediency to the archetypal source of our world's continuing peril: the fateful neglect, the repression, of the anima mundi. ~ James Hillman,

187:From the Hive Manual. The relationship between ecology and evolution is extremely close, deeply implicated in organic changes among a given animal population, and profoundly sensitive to the density of numbers within a given habitat. Our adaptations aim to increase the population tolerance, to permit a human density ten to twelve times greater than is currently considered possible. Out of this, we will get our survival variations. ~ Frank Herbert,

188:Fuller predicted that humanity had reached a critical evolutionary point. If humans did not evolve from greed and selfishness to generosity and abundance, humans—as an experiment on earth—would end. He often referred to the rich and powerful who hoarded “god’s abundance” only for themselves as “blood clots.” He believed that if humans did not “evolve” we would not only kill ourselves, but also kill the ecology of planet earth. ~ Robert T Kiyosaki,

189:Missoula has a culture uniquely its own, however, thanks to the fusion of its gritty frontier heritage with the university’s myriad impacts. UM has nationally distinguished programs in biology and ecology and is perhaps even more renowned for its literary bona fides. The faculty of the university’s Creative Writing Program, founded in 1920, has included such influential authors as Richard Hugo, James Crumley, and William Kittredge. ~ Jon Krakauer,

190:Eco” comes from the Greek word oikos, meaning home. Ecology is the study of home, while economics is the management of home. Ecologists attempt to define the conditions and principles that govern life’s ability to flourish through time and change. Societies and our constructs, like economics, must adapt to those fundamentals defined by ecology. The challenge today is to put the “eco” back into economics and every aspect of our lives. ~ David Suzuki,

191:It’s civilized to let a society overbreed and destroy the ecology, raise interpersonal tensions to the point that violence is endemic, and stretch resources to the point that all too many children are ill-fed, uneducated, diseased, and without any hope of ever reaching their potential? Or would you prefer millions of abortions? That happened, you know, before the chaos. But it’s barbaric to require people to limit their offspring? ~ L E Modesitt Jr,

192:The thing the ecologically illiterate don't realise about an ecosystem is that it's a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche. A system has order, flowing from point to point. If something dams that flow, order collapses. The untrained might miss that collapse until it was too late. That's why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences. ~ Frank Herbert,

193:We don't even know what species are out there, for the most part, particularly when you get down to the microbes and very small invertebrates. They make up the mass of the organisms around us, including the soil we depend on, the soil of cornfields as well as hardwood forests. We haven't taken ecology to the point where we can even make a crude prediction of what's going to happen when we've reduced the living world down to a certain level. ~ E O Wilson,

194:He saw her as she had been when he met her at UCLA. He was going to fight diseases of the body and she, diseases of a society that seemed to her too shortsighted and indifferent to survive. She preached at him about old-fashioned, long-lost causes—human rights, the elderly, the ecology, throwaway children, corporate government, the vast rich-poor gap and the shrinking middle class. …She should have been born twenty or thirty years earlier. ~ Octavia E Butler,

195:[A]ll the categories of creatures act individually as special-case and may be linearly analyzed; retrospectively, it is discoverable that inadvertently they are all interaffecting one another synergetically as a spherical, interprecessionally regenerative, tensegrity spherical integrity. Geodesic spheres demonstrate the compressionally discontinuous--tensionally continuous integrity. Ecology is tensegrity geodesic spherical programming. ~ R Buckminster Fuller,

196:Early ecologists soon realised that, since humans are organisms, ecology should include the study of the relationship between humans and the rest of the biosphere. ... We don't often tend to think about the social sciences (history, economics and politics) as subcategories of ecology. But since people are organisms, it is apparent that we must first understand the principles of ecology if we are to make sense of the events in the human world. ~ Richard Heinberg,

197:I’ve always thought of God as the only first-rate artist. There’s so much that’s miraculous about us—the way three tiny bones in our ears can process sound waves, for instance; and around us his perfect hand has painted the greatest masterpiece, the ecology of nature with its balance and precision, the way it can juxtapose competing forces into something harmonious. Stop and look sometime at the beauty of a weeping willow—I can go on and on ~ James Calvin Schaap,

198:Capitalism’s grow-or-die imperative stands radically at odds with ecology’s imperative of interdependence and limit. The two imperatives can no longer coexist with each other; nor can any society founded on the myth that they can be reconciled hope to survive. Either we will establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or her status ["On the Future of the Left," Motherboard, February 4, 2015]. ~ Ursula K Le Guin,

199:I learned that [Trotskyism] were no different from the Stalinists, and they expelled me, which is the typical Marxist-Leninist way of dealing with dissenters. From that point on, I migrated by the 1950s into anarchism, increasingly emphasizing decentralization. Also, I made the all-important step of bridging my social philosophy with ecology. I did that in 1952 and went on to write a whole series of books developing an anarcho-ecological approach. ~ Murray Bookchin,

200:The thing the ecologically illiterate don’t realize about an ecosystem,” Kynes said, “is that it’s a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche. A system has order, a flowing from point to point. If something dams that flow, order collapses. The untrained might miss that collapse until it was too late. That’s why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences. ~ Frank Herbert,

201:A sense of being part of the great all-inclusive life prompts us to reflect on our own place and on how we ought to live. Guarding others' lives, the ecology and the earth is the same as protecting one's own life. By like token, wounding them is the same thing as wounding oneself. Consequently, it is the duty of each of us to participate as members of the life community in the evolution of the universe. We can do this by guarding earth's ecological system. ~ Daisaku Ikeda,

202:The thing the ecologically illiterate don’t realize about an ecosystem,” Kynes said, “is that it’s a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche. A system has order, a flowing from point to point. If something dams that flow, order collapses. The untrained might miss that collapse until it was too late. That’s why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.” Had ~ Frank Herbert,

203:One of the great sadnesses of modern life, because of our disenfranchisement and disillusionment with religion, is that we don't have access to these ideas. Yoga and meditation, for me, is a way of, in this secular world, accessing very very beautiful principles that would perhaps make us happier, at a time when people feel disillusioned with the economy, concerned about the ecology, worried with politicians, and don't trust what they're being told on television. ~ Russell Brand,

204:The popes have spoken of human ecology, closely linked to environmental ecology. We are living in a time of crisis: we see this in the environment, but above all we see this in mankind Man is not in charge today, money is in charge, money rules. God our Father did not give the task of caring for the earth to money, but to us, to men and women: we have this task! Instead, men and women are sacrificed to the idols of profit and consumption: it is the 'culture of waste.' ~ Pope Francis,

205:Why has East Asia provided textbook examples of collectivism?21 The key is how culture is shaped by the way people traditionally made a living, which in turn is shaped by ecology. And in East Asia it’s all about rice. Rice, which was domesticated there roughly ten thousand years ago, requires massive amounts of communal work. Not just backbreaking planting and harvesting, which are done in rotation because the entire village is needed to harvest each family’s rice. ~ Robert M Sapolsky,

206:In the Germany of the l920s, the Weimar Republic, both organismic biology and Gestalt psychology were part of a larger intellectual trend that saw itself as a protest movement against the increasing fragmentation and alienation of human nature. The entire Weimar culture was characterized by an antimechanistic outlook, a "hunger for wholeness". Organismic biology, Gestalt psychology, ecology, and, later on, general systems theory all grew out of this holistic zeitgeist. ~ Fritjof Capra,

207:Financial institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks-when one fails, they all fall. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur... I shiver at the thought. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb,

208:You have a poor outlook on humanity.” “Don’t you?” “I’ve lived longer than you have. I’ve earned the right to be bitter. You’re not old enough to be bitter.” “Oh, I’m bitter,” she assured him. “Bitter and outraged.” “Outraged by what?” “Pretty much everything except puppies and kittens. The economy, ecology, foreign policy, social policy, women’s rights, gay rights. The list goes on. There’s a lot to be outraged about, including the lack of outrage exhibited by the average American. ~ Tami Hoag,

209:Wilderness is a place where the wild potential is fully expressed, a diversity of living and nonliving beings flourishing according to their own sorts of order. In ecology we speak of "wild systems." When an ecosystem is fully functioning, all the members are present at the assembly. To speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness. Human beings came out of that wholeness, and to consider the possibility of reactivating membership in the Assembly of All Beings is in no way regressive. ~ Gary Snyder,

210:Between catching and cooking, each fish was measured, its length jotted in a little spiral-bound logbook that Willie had encouraged me to start: date, length of fish, lure or bait used, any special notes such as food found in the mouth or stomach. Though he had spent much of his life in cities and still lived in the Boston area, Willie observed the world with a naturalist’s eye. He knew that keeping track of details would help me understand the fish we hunted and the ecology of the place. ~ Tovar Cerulli,

211:My Prime Minister regards the economy as our highest priority and forgets that economics and ecology are derived from the same Greek word, oikos, meaning household or domain. Ecology is the study of home, while economics is its management. Ecologists try to define the conditions and principles that enable a species to survive and flourish. Yet in elevating the economy above those principles, we seem to think we are immune to the laws of nature. We have to put the ‘eco’ back into economics. ~ David Suzuki,

212:We shall have to stop thinking of technology as something invulnerable that is merely used by humans, and view it as part of a greater cybernetic ecology all around us. The key distinction in an environment is not between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’, but between semantic and dynamic: intention and behaviour. Biology has already drawn these lines, and through us, it will integrate the inanimate with the animate in information systems, until we no longer see a pertinent difference between the two. ~ Mark Burgess,

213:Page: Don't keep the world on tenterhooks, Tom! Out with it! What's the best thing we can do to ensure a long, happy, healthy future for mankind?
Grey: We can just about restore the balance of the ecology, the biosphere, and so on-in other words we can live within our means instead of on an unrepayable overdraft, as we've been doing for the past half century-if we exterminate the two hundred million most extravagant and wasteful of our species.
Page: Follow that if you can, Mr. President. ~ John Brunner,

214:That thing we call a place is the intersection of many changing forces passing through, whirling around, mixing, dissolving, and exploding in a fixed location. To write about a place is to acknowledge that phenomena often treated separately—ecology, democracy, culture, storytelling, urban design, individual life histories and collective endeavors—coexist. They coexist geographically, spatially, in place, and to understand a place is to engage with braided narratives and sue generous explorations. ~ Rebecca Solnit,

215:That thing we call a place is the intersection of many changing forces passing through, whirling around, mixing, dissolving, and exploding in a ixed location. To write about a place is to acknowledge that phenomena often treated separately - ecology, democracy, culture, storytelling, urban design, individual life histories and collective endeavors - coexist. They coexist geographically, spatially, in place, and to understand a place is to engage with braided narratives and sui generis explorations ~ Rebecca Solnit,

216:That thing we call a place is the intersection of many changing forces passing through, whirling around, mixing, dissolving, and exploding in a fixed location. To write about a place is to acknowledge that phenomena often treated separately - ecology, democracy, culture, storytelling, urban design, individual life histories and collective endeavors - coexist. They coexist geographically, spatially, in place, and to understand a place is to engage with braided narratives and sui generis explorations ~ Rebecca Solnit,

217:One of the anomalies of modern ecology is the creation of two groups, each of which seems barely aware of the existence of the other. The one studies the human community, almost as if it were a separate entity, and calls its findings sociology, economics and history. The other studies the plant and animal community and comfortably relegates the hodge-podge of politics to the liberal arts. The inevitable fusion of these two lines of thought will, perhaps, constitute the outstanding advance of this century. ~ Aldo Leopold,

218:The social view of humanity, namely that of social ecology, focuses primarily on the historic emergence of hierarchy and the need to eliminate hierarchical relationships. It emphasizes the just demands of the oppressed in a society that wantonly exploits human beings, and it calls for their freedom. It explores the possibility or a new technology and a new sensibility, including more organic forms of reason, that will harmonize our relationship with nature instead of opposing society to the natural world. ~ Murray Bookchin,

219:Our ancient sources of wisdom call on human beings to rise to their highest capacity and behave in extraordinarily open and generous ways to one another, under difficult circumstances to transcend differences and create understanding across all barriers of convention and fear. This wisdom is fragile as our environment is fragile, threatened by an overwhelming material culture. I believe in a spiritual ecology. In today’s world, Judaism and Tibetan Buddhism and other wisdom traditions are endangered species. ~ Rodger Kamenetz,

220:Nine million computers a month are being connected together. Now, people think that computers are office machines, but all of our technology is an excretion of the imagination. All of our technology is the condensation of ideological intention. And the fact that we now have turned our attention to information—the true stuff of reality—is a hopeful sign. For three centuries we’ve been obsessed with matter. We thought that was the true stuff of reality. Well, it turns out that’s just nonsense. ~ Terence McKenna, Ecology of Souls,

221:Like the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that in closed energy systems things tend to run down and get less orderly, the same seems to be true of closed relationships like marriages. My guess is that if you do nothing to make things get better in your marriage but do not do anything wrong, the marriage will still tend to get worse over time. To maintain a balanced emotional ecology you need to make an effort—think about your spouse during the day, think about how to make a good thing even better, and act. ~ John M Gottman,

222:. I was often surprised by the dispassionate way patients’ symptoms were discussed and by how much time was spent on trying to manage their suicidal thoughts and self-destructive behaviors, rather than on understanding the possible causes of their despair and helplessness. I was also struck by how little attention was paid to their accomplishments and aspirations; whom they cared for, loved, or hated; what motivated and engaged them, what kept them stuck, and what made them feel at peace—the ecology of their lives. ~ Bessel A van der Kolk,

223:When you analyze nature as an integrated system of chemical reactions—gene transfer, catalytic self-regulating activities, hypercycles of energy, nutrients, and metabolism—when you analyze nature from that point of view, you see that it seeks to maximize cooperation, connectedness. Mutual interdependability is the thing which holds the whole thing together. And the species that is most successful is not the species that can dominate all others, it’s the species that can make itself indispensable to all others. ~ Terence McKenna, Ecology of Souls,

224:If we want to survive on this planet, we are going to have to understand that we need to respect the laws of ecology:
Law No. 1: The strength of any ecosystem is based on biodiversity. The decreased level of biodiversity on the planet today is our most serious problem, even more serious than global warming.
Because…
Law No. 2 is interdependence: all species are interdependent; they need each other.
Law No. 3 is the law of finite resources: growth has a limit and there is a limit to the earth's carrying capacity. (p. 54) ~ Paul Watson,

225:Through luminous and erudite readings of the texts, Hasana Sharp shows us how profound and radical is Spinoza's conception of nature and his claim that humans always remain part of nature, acting solely according to the same rules. She demonstrates the political consequences of adopting this perspective through a provocative intervention in contemporary feminist theory, while along the way opening promising avenues for future work in a variety of other fields, such as animal studies and ecology. This is a challenging and important book. ~ Michael Hardt,

226:About the Author Delia Owens is the coauthor of three internationally bestselling nonfiction books about her life as a wildlife scientist in Africa—Cry of the Kalahari, The Eye of the Elephant, and Secrets of the Savanna. She has won the John Burroughs Award for Nature Writing and has been published in Nature, the African Journal of Ecology, and International Wildlife, among many other publications. She currently lives in Idaho, where she continues her support for the people and wildlife of Zambia. Where the Crawdads Sing is her first novel. ~ Delia Owens,

227:Okay, but what about microbial disease? “To declare war on ninety-nine percent of bacteria when less than one percent of them threaten our health makes no sense. Many of the bacteria we’re killing are our protectors.” In fact, the twentieth-century war on bacteria—with its profligate use of antibiotics, and routine sterilization of food—has undermined our health by wrecking the ecology of our gut. “For the first time in human history, it has become important to consciously replenish our microflora.” Hence the urgency of cultural revival. And ~ Michael Pollan,

228:On Earth Day I made a commitment to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by the year 2000. And I asked for a blueprint on how to achieve this goal. In concert with all other nations, we simply must halt global warming. It is a threat to our health, to our ecology, and to our economy. I know that the precise magnitude and patterns of climate change cannot be fully predicted. But global warming clearly is a growing, long-term threat with profound consequences. And make no mistake about it, it will take decades to reverse. ~ William J Clinton,

229:Shallow ecology is anthropocentric, or human-centred. It views humans as above or outside nature, as the source of all value, and ascribes only instrumental, or 'use', value to nature. Deep ecology does not separate humans - or anything else - from the natural environment. It does see the world not as a collection of isolated objects but as a network of phenomena that are fundamentally interconnected and interdependent. Deep ecology recognizes the intrinsic value of all human beings and views humans as just one particular strand in the web of life. ~ Fritjof Capra,

230:Only within the 20th Century has biological thought been focused on ecology, or the relation of the living creature to its environment. Awareness of ecological relationships is - or should be - the basis of modern conservation programs, for it is useless to attempt to preserve a living species unless the kind of land or water it requires is also preserved. So delicately interwoven are the relationships that when we disturb one thread of the community fabric we alter it all - perhaps almost imperceptibly, perhaps so drastically that destruction follows. ~ Rachel Carson,

231:I think that we're at an alarming moment in American political development and maybe in world political development, because the United States is so influential. If the trends of the last thirty or forty years are not halted and reversed - and those trends include increasingly inequality, a crumbling public life, a disintegrating public infrastructure, an exhausted ecology, and a huge war arsenal, and more and more war making - then I'm rather gloomy about the prospects for the American future and the harm that the United States could do to the world. ~ Frances Fox Piven,

232:These bursts of exploration—shopping trips, days off that are spent wandering around the city, weekend getaways—seem to be important in growing the local ecology of cities. If we looked at cities with greater than average rates of exploration in the credit card data, we found that in subsequent years they had a higher GDP, a larger population, and a greater variety of stores and restaurants. It makes sense that more exploration, which results in a greater number of interactions between current norms and new ideas, would be a driver of innovative behavior. ~ Alex Pentland,

233:But it did occur to me that there was perhaps a strain of humility that was more common then than now, that there was a moral ecology, stretching back centuries but less prominent now, encouraging people to be more skeptical of their desires, more aware of their own weaknesses, more intent on combatting the flaws in their own natures and turning weakness into strength. People in this tradition, I thought, are less likely to feel that every thought, feeling, and achievement should be immediately shared with the world at large. The popular culture seemed more ~ David Brooks,

234:It is so hard for an evolutionary biologist to write about extinction caused by human stupidity. Let me then float an unconventional plea, the inverse of the usual argument. The extinction of Partula is unfair to Partula. That is the conventional argument, and I do not challenge its primacy. But we need a humanistic ecology as well, both for the practical reason that people will always touch people more than snails do or can, and for the moral reason that humans are legitimately the measure of all ethical questions for these are our issues, not nature's. ~ Stephen Jay Gould,

235:Artificial, man-made mechanical and engineering contraptions with simple responses are complicated, but not “complex,” as they don’t have interdependencies. You push a button, say, a light switch, and get an exact response, with no possible ambiguity in the consequences, even in Russia. But with complex systems, interdependencies are severe. You need to think in terms of ecology: if you remove a specific animal you disrupt a food chain: its predators will starve and its prey will grow unchecked, causing complications and series of cascading side effects. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb,

236:There is behavioral ecology, which looks closely at the difference different ecologies make to behavior and other features of animals and humans. There's evolutionary individual psychology, there's evolutionary social psychology. In Darwin's terms, evolution couldn't exist without variation, and variation is important in behavioral genetics. And so on, and so on. There are so many instances in which evolution actually sharpens the precision, I think, with which one can find out the importance of differences. We're interested in differences as well as commonalities. ~ Brian Boyd,

237:In 1970 he was hailed on a Time magazine cover as the "Paul Revere of ecology." A year later he published The Closing Circle, an impassioned book that warned of the dangers of environmental pollution. In 1972 the Club of Rome, a loose association of scientists, technocrats, and politicians, produced The Limits to Growth. Employing computers to test economic models, the authors concluded that the world would self-destruct by the end of the century unless planners figured out ways to limit population and industrial growth and to expand supplies of food and energy. ~ James T Patterson,

238:In a paper evaluating the case for trophic cascades in the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, Peterson, Vucetich, and Douglas Smith, who trained on Isle Royale and now is a project leader for the Wolf Restoration Project at Yellowstone, argue that ecosystems are too complex to trace neat relationships, particularly in Yellowstone where grizzly bears, black bears, cougars, and wolves eat bison, deer, and elk. They also point out that, when you follow the threads of prey fluctuations, you often find at the source not wild-animal predators but human beings. ~ Sam Kean,

239:To understand this, we need to make a distinction between what is good for the individual and what is good for the society as a whole, between the psychology of personal autonomy and the ecology of personal autonomy. In a study focused on twenty developed Western nations and Japan, Richard Eckersley notes that the factors that seem best correlated with national differences in youth suicide rates involve cultural attitudes toward personal freedom and control. Those nations whose citizens value personal freedom and control the most tend to have the highest suicide rates. ~ Barry Schwartz,

240:I hope a start at getting some oil out of the enormous Alaska field isn't indefinitely mired in a bureaucratic morass as a result of our national concern for the ecology. This concern must not be so misguided, misdirected, misused that it serves to stop economic growth, to bankrupt companies, to stifle new development, new jobs, new horizons. In fighting new pollution and stemming present pollution, exciting, sometimes costly means and methods exist and others will evolve. But blanket legislative naysaying to expanding power and energy sources is stupid, self-defeating. ~ Malcolm Forbes,

241:Biologists often talk about the “ecology” of an organism: the tallest oak in the forest is the tallest not just because it grew from the hardiest acorn; it is the tallest also because no other trees blocked its sunlight, the soil around it was deep and rich, no rabbit chewed through its bark as a sapling, and no lumberjack cut it down before it matured. We all know that successful people come from hardy seeds. But do we know enough about the sunlight that warmed them, the soil in which they put down the roots, and the rabbits and lumberjacks they were lucky enough to avoid? ~ Malcolm Gladwell,

242:Social ecology is based on the conviction that nearly all of our present ecological problems originate in deep-seated social problems. It follows, from this view, that these ecological problems cannot be understood, let alone solved, without a careful understanding of our existing society and the irrationalities that dominate it. To make this point more concrete: economic, ethnic, cultural, and gender conflicts, among many others, lie at the core of the most serious ecological dislocations we face today—apart, to be sure, from those that are produced by natural catastrophes. ~ Murray Bookchin,

243:Industrial Society is not merely one containing 'industry,' large-scale productive units capable of supplying man's material needs in a way which can eliminate poverty: it is also a society in which knowledge plays a part wholly different from that which it played in earlier social forms, and which indeed possesses a quite different type of knowledge. Modern science is inconceivable outside an industrial society: but modern industrial society is equally inconceivable without modern science. Roughly, science is the mode of cognition of industrial society, and industry is the ecology of science. ~ Ernest Gellner,

244:If ecology was one of my measures of merit when it came to food, wouldn’t it make more sense to eat meat from a locally pastured beef cow than to buy salmon shipped in from Alaska or processed blocks of tofu made from soybeans grown a thousand miles away on industrially farmed land where diverse prairie habitat once thrived? If humaneness was another of my measures, wouldn’t it make more sense to shoot a deer who had lived a truly free life than to buy even the happiest, most local, backyard chicken? What meat could be more ethical than fifty or more pounds of venison resulting from a single, quick death? ~ Tovar Cerulli,

245:A daughter at home resting up from her husband--who is apparently a head of some sort, one of the Berkeley Street People, a People's Park maker, a drop-out and a cop-out whose aim is to remake the world closer to the heart's desire. I know him, I have seen him a hundred times--his mouth is full of ecology, his mind is full of fumes. He brings his dog to classes, or did when he was attending classes. He eats organically grown vegetables and lives in communes and admires American Indians and takes his pleasure out of tribal ceremonials and loves the Earth and all its natural products. He thinks you can turn the clock back. ~ Wallace Stegner,

246:Only within the 20th Century has biological thought been focused on ecology, or the relation of the living creature to its environment. Awareness of ecological relationships is — or should be — the basis of modern conservation programs, for it is useless to attempt to preserve a living species unless the kind of land or water it requires is also preserved. So delicately interwoven are the relationships that when we disturb one thread of the community fabric we alter it all — perhaps almost imperceptibly, perhaps so drastically that destruction follows."

Essay on the Biological Sciences, in: Good Reading (1958) ~ Rachel Carson,

247:The limits of production, consumption, and reproduction are fixed only by the system in which we find ourselves. Such limits are neither outside nor inside but both, knitted together by capitalism’s ecology of power, production, and nature. The individual footprint teaches us to think of consumption as determined by “lifestyle choices”3 rather than socially enforced logics. If you have been gentrified out of your old neighborhood and need to commute an hour to your job, your ecological footprint isn’t a lifestyle choice. It’s a choice in the same way that English peasants, once kicked off the land, were “free” to find wage work—or starve. ~ Raj Patel,

248:It doesn’t matter!’ snapped the Metatron. ‘The whole point of the creation of the Earth and Good and Evil—’ ‘I don’t see what’s so triffic about creating people as people and then gettin’ upset ’cos they act like people,’ said Adam severely. ‘Anyway, if you stopped tellin’ people it’s all sorted out after they’re dead, they might try sorting it all out while they’re alive. If I was in charge, I’d try makin’ people live a lot longer, like ole Methuselah. It’d be a lot more interestin’ and they might start thinkin’ about the sort of things they’re doing to all the enviroment and ecology, because they’ll still be around in a hundred years’ time. ~ Terry Pratchett,

249:I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammels and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace. ~ Richard Brautigan,

250:Our intelligence is a source of toxicity to nature and discomfort to ourselves—unless our values are based on planetary values, are linked to the values of the rest of nature. And that means we need to fit ourselves more appropriately into the scheme of things by limiting our numbers, by limiting our extraction of natural resources and toxification of the environment. We need to realize that there is a hegemony of life on the planet—not necessarily a hegemony of intelligence. Intelligence is not a license to trample. The proper role of intelligence in a planetary ecology is that of gardener, caregiver, and maintainer of balance. ~ Terence McKenna, Evolving Times,

251:To open deeply, as genuine spiritual life requires, we need tremendous courage and strength, a kind of warrior spirit. But the place for this warrior strength is in the heart. We need energy, commitment, and courage not to run from our life nor to cover it over with any philosophy—material or spiritual. We need a warrior’s heart that lets us face our lives directly, our pains and limitations, our joys and possibilities. This courage allows us to include every aspect of life in our spiritual practice: our bodies, our families, our society, politics, the earth’s ecology, art, education. Only then can spirituality be truly integrated into our lives. ~ Jack Kornfield,

252:Life is some kind of opportunity. It’s an opening between unbridgeable chasms of the unknown. And yet, out of chaos—for 20, 40, 70 years—we come into a domain of immense opportunity. It is a conundrum, it is a puzzle, it is something to be figured out. And I have the faith that, if we can figure this out, we can somehow not only make a better world for our children, but in some other profound way we can even undo what has been done. This would be the ultimate dream: that somehow we can discover an elegant escape that will leave us with the clear understanding that the problem was an illusion. It was an illusion. It was the last illusion. ~ Terence McKenna, Ecology of Souls,

253:But we were talking about economics?” John said. “But this is economics, don’t you see, this is our eco-economics! Everyone should make their living, so to speak, based on a calculation of their real contribution to the human ecology. Everyone can increase their ecological efficiency by efforts to reduce how many kilocalories they use—this is the old Southern argument against the energy consumption of the Northern industrial nations. There was a real ecologic basis to that objection, because no matter how much the industrial nations produced, in the larger equation they could not be as efficient as the South.” “They were predators on the South,” John said. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson,

254:Now, of course, having failed in every attempt to subdue the Glades by frontal attack, we are slowly killing it off by tapping the River of Grass. In the questionable name of progress, the state in its vast wisdom lets every two-bit developer divert the flow into drag-lined canals that give him 'waterfront' lots to sell. As far north as Corkscrew Swamp, virgin stands of ancient bald cypress are dying. All the area north of Copeland had been logged out, and will never come back. As the glades dry, the big fires come with increasing frequency. The ecology is changing with egret colonies dwindling, mullet getting scarce, mangrove dying of new diseases born of dryness. ~ John D MacDonald,

255:Since the lunchroom does no significant harm to the caverns' ecology, I'd like to believe that this is one of those lucky places where we don't have to choose between doing the right thing and enjoying a goof. I look up at the ceiling of the lunchroom, which is, of course, the ceiling of the cave. It looks so lunar I can't help but think of a certain astronaut. In 1971, Apollo 14's Alan Shepard hit golf balls on the moon. Gearing up to face the profundity of the universe, this man brought sporting goods with him into space. Who can blame him? That's what we Americans do when we find a place that's really special. We go there and act exactly like ourselves. And we are a bunch of fun-loving dopes. ~ Sarah Vowell,

256:Make no mistake. The greatest destroyer of ecology. The greatest source of waste, depletion and pollution. The greatest purveyor of violence, war, crime, poverty, animal abuse and inhumanity. The greatest generator of personal and social neurosis, mental disorders, depression, anxiety. Not to mention the greatest source of social paralysis, stopping us from moving into new methodologies for personal health, global sustainability and progress on this planet, is not some corrupt government or legislation.
Not some rogue corporation or banking cartel.
Not some flaw of human nature and not some secret cabal that controls the world.
It is the socioeconomic system itself at its very foundation. ~ Peter Joseph,

257:As director Brad Bird sees it, every creative organization—be it an animation studio or a record label—is an ecosystem. “You need all the seasons,” he says. “You need storms. It’s like an ecology. To view lack of conflict as optimum is like saying a sunny day is optimum. A sunny day is when the sun wins out over the rain. There’s no conflict. You have a clear winner. But if every day is sunny and it doesn’t rain, things don’t grow. And if it’s sunny all the time—if, in fact, we don’t ever even have night—all kinds of things don’t happen and the planet dries up. The key is to view conflict as essential, because that’s how we know the best ideas will be tested and survive. You know, it can’t only be sunlight. ~ Ed Catmull,

258:Maybe today some people see opposition between, on the one hand, a seemingly barren, old, institutional church, cut off from the world, looking after buildings, and worried about membership and attendance, and on the other hand, new communities, filled with life, enthusiasm, risk, openness and welcome, concerned about the big issues of the world - injustice, torture, peace, disarmament, ecology, a better distribution of wealth, the liberation of women, drug addiction, AIDS, people with handicaps, etc. . . . But we know that every community, with time, risks closing in on itself and becoming an empty institution governed by laws. The new communities of today can become the closed up, barren institutions of tomorrow. ~ Jean Vanier,

259:Create a Chocolate Factory There may be as many different types of playrooms as there are families, but every one of them should have the following design element: lots of choices. A place for drawing. A place for painting. Musical instruments. A wardrobe hanging with costumes. Blocks. Picture books. Tubes and gears. Anything where a child can be safely let loose, joyously free to explore whatever catches her fancy. Did you see the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory? If so, you may have been filled with wonder at the chocolate plant, complete with trees, lawns, and waterfalls—a totally explorable, nonlinear ecology. That’s what I mean. I am focusing on artistic pursuits because kids who are trained in the arts ~ John Medina,

260:We tend to operate along very short-term goals. It’s very hard for us to put in place a project that looks 40 or 50 years ahead. It was interesting—a couple of years ago there was an article in the Whole Earth Review about a chapel at Oxford: that the main beam of this chapel, which was an oak beam about so by so, was rotted through with worms and had to be replaced. And it was no problem because, 800 years ago, an English king planted an oak tree that was to be grown for the specific purpose of replacing this beam when it should need to be replaced. And so this 750-year-old oak tree was cut and the beam hewn and put into place. And it inspired them to plant another oak tree—which is not a bad idea! ~ Terence McKenna, Ecology of Souls,

261:Today's American food culture is a contested landscape in search of values, new direction, and its own indigenous sense of rightness and self-worth. It's a culture looking toward ecology, the regional flow of seasons, and opportunities for new ways to invigorate and color the American palate. Our new foodies are concerned with health, sustainability, environmental integrity, social justice, and the push-pull between global and local economies. Our food world is a charged scene of culinary inquiry continually in search of ancestors, historic precedent, and novel ways to explore tradition while surging forward. The chefs and culinarians of twenty-first-century America have become hungry for an origin story all our own. ~ Michael W Twitty,

262:A much studied example is the sea otter in California. The otter all but disappeared during the nineteenth century because of excessive hunting for its pelts. After federal regulators in 1911 forbade further hunting of this lovely creature, the otter made a dramatic comeback. Because it feeds on urchins, with the increase in otters the urchin population went down. With fewer urchins around, the number of kelps, a favorite food of urchins, increased dramatically. This increased the supply of food for fish and protected the coast from erosion. Therefore, protection of only one species, a hub, drastically altered both the economy and the ecology of the coastline. Indeed, finfish dominate in coastal fisheries once dedicated to shellfish. ~ Albert L szl Barab si,

263:The much wider notion of ecology, in contrast, includes all co-operative processes which take part in a self-organizing system which in turn is composed of biological self-organizing systems. The term “co-operative” is viewed here from the angle of the overall system and includes competition and predator-prey relationships although it would be difficult for the affected individuals to recognize the co-operative aspect. Both sociobiology and ecology are thus characterized by a minimum of two semantic levels, the level of the individual organisms on the one hand and the level of the macrosystem on the other. The number of semantic levels may, of course, be higher than two if the macrosystem differentiates further. ~ Erich Jantsch, The Self-Organizing Universe,

264:I think what we have to do is begin, then, to design this process. It is now moving fast enough that it is within the ken of each one of us to see progressive consolidation of change taking place in the world around us. We, as human beings, I think, are destined to be the design and control element in this thing; in this global Gaian process. Never mind that we have done it so badly up to now, because now—meaning the 20th century—is a completely different kind of epistemic world than any world that preceded it. And to the degree that we can shed the inherited behavior patterns of previous centuries, previous cultural styles, and actually take hold of the tools present at hand, we can guide and control this evolutionary process. ~ Terence McKenna, Ecology of Souls,

265:(...) my preoccupation in a larger sense is the optimum man. The question of establishing an internal ecology, where the optimum liver works with the optimum spleen and the optimum eyeball and so forth. Now, when you get to the mind—not the brain, but the optimum mind—then you have the whole inner space idea; my conviction is that there’s more room there than there is in outer space, in each individual human being. Love of course has a great deal to do with that, as a necessary coloration and adjunct to everything that we do—to love oneself, to love the parts of oneself, to love the interaction of the parts of oneself, and then the interaction of that whole organism with those of another person. Which is as good a definition of love as you can get, I think. ~ Theodore Sturgeon,

266:We are beginning to play with ideas of ecology, and although we immediately trivialize these into commerce or politics, there is at least an impulse still in the human breast to unify and thereby sanctify the total natural world, of which we are. ... There have been, and still are, in the world many different and even contrasting epistemologies which have been alike in stressing an ultimate unity, and, although this is less sure, which have also stressed the notion that ultimate unity is aesthetic. The uniformity of these views gives hope that perhaps the great authority of quantitative science may be insufficient to deny an ultimate unifying beauty.

I hold to the presupposition that our loss of the sense of aesthetic unity was, quite simply, an epistemological mistake. ~ Gregory Bateson,

267:Social Ecology:

The notion that man must dominate nature emerges directly from the domination of man by man… But it was not until organic community relation … dissolved into market relationships that the planet itself was reduced to a resource for exploitation. This centuries-long tendency finds its most exacerbating development in modern capitalism. Owing to its inherently competitive nature, bourgeois society not only pits humans against each other, it also pits the mass of humanity against the natural world. Just as men are converted into commodities, so every aspect of nature is converted into a commodity, a resource to be manufactured and merchandised wantonly. … The plundering of the human spirit by the market place is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capital. ~ Murray Bookchin,

268:It marshals a vast amount of scientific evidence, from physics to biology, and offers extensive arguments, all geared to objectively proving the holistic nature of the universe. It fails to see that if we take a bunch of egos with atomistic concepts and teach them that the universe is holistic, all we will actually get is a bunch of egos with holistic concepts. Precisely because this monological approach, with its unskillful interpretation of an otherwise genuine intuition, ignores or neglects the "I" and the "we" dimensions, it doesn't understand very well the exact nature of the inner transformations that are necessary in the first place in order to be able to find an identity that embraces the manifest All. Talk about the All as much as we want, nothing fundamentally changes. ~ Ken Wilber, Sex Ecology Spirituality,

269:But where was he going to go, exactly? It was not considered the thing to look panicked or even especially concerned about graduation, but everything about the world after Brakebills felt dangerously vague and under-thought to Quentin. What was he going to do? What exactly? Every ambition he'd ever had in his life had been realized the day he was admitted to Brakebills, and he was struggling to formulate a new one with any kind of practical specificity. This wasn't Fillory, where there was some magical war to be fought. There was no Watcherwoman to be rooted out, no great evil to be vanquished, and without that everything else seemed so mundane and penny-ante. No one would come right out and say it, but the worldwide magical ecology was suffering from a serious imbalance: too many magicians, not enough monsters. ~ Lev Grossman,

270:In short, conquest is in no sense a necessary sign of higher human development, though conquistadors have always thought otherwise. Any valid concept of organic development must use the primary terms of ecology-cooperation and symbiosis-as well as struggle and conflict, for even predators are part of a food chain, and do not 'conquer' their prey except to eat them. The idea of total conquest is an extrapolation from the existing power system: it indicates, not a desirable end, accomodation, but a pathological aberration, re-enforced by such rewards as this system bestows. As for the climactic notion that "the universe will be man's at last"-what is this but a paranoid fantasy, comparable to the claims of an asylum inmate who imagines that he is Emperor of the World? Such a claim is countless light-years away from reality. ~ Lewis Mumford,

271:we should not give up on the aesthetic dimension, which is, ultimately, the reverberation of sentience (pain). If, as Derrida observes, there are only different forms of narcissism rather than narcissism and something else, the true escape from narcissism would be a dive further into it, and an extension of it (Derrida's word) to include as many other beings as possible.12l By heightening the dilemma of a body and a material world haunted by mind(s), we care for the ecosystem, which in sum is interconnectedness. The ecological thought, the thinking of interconnectedness, has a dark side embodied not in a hippie aesthetic of life over death, or a sadistic sentimental Bambification of sentient beings, but in a "goth" assertion of the contingent and necessarily queer idea that we want to stay with a dying world: dark ecology. ~ Timothy Morton,

272:The pollution of the outward environment we are witnessing is only the mirror and the consequence
of the inward environment, to which we pay too little heed. I think that this is also the defect of the ecological movements. They crusade with an understandable and also legitimate passion against the pollution of the environment, whereas man's self-pollution of his soul continues to be treated as one of the rights of his freedom.

There is a discrepancy here. We want to eliminate the measurable pollution, but we don't consider the pollution of man's soul and his creaturely form.... he must acknowledge himself as a creature and realise that there must be a sort of inner purity to his creatureliness: spiritual ecology, if you will."

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Salt of the Earth, Ignatius Press, 1997, pp. 230-231 ~ Benedict XVI,

273:...we do not lend the hearth quite the importance that our ancestors did, Greek or otherwise. Yet, even for us, the word stands for something more than just a fireplace. We speak of 'hearth and home'. The word 'hearth' shares its ancestry with 'heart', just as the modern Greek for 'hearth' is kardia, which also means 'heart'. In Ancient Greece the wider concept of hearth and home was expressed by the oikos, which lives on for us today in economics and ecology. The Latin for hearth is focus - with speaks for itself. It is a strange and wonderful thing that out of the words for fireplace we have spun "cardiologist', 'deep focus' and 'eco-warrior'. The essential meaning of centrality that connects them also reveals the great significance of the hearth to the Greeks and Romans, and consequently the importance of Hestia, its presiding deity. ~ Stephen Fry,

274:What we have very, very suddenly—almost overnight—put in place is, number one: an entirely global system for collecting information about reality and ourselves. We never had this before. We didn’t even have it thirty years ago. Now you can find out what’s going on. You can go, if necessary, anywhere you need to go: within 72 hours you can be on the ground almost anywhere on Earth, checking out what’s going on. In the meantime, anthropological data, sociological data, climatological data, demographic data, political data, defense strategy data—all of this stuff is available. We now know at least what cards are in play. And this is the first time this has been so. We are now a global culture. You know, from the rainforests of the Amazon to the wastes of the Kalahari, from Nome to Santiago—it’s one family, one people. ~ Terence McKenna, Ecology of Souls,

275:This is what we can promise the future: a legacy of care. That we will be good stewards and not take too much or give back too little, that we will recognize wild nature for what it is, in all its magnificent and complex history - an unfathomable wealth that should be consciously saved, not ruthlessly spent. Privilege is what we inherit by our status as Homo sapiens living on this planet. This is the privilege of imagination. What we choose to do with our privilege as a species is up to each of us.

Humility is born in wildness. We are not protecting grizzlies from extinction; they are protecting us from the extinction of experience as we engage with a world beyond ourselves. The very presence of a grizzly returns us to an ecology of awe. We tremble at what appears to be a dream yet stands before us on two legs and roars. ~ Terry Tempest Williams,

276:As director Brad Bird sees it, every creative organization-be it an animation studio or a record label-is an ecosystem. 'You need all the seasons,' he says. 'You need storms. It's like an ecology. To view lack of conflict as optimum is like saying a sunny day is optimum. A sunny day is when the sun wins out over the rain. There's no conflict. You have a clear winner. But if every day is sunny and it doesn't rain, things don't grow. And if it's sunny all the time-if, in fact, we don't even have night-all kinds of things don't happen and the planet dries up. The key is to view conflict as essential, because that's how we know the best ideas will be tested and survive. You know, it can't only be sunlight.'
It is management's job to figure out how to help other see conflict as healthy-as a route to balance, which benefits us all in the long run. ~ Ed Catmull,

277:From a shamanic perspective, the psychic blockade that prevents otherwise intelligent adults from considering the future of our world - our obvious lack of future, if we continue on our present path - reveals an occult dimension. It is like a programming error written into the software designed for the modern mind, which has endless energy to spend on the trivial and treacly, sports statistic or shoe sale, but no time to spare for the torments of the Third World, for the mass extinction of species to perpetuate a way of life without a future, for the imminent exhaustion of fossil fuel reserves, or for the fine print of the Patriot Act. This psychic blockade is reinforced by a vast propaganda machine spewing out crude as well as sophisticated distractions, encouraging individuals to see themselves as alienated spectators of their culture, rather than active participants in a planetary ecology. ~ Daniel Pinchbeck,

278:Epidemiologic theory. As a phrase, it sounds at once dry and arcane.Yet, in reality, it is vital and engaging. Epidemiologic theory is about explaining the people’s health. It is about life and death. It is about biology and society. It is about ecology and the economy. It is about how the myriad activities and meanings of people’s lives—involving work, dignity, desire, love, play, confl ict, discrimination, and injustice—become literally incorporated into our bodies—that is, embodied—and manifest in our health status, individually and collectively. It is about why rates of disease and death change over time and vary geographically. It is about why different societies—and within societies, why different societal groups—have better or worse health than others. And it is about essential knowledge critical for improving the people’s health and minimizing inequitable burdens of disease, disability, and death ~ Anonymous,

279:Everyone talks about green cities now, but the concrete results in affluent cities mostly involve curbside composting and tackling solar panels onto rooftops while residents continue to drive, to stop, to eat organic pears flown in from Argentina, to be part of the big machine of consumption and climate change. The free-range chickens and Priuses are great, but they alone aren't adequate tools for creating a truly different society and ecology. The future, at least the sustainable one, isn't going to be invented by people who are happily surrendering selective bits and pieces of environmentally unsound privilege. It's going to be made by those who had all that taken away from them or never had it in the first place. {...} There is no moral reason why they should do and be better than the rest of us—but there is a practical one. They have to. Detroit is where change is most urgent and therefore most viable. ~ Rebecca Solnit,

280:Whole Earth Discipline carries on something that began in 1968, when I founded the Whole Earth Catalog. I stayed with the Catalog as editor and publisher until 1984, adding a magazine called CoEvolution Quarterly along the way. The Whole Earth publications were compendia of environmentalist tools and skills (along with much else) and explicitly purveyed a biological way of understanding. Peter Warshall wrote and reviewed about watersheds, soil, and ecology. Richard Nilsen and Rosemary Menninger covered organic farming and community gardens. J. Baldwin was an impeccable source on “appropriate technology”—solar, wind, insulation, bicycles. Lloyd Kahn wrote about handmade houses. We promoted bioregionalism, restoration, and “reinhabitation” of one’s natural environment. There’s now an insightful book about all that by Andrew Kirk—Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (2007). ~ Stewart Brand,

281:Ethics that focus on human interactions, morals that focus on humanity's relationship to a Creator, fall short of these things we've learned. They fail to encompass the big take-home message, so far, of a century and a half of biology and ecology: life is- more than anything else- a process; it creates, and depends on, relationships among energy, land, water, air, time and various living things. It's not just about human-to-human interaction; it's not just about spiritual interaction. It's about all interaction. We're bound with the rest of life in a network, a network including not just all living things but the energy and nonliving matter that flows through the living, making and keeping all of us alive as we make it alive. We can keep debating ideologies and sending entreaties toward heaven. But unless we embrace the fuller reality we're in- and reality's implications- we'll face big problems. ~ Carl Safina,

282:Too many land users and too many conservationists seem to have accepted the doctrine that the availability of goods is determined by the availability of cash, or credit, and by the market. In other words, they have accepted the idea always implicit in the arguments of the land-exploiting corporations: that there can be, and that there is, a safe disconnection between economy and ecology, between human domesticity and the wild world. Industrializing farmers have too readily assumed that the nature of their land could safely be subordinated to the capability of their technology, and that conservation could safely be left to conservationists. Conservationists have too readily assumed that the integrity of the natural world could be preserved mainly by preserving tracts of wilderness, and that the nature and nurture of the economic landscapes could safely be left to agribusiness, the timber industry, debt-ridden farmers and ranchers, and migrant laborers. To ~ Wendell Berry,

283:Roughly half of all American Catholic teens now lose their Catholic identity before they turn thirty. The reasons are varied. Today’s mass media, both in entertainment and in news, offer a steady diet of congenial, practical atheism, highlighting religious hypocrisy and cultivating consumer appetite. As one study noted, many young adults assume that “science and logic are how we ‘really’ know things about our world, and religious faith either violates or falls short of the standards of scientific knowledge.”8 Others have been shaped by theories trickling down from universities through high schools into a vulgarized, “simple-minded ideology presupposing the cultural construction of everything” and fostering an uncritical moral relativism.9 But the example of parents remains a key factor—often the key factor—in shaping young adult beliefs. The family is the main transmitter of religious convictions. Disrupting the family disrupts an entire cultural ecology. ~ Charles J Chaput,

284:Our world is falling apart quietly. Human civilization has reduced the plant, a four-million-year-old life form, into three things: food, medicine, and wood. In our relentless and ever-intensifying obsession with obtaining a higher volume, potency, and variety of these three things, we have devastated plant ecology to an extent that millions of years of natural disaster could not. Roads have grow like a manic fungus and the endless miles of ditches that bracket these roads serve as hasty graves for perhaps millions of plant species extinguished in the name of progress. Planet Earth is nearly a Dr. Seuss book made real: every year since 1990 we have created more than eight billion new stumps. If we continue to fell healthy trees at this rate, less then six hundred years from now, every tree on the planet will have been reduced to a stump. My job is about making sure there will be some evidence that someone cared about the great tragedy that unfolded during our age. ~ Hope Jahren,

285:The fundamental core of contemporary Darwinism, the theory of DNA-based reproduction and evolution, is now beyond dispute among scientists. It demonstrates its power every day, contributing crucially to the explanation of planet-sized facts of geology and meteorology, through middle-sized facts of ecology and agronomy, down to the latest microscopic facts of genetic engineering. It unifies all of biology and the history of our planet into a single grand story. Like Gulliver tied down in Lilliput, it is unbudgeable, not because of some one or two huge chains of argument that might–hope against hope–have weak links in them, but because it is securely tied by hundreds of thousands of threads of evidence anchoring it to virtually every other field of knowledge. New discoveries may conceivably lead to dramatic, even 'revolutionary' shifts in the Darwinian theory, but the hope that it will be 'refuted' by some shattering breakthrough is about as reasonable as the hope that we will return to a geocentric vision and discard Copernicus. ~ Daniel C Dennett,

286: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. But the oneness of this measure is far different from the singularity of the standard of productivity that we have been using; it is far more complex. One of its concerns, one of the inevitable natural measures, is productivity; but it is also concerned for the health of all the creatures belonging to a given place, from the creatures of the soil and water to the humans and other creatures of the land surface to the birds of the air. The use of nature as measure proposes an atonement between ourselves and our world, between economy and ecology, between the domestic and the wild. Or it proposes a conscious and careful recognition of the interdependence between ourselves and nature that in fact has always existed and, if we are to live, must always exist. Industrial ~ Wendell Berry,

287:Nor had he, as far as he knew, ever believed in anything. It had been embarrassing, because he quite wanted to believe in something, since he recognized that belief was the lifebelt that got most people through the choppy waters of Life. He'd have liked to believe in a supreme God, although he'd have preferred a half-hour's chat with Him before committing himself, to clear up one or two points. He'd sat in all sorts of churches, waiting for that single flash of blue light, and it hadn't come. And then he'd tried to become an official Atheist and hadn't got the rock-hard, self-satisfied strength of belief even for that. And every single political party had seemed to him equally dishonest. And he'd give up on ecology...Then he'd tried believe in the Universe, which seemed sound enough until he'd innocently started reading books with words like Chaos and Time and Quantum in the titles. He'd found that even the people whose job of work was, so to speak, the Universe, didn't really believe in it and were actually quite proud of not knowing what or even if it could theoretically exist. ~ Terry Pratchett,

288:Rububiyyah: Lordship, the quality of being a lord. A term derived from the Qur'anic
descriptions of Allah's lordship over creation. One might say the ecology of natural existence.
It is an essential element in Sufic cosmology and is a most sophisticated concept which
surpasses the crude specificity and mechanistic views of evolutionist biology. It is an energy
system of relationships in constant change and altering dynamics. It functions through the
different realms, the atomic, the mineral, the plant, and so on. It relates the levels of living
organisms from the uni-cellular up to man, and the interpenetrations of organism and
environment. It re-defines "event" from crude historicity to a picture of organism/event in a
unified field. It is the underlying concept which allows us to abandon the dead mind/body
split of the dying culture. It permits us to utilize and develop the energy concepts of
Islamic/Chinese medicine - which hold a common energy concept at base. Rububiyya permits
us to observe ONE PROCESS at work throughout every level of the creational realities. ~ Ibn Arabi,

289:Ownership shatters ecology. For the land to survive, for us to survive, it must cease to be property. It cannot continue to sustain us for much longer under the weight of such merciless use. We know this. We know the insatiable hunger for profit that drives that use and the dismpowerment that accommodates us. We don't yet know how to make it stop.

But where ecology meets culture there is another question. How do we hold in common not only the land, but all the fragile, tenacious rootedness of human beings to the ground of our histories, teh cultural residues of our daily work, the invidual and tribal longings for place? How do we abolish ownership of land and respect people's ties to it? How do we shift the weight of our times from the single-minded nationalist drive for a piece of territory and the increasingly barricaded self-interest of even the marginally privileged towards a rich and multilayered sense of collective heritage? I don't have the answer. But I know that only when we can hold each people's particular memories and connections with land as a common treasure can the knowledge of our place on it be restored. ~ Aurora Levins Morales,

290:
An Informal Integral Canon: Selected books on Integral Science, Philosophy and the Integral Transformation
Sri Aurobindo - The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo - The Synthesis of Yoga
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin - The Phenomenon of Man
Jean Gebser - The Ever-Present Origin
Edward Haskell - Full Circle - The Moral Force of Unified Science
Oliver L. Reiser - Cosmic Humanism and World Unity
Christopher Hills - Nuclear Evolution: Discovery of the Rainbow Body
The Mother - Mother's Agenda
Erich Jantsch - The Self-Organizing Universe - Scientific and Human Implications of the Emerging Paradigm of Evolution
T. R. Thulasiram - Arut Perum Jyothi and Deathless Body
Kees Zoeteman - Gaiasophy
Ken Wilber - Sex Ecology Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution
Don Edward Beck - Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership, and Change
Kundan Singh - The Evolution of Integral Yoga: Sri Aurobindo, Sri Ramakrishna, and Swami Vivekananda
Sean Esbjorn-Hargens - Integral Ecology: Uniting Multiple Perspectives on the Natural World
~ M Alan Kazlev, Kheper, #reading list,

291:It's a strange world. It seems that about fifteen billion years ago there was, precisely, absolute nothingness, and then within less than a nanosecond the material universe blew into existence.

Stranger still, the physical matter so produced was not merely a random and chaotic mess, but seemed to organize itself into ever more and complex and intricate forms. So complex were these forms that, many billions of years later, some of them found ways to reproduce themselves, and thus out of matter arose life.

Even stranger, these life forms were apparently not content to merely reproduce themselves, but instead began a long evolution that would eventually allow them to represent themselves, to produce sign and symbols and concepts, and thus out of life arose mind.

Whatever this process of evolution was, it seems to have been incredibly driven from matter to life to mind.

But stranger still, a mere few hundred years ago, on a small and indifferent planet around an insignificant star, evolution became conscious of itself.

And at precisely the same time, the very mechanisms that allowed evolution to become conscious of itself were simultaneously working to engineer its own extinction.

And that was the strangest of all. ~ Ken Wilber, Sex Ecology Spirituality, p. 3,

292:The decline of geography in academia is easy to understand: we live in an age of ever-increasing specialization, and geography is a generalist's discipline. Imagine the poor geographer trying to explain to someone at a campus cocktail party (or even to an unsympathetic adminitrator) exactly what it is he or she studies.
"Geography is Greek for 'writing about the earth.' We study the Earth."
"Right, like geologists."
"Well, yes, but we're interested in the whole world, not just the rocky bits. Geographers also study oceans, lakes, the water cycle..."
"So, it's like oceanography or hydrology."
"And the atmosphere."
"Meteorology, climatology..."
"It's broader than just physical geography. We're also interested in how humans relate to their planet."
"How is that different from ecology or environmental science?"
"Well, it encompasses them. Aspects of them. But we also study the social and economic and cultural and geopolitical sides of--"
"Sociology, economics, cultural studies, poli sci."
"Some geographers specialize in different world regions."
"Ah, right, we have Asian and African and Latin American studies programs here. But I didn't know they were part of the geography department."
"They're not."
(Long pause.)
"So, uh, what is it that do study then? ~ Ken Jennings,

293:If you believe in the lone genius myth, creativity is an antisocial act, performed by only a few great figures — mostly dead men with names like Mozart, Einstein, or Picasso. The rest of us are left to stand around and gawk in awe at their achievements. Under the "scenius" model, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals — artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers — who make up an “ecology of talent.” Being a valuable part of a scenius is not necessarily about how smart or talented you are, but about what you have to contribute—the ideas you share, the quality of the connections you make, and the conversations you start. If we forget about genius and think more about how we can nurture and contribute to a scenius, we can adjust our own expectations and the expectations of the worlds we want to accept us. We can stop asking what others can do for us, and start asking what we can do for others.

Think about what you want to learn, and make a commitment to learning it in front of others. Find a scenius, pay attention to what others are sharing, and then start taking note of what they’re not sharing. Be on the lookout for voids that you can fill with your own efforts, no matter how bad they are at first. . . . Share what you love, and the people who love the same things will find you. ~ Austin Kleon,

294:The Twenty Tenets of Holons
1. Reality as a whole is not composed of things, or processes, but of holons.
2. Holons display four fundamental capacities:
a. self-preservation,
b. self-adaptation,
c. self-transcendence.
d. self-dissolution.
3. Holons emerge.
4. Holons emerge holarchically.
5. Each emergent holon transcends but includes its predecessor.
6. The lower sets the possibilities of the higer; the higher sets the probabilities of the lower.
7. "The number of levels which a hierarchy comprises determines whether it is 'shallow' or 'deep'; and the number of holons on any given level we shall call its 'span'" (A. Koestler).
8. Each successive level of evolution produces greater depth and less span.
9. Destroy any type of holon, and you will destroy all of the holons above it and none of the holons below it.
10. Holarchies coevolve.
11. The micro is in relational exchange with the macro at all levels of its depth.
12. Evolution has directionality:
a. Increasing complexity.
b. Increasing differentiation/integration.
c. Increasing organisation/structuration.
d. Increasing relative autonomy.
e. Increasing telos.
~ Ken Wilber, Sex Ecology Spirituality, 1995, p. 35-78.,

295:Newton Pulsifer had never had a cause in his life. Nor had he, as far as he knew, ever believed in anything. It had been embarassing, because he quite wanted to believe in something, since he recognized that belief was the lifebelt that got most people through the choppy waters of Life. He'd have liked to believe in a supreme God, although he'd have preferred a half-hour's chat with Him before committing himself, to clear up one or two points. He'd sat in all sorts of churches, waiting for that single flash of blue light, and it hadn't come. And then he'd tried to become an official Atheist and hadn't got the rock-hard, self-satisfied strenght of belief even for that. And every single political party had seemed to him equally dishonest. And he'd given up on ecology when the ecology magazine he'd been subscribing to had shown its readers a plan of a self-suficient garden, and had drawn the ecological goat tethered within three feet of the ecological beehive. Newt had spent a lot of time at his grandmother's house in the country and thought he knew something about the habits of both goats and bees, and concluded therefore that the magazine was run by a bunch of bib-overalled maniacs. Besides, it used the word 'community' too often; Newton had always suspected that people who regularly used the word 'community' were using it in a very specific sense that excluded him and everyone he knew. ~ Terry Pratchett,

296:Unlike human laws (and the Malthusian approach), the natural laws of ecology do not discriminate on the basis of race, status or bank account balance. Simply put, there are not enough resources on the planet to feed a human population that is growing and consuming like we are. We are killing the coral reefs, the forests, the wetlands and the oceans. And we are violating the third law of ecology: "There is a limit to population growth because there is a limit to the planet's carrying capacity." We are literally stealing the carrying capacity that could support other species, and that is a violation of the first law of ecology: "The strength of an ecosystem depends on the diversity of the species that make up that ecosystem."
Decreased biodiversity has an impact on everything else; it's the second law of ecology, the law of interdependence. In other words, the increase in the human population is contributing to a decrease in the carrying capacity, and that has an impact on our interactions with other species. It reduces our chance of survival even further and makes a future for us on this earth unlikely. The human population must stabilize itself and if we don't do it voluntarily, nature will look after it for us. Were that to happen, our numbers would be reduced in a very painful manner over which we would have no control. I am not religious, but I think that the four horsemen of the Apocalypse - famines, epidemics, wars and civil strife - will reduce the human population and [bring about] the loos of planetary carrying capacity. (p. 118-119) ~ Paul Watson,

297:We might be excused our ignorance in this case, because ocean-atmosphere systems are, after all, almost inconceivably complex. Less easy to excuse is our astounding lack of knowledge of much more visible features of our planet’s natural resources and ecology—features that have a direct impact on our well-being. For instance, we know surprisingly little about the state of the planet’s soils. While we have good information for some areas, like the Great Plains of the United States, soil data are sketchy for vast tracts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where billions of people depend directly on agriculture for survival. So we can’t accurately judge how badly we’ve degraded these soils through overuse and poor husbandry, though we do have patchy evidence that the damage is severe and getting worse in many places.18 Similarly, despite extensive satellite photography, our estimates of the rate and extent of tropical deforestation are rudimentary. We know even less about the natural ecology and species diversity inside these forests, where biologists presume most animal and plant species live. As a result, credible figures on the number of Earth’s species range from 5 to 30 million.19 And when it comes to broader questions—questions of how all these components of the planet’s ecology fit together; how they interact to produce Earth’s grand cycles of energy, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur; and how we’re perturbing these components and cycles—we find a deep and pervasive lack of knowledge, with unknown unknowns everywhere. Our ignorance, for all practical purposes, knows no bounds. ~ Thomas Homer Dixon,

298:Why should people in one part of the globe have developed collectivist cultures, while others went individualist? The United States is the individualism poster child for at least two reasons. First there's immigration. Currently, 12 percent of Americans are immigrants, another 12 percent are children of immigrants, and everyone else except for the 0.9 percent pure Native Americans descend from people who emigrated within the last five hundred years. And who were the immigrants? Those in the settled world who were cranks, malcontents, restless, heretical, black sheep, hyperactive, hypomanic, misanthropic, itchy, unconventional, yearning to be rich, yearning to be out of their damn boring repressive little hamlet, yearning. Couple that with the second reason - for the majority of its colonial and independent history, America has had a moving frontier luring those whose extreme prickly optimism made merely booking passage to the New World insufficiently novel - and you've got America the individualistic.
Why has East Asia provided textbook examples of collectivism? The key is how culture is shaped by the way people traditionally made a living, which in turn is shaped by ecology. And in East Asia it's all about rice. Rice, which was domesticated there roughly ten thousand years ago, requires massive amounts of communal work. Not just backbreaking planting and harvesting, which are done in rotation because the entire village is needed to harvest each family's rice. The United States was not without labor-intensive agriculture historically. But rather than solving that with collectivism, it solved it withe slavery. ~ Robert M Sapolsky,

299:The earlier Aryan invaders of the Gangetic Plain presided over feasts of cattle, horses, goats, buffalo, and sheep. By later Vedic and early Hindu times, during the first millenium B.C., the feasts came to be managed by the priestly caste of Brahmans, who erected rituals of sacrifice around the killing of animals and distributed the meat in the name of the Aryan chiefs and war lords. After 600 B.C., when populations grew denser and domestic animals became proportionately scarcer, the eating of meat was progressively restricted until it became a monopoly of the Brahmans and their sponsors. Ordinary people struggled to conserve enough livestock to meet their own desperate requirements for milk, dung used as fuel, and transport. During this period of crisis, reformist religions arose, most prominently Buddhism and Jainism, that attempted to abolish castes and hereditary priesthoods and to outlaw the killing of animals. The masses embraced the new sects, and in the end their powerful support reclassified the cow into a sacred animal. So it appears that some of the most baffling of religious practices in history might have an ancestry passing in a straight line back to the ancient carnivorous habits of humankind. Cultural anthropologists like to stress that the evolution of religion proceeds down multiple, branching pathways. But these pathways are not infinite in number; they may not even be very numerous. It is even possible that with a more secure knowledge of human nature and ecology, the pathways can be enumerated and the directions of religious evolution in individual cultures explained with a high level of confidence. ~ Edward O Wilson,

300:The Linux world behaves in many respects like a free market or an ecology, a collection of selfish agents attempting to maximize utility which in the process produces a self-correcting spontaneous order more elaborate and efficient than any amount of central planning could have achieved. Here, then, is the place to seek the “principle of understanding”. The “utility function” Linux hackers are maximizing is not classically economic, but is the intangible of their own ego satisfaction and reputation among other hackers. (One may call their motivation “altruistic”, but this ignores the fact that altruism is itself a form of ego satisfaction for the altruist). Voluntary cultures that work this way are not actually uncommon; one other in which I have long participated is science fiction fandom, which unlike hackerdom has long explicitly recognized “egoboo” (ego-boosting, or the enhancement of one’s reputation among other fans) as the basic drive behind volunteer activity. Linus, by successfully positioning himself as the gatekeeper of a project in which the development is mostly done by others, and nurturing interest in the project until it became self-sustaining, has shown an acute grasp of Kropotkin’s “principle of shared understanding”. This quasi-economic view of the Linux world enables us to see how that understanding is applied. We may view Linus’s method as a way to create an efficient market in “egoboo” — to connect the selfishness of individual hackers as firmly as possible to difficult ends that can only be achieved by sustained cooperation. With the fetchmail project I have shown (albeit on a smaller scale) that his methods can be duplicated with good results. Perhaps I have even done it a bit more consciously and systematically than he. ~ Eric S Raymond,

301:What I am fighting is the slick "Marxist" or "anarchist" opportunism, which sees aligning with the white settler majority and reform politics as the absolute necessity.
Malcolm X and Women's Liberation, ACT-UP and Wounded Knee II, Anti-Vietnam War draft card burning and radical ecology, were all shocking to the majority of North Americans. Radical threats to "the American Way of Life" – and loudly condemned not only by the majority but more specifically by the white working class – these political offensives by the few turned everything upside down. Because in the metropolis, radical and democratic change can only come against the wishes of the bribed majority. That may be tough to swallow for white folks, but reality is just reality.
This obsession with needing a social majority has nothing to do with being "practical". What it has to do with is bourgeois and defeatist thinking. This is like the left thinking that could not build a practical anti-fascist movement in Weimar Republic Germany during the 1920s and 1930s, although millions hated Nazism and wanted to do something, because that German left was too preoccupied with fantasies of either seizing or getting elected into state power for itself.
That left was too lost in delusions of success almost within their hands, delusions of maneuvering together a majority, to bother even really understanding fascism coming up fast in their rear view mirror. The urgent need was to organize a working minority to counter fascism in a much more radical way. Not by trying to defend liberal bourgeois rule. All the real things that had to be done by scattered German anti-fascists later after the Nazis were put into power – such as to survive politically, to significantly sabotage the war effort, to rescue Jews and Romany and gays, to build an underground against the madness of the Third Reich – all these things were attempted bravely but largely unsuccessfully, because they had to be done too late from scratch. ~ J Sakai,

302:It is very easy to grow tired at collecting; the period of a low tide is about all men can endure. At first the rocks are bright and every moving animal makes his mark on the attention. The picture is wide and colored and beautiful. But after an hour and a half the attention centers weary, the color fades, and the field is likely to narrow to an individual animal. Here one may observe his own world narrowed down until interest and, with it, observation, flicker and go out. And what if with age this weariness becomes permanent and observation dim out and not recover? Can this be what happens to so many men of science? Enthusiasm, interest, sharpness, dulled with a weariness until finally they retire into easy didacticism? With this weariness, this stultification of attention centers, perhaps there comes the pained and sad memory of what the old excitement was like, and regret might turn to envy of the men who still have it. Then out of the shell of didacticism, such a used-up man might attack the unwearied, and he would have in his hands proper weapons of attack. It does seem certain that to a wearied man an error in a mass of correct data wipes out all the correctness and is a focus for attack; whereas the unwearied man, in his energy and receptivity, might consider the little dross of error a by-product of his effort. These two may balance and produce a purer thing than either in the end. These two may be the stresses which hold up the structure, but it is a sad thing to see the interest in interested men thin out and weaken and die. We have known so many professors who once carried their listeners high on their single enthusiasm, and have seen these same men finally settle back comfortably into lectures prepared years before and never vary them again. Perhaps this is the same narrowing we observe in relation to ourselves and the tide pool—a man looking at reality brings his own limitations to the world. If he has strength and energy of mind the tide pool stretches both ways, digs back to electrons and leaps space into the universe and fights out of the moment into non-conceptual time. Then ecology has a synonym which is ALL. ~ John Steinbeck,

303:What finally turned me back toward the older traditions of my own [Chickasaw] and other Native peoples was the inhumanity of the Western world, the places--both inside and out--where the culture's knowledge and language don't go, and the despair, even desperation, it has spawned. We live, I see now, by different stories, the Western mind and the indigenous. In the older, more mature cultures where people still live within the kinship circles of animals and human beings there is a connection with animals, not only as food, but as 'powers,' a word which can be taken to mean states of being, gifts, or capabilities.

I've found, too, that the ancient intellectual traditions are not merely about belief, as some would say. Belief is not a strong enough word. They are more than that: They are part of lived experience, the on-going experience of people rooted in centuries-old knowledge that is held deep and strong, knowledge about the natural laws of Earth, from the beginning of creation, and the magnificent terrestrial intelligence still at work, an intelligence now newly called ecology by the Western science that tells us what our oldest tribal stories maintain--the human animal is a relatively new creation here; animal and plant presences were here before us; and we are truly the younger sisters and brothers of the other animal species, not quite as well developed as we thought we were. It is through our relationships with animals and plants that we maintain a way of living, a cultural ethics shaped from an ancient understanding of the world, and this is remembered in stories that are the deepest reflections of our shared lives on Earth.

That we held, and still hold, treaties with the animals and plant species is a known part of tribal culture. The relationship between human people and animals is still alive and resonant in the world, the ancient tellings carried on by a constellation of stories, songs, and ceremonies, all shaped by lived knowledge of the world and its many interwoven, unending relationships. These stories and ceremonies keep open the bridge between one kind of intelligence and another, one species and another.

(from her essay "First People") ~ Linda Hogan,

304:No settled family or community has ever called its home place an “environment.” None has ever called its feeling for its home place “biocentric” or “anthropocentric.” None has ever thought of its connection to its home place as “ecological,” deep or shallow. The concepts and insights of the ecologists are of great usefulness in our predicament, and we can hardly escape the need to speak of “ecology” and “ecosystems.” But the terms themselves are culturally sterile. They come from the juiceless, abstract intellectuality of the universities which was invented to disconnect, displace, and disembody the mind. The real names of the environment are the names of rivers and river valleys; creeks, ridges, and mountains; towns and cities; lakes, woodlands, lanes roads, creatures, and people.

And the real name of our connection to this everywhere different and differently named earth is “work.” We are connected by work even to the places where we don’t work, for all places are connected; it is clear by now that we cannot exempt one place from our ruin of another. The name of our proper connection to the earth is “good work,” for good work involves much giving of honor. It honors the source of its materials; it honors the place where it is done; it honors the art by which it is done; it honors the thing that it makes and the user of the made thing. Good work is always modestly scaled, for it cannot ignore either the nature of individual places or the differences between places, and it always involves a sort of religious humility, for not everything is known. Good work can be defined only in particularity, for it must be defined a little differently for every one of the places and every one of the workers on the earth.

The name of our present society’s connection to the earth is “bad work” – work that is only generally and crudely defined, that enacts a dependence that is ill understood, that enacts no affection and gives no honor. Every one of us is to some extent guilty of this bad work. This guilt does not mean that we must indulge in a lot of breast-beating and confession; it means only that there is much good work to be done by every one of us and that we must begin to do it. ~ Wendell Berry,

305:Newton Pulsifer had never had a cause in his life. Nor had he, as far as he knew, ever believed in anything. It had been embarrassing, because he quite wanted to believe in something, since he recognized that belief was the lifebelt that got most people through the choppy waters of Life. He’d have liked to believe in a supreme God, although he’d have preferred a half-hour’s chat with Him before committing himself, to clear up one or two points. He’d sat in all sorts of churches, waiting for that single flash of blue light, and it hadn’t come. And then he’d tried to become an official Atheist and hadn’t got the rock-hard, self-satisfied strength of belief even for that. And every single political party had seemed to him equally dishonest. And he’d given up on ecology when the ecology magazine he’d been subscribing to had shown its readers a plan of a self-sufficient garden, and had drawn the ecological goat tethered within three feet of the ecological beehive. Newt had spent a lot of time at his grandmother’s house in the country and thought he knew something about the habits of both goats and bees, and concluded therefore that the magazine was run by a bunch of bib-overalled maniacs. Besides, it used the word “community” too often; Newt had always suspected that people who regularly used the word “community” were using it in a very specific sense that excluded him and everyone he knew. Then he’d tried believing in the Universe, which seemed sound enough until he’d innocently started reading new books with words like Chaos and Time and Quantum in the titles. He’d found that even the people whose job of work was, so to speak, the Universe, didn’t really believe in it and were actually quite proud of not knowing what it really was or even if it could theoretically exist. To Newt’s straightforward mind this was intolerable. Newt had not believed in the Cub Scouts and then, when he was old enough, not in the Scouts either. He was prepared to believe, though, that the job of wages clerk at United Holdings [Holdings] PLC, was possibly the most boring in the world. This is how Newton Pulsifer looked as a man: if he went into a phone booth and changed, he might manage to come out looking like Clark Kent. ~ Terry Pratchett,

306:Trees stand at the heart of ecology, and they must come to stand at the heart of human politics. Tagore said, Trees are the earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening heaven. But people—oh, my word—people! People could be the heaven that the Earth is trying to speak to. “If we could see green, we’d see a thing that keeps getting more interesting the closer we get. If we could see what green was doing, we’d never be lonely or bored. If we could understand green, we’d learn how to grow all the food we need in layers three deep, on a third of the ground we need right now, with plants that protected one another from pests and stress. If we knew what green wanted, we wouldn’t have to choose between the Earth’s interests and ours. They’d be the same!” One more click takes her to the next slide, a giant fluted trunk covered in red bark that ripples like muscle. “To see green is to grasp the Earth’s intentions. So consider this one. This tree grows from Colombia to Costa Rica. As a sapling, it looks like a piece of braided hemp. But if it finds a hole in the canopy, the sapling shoots up into a giant stem with flaring buttresses.” She turns to regard the image over her shoulder. It’s the bell of an enormous angel’s trumpet, plunged into the Earth. So many miracles, so much awful beauty. How can she leave so perfect a place? “Did you know that every broadleaf tree on Earth has flowers? Many mature species flower at least once a year. But this tree, Tachigali versicolor, this one flowers only once. Now, suppose you could have sex only once in your entire life. . . .” The room laughs now. She can’t hear, but she can smell their nerves. Her switchback trail through the woods is twisting again. They can’t tell where their guide is going. “How can a creature survive, by putting everything into a one-night stand? Tachigali versicolor’s act is so quick and decisive that it boggles me. You see, within a year of its only flowering, it dies.” She lifts her eyes. The room fills with wary smiles for the weirdness of this thing, nature. But her listeners can’t yet tie her rambling keynote to anything resembling home repair. “It turns out that a tree can give away more than its food and medicines. The rain forest canopy is thick, and wind-borne seeds never land very far from their parent. Tachigali’s once-in-a-lifetime offspring germinate right away, in the shadow of giants who have the sun locked up. They’re doomed, unless an old tree falls. The dying mother opens a hole in the canopy, and its rotting trunk enriches the soil for new seedlings. Call it the ultimate parental sacrifice. The common name for Tachigali versicolor is the suicide tree. ~ Richard Powers,

307:BUYING OFF THE ENVIRONMENTALISTS Where are the environmentalists? For fifty years, they’ve been carrying on about overpopulation; promoting family planning, birth control, abortion; and saying old people have a “duty to die and get out of the way”—in Colorado’s Democratic Governor Richard Lamm’s words. In 1971, Oregon governor and environmentalist Tom McCall told a CBS interviewer, “Come visit us again. . . . But for heaven’s sake, don’t come here to live.” How about another 30 million people coming here to live? The Sierra Club began sounding the alarm over the country’s expanding population in 1965—the very year Teddy Kennedy’s immigration act passed65—and in 1978, adopted a resolution expressly asking Congress to “conduct a thorough examination of U.S. immigration laws.” For a while, the Club talked about almost nothing else. “It is obvious,” the Club said two years later, “that the numbers of immigrants the United States accepts affects our population size and growth rate,” even more than “the number of children per family.”66 Over the next three decades, America took in tens of millions of legal immigrants and illegal aliens alike. But, suddenly, about ten years ago, the Sierra Club realized to its embarrassment that importing multiple millions of polluting, fire-setting, littering immigrants is actually fantastic for the environment! The advantages of overpopulation dawned on the Sierra Club right after it received a $100 million donation from hedge fund billionaire David Gelbaum with the express stipulation that—as he told the Los Angeles Times—“if they ever came out anti-immigration, they would never get a dollar from me.”67 It would be as if someone offered the Catholic Church $100 million to be pro-abortion. But the Sierra Club said: Sure! Did you bring the check? Obviously, there’s no longer any reason to listen to them on anything. They want us to get all excited about some widening of a road that’s going to disturb a sandfly, but the Sierra Club is totally copasetic with our national parks being turned into garbage dumps. Not only did the Sierra Club never again say another word against immigration, but, in 2004, it went the extra mile, denouncing three actual environmentalists running for the Club’s board, by claiming they were racists who opposed mass immigration. The three “white supremacists” were Dick Lamm, the three-time Democratic governor of Colorado; Frank Morris, former head of the Black Congressional Caucus Foundation; and Cornell professor David Pimentel, who created the first ecology course at the university in 1957 and had no particular interest in immigration.68 But they couldn’t be bought off, so they were called racists. ~ Ann Coulter,

308:The Linux world behaves in many respects like a free market or an ecology, a collection of selfish agents attempting to maximize utility which in the process produces a self-correcting spontaneous order more elaborate and efficient than any amount of central planning could have achieved. Here, then, is the place to seek the “principle of understanding”. The “utility function” Linux hackers are maximizing is not classically economic, but is the intangible of their own ego satisfaction and reputation among other hackers. (One may call their motivation “altruistic”, but this ignores the fact that altruism is itself a form of ego satisfaction for the altruist). Voluntary cultures that work this way are not actually uncommon; one other in which I have long participated is science fiction fandom, which unlike hackerdom has long explicitly recognized “egoboo” (ego-boosting, or the enhancement of one’s reputation among other fans) as the basic drive behind volunteer activity. Linus, by successfully positioning himself as the gatekeeper of a project in which the development is mostly done by others, and nurturing interest in the project until it became self-sustaining, has shown an acute grasp of Kropotkin’s “principle of shared understanding”. This quasi-economic view of the Linux world enables us to see how that understanding is applied. We may view Linus’s method as a way to create an efficient market in “egoboo” — to connect the selfishness of individual hackers as firmly as possible to difficult ends that can only be achieved by sustained cooperation. With the fetchmail project I have shown (albeit on a smaller scale) that his methods can be duplicated with good results. Perhaps I have even done it a bit more consciously and systematically than he. Many people (especially those who politically distrust free markets) would expect a culture of self-directed egoists to be fragmented, territorial, wasteful, secretive, and hostile. But this expectation is clearly falsified by (to give just one example) the stunning variety, quality, and depth of Linux documentation. It is a hallowed given that programmers hate documenting; how is it, then, that Linux hackers generate so much documentation? Evidently Linux’s free market in egoboo works better to produce virtuous, other-directed behavior than the massively-funded documentation shops of commercial software producers. Both the fetchmail and Linux kernel projects show that by properly rewarding the egos of many other hackers, a strong developer/coordinator can use the Internet to capture the benefits of having lots of co-developers without having a project collapse into a chaotic mess. So to Brooks’s Law I counter-propose the following: Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one. ~ Eric S Raymond,

309:I believe this movement will prevail.
I don’t mean it will defeat, conquer, or create harm to someone else.
Quite the opposite.
I don’t tender the claim in an oracular sense.
I mean that the thinking that informs the movement’s goals will reign. It will soon suffuse most institutions, but before then, it will change a sufficient number of people so as to begin the reversal of centuries of frenzied self-destructive behavior. Some say it is too late, but people never change when they are comfortable. Helen Keller threw aside the gnawing fears of chronic bad news when she declared, “I rejoice to live in such a splendidly disturbing time!” In such a time, history is suspended and thus unfinished. It will be the stroke of midnight for the rest of our lives.
My hopefulness about the resilience of human nature is matched by the gravity of our environmental and social condition. If we squander all our attention on what is wrong, we will miss the prize: In the chaos engulfing the world, a hopeful future resides because the past is disintegrating before us. If that is difficult to believe, take a winter off and calculate what it requires to create a single springtime. It’s not too late for the world’s largest institutions and corporations to join in saving the planet, but cooperation must be on the planet’s terms. The “Help Wanted” signs are everywhere. All people and institutions including commerce, governments, schools, churches and cities, need to learn from life and reimagine the world from the bottom up, based on the first principles if justice and ecology. Ecological restoration is extraordinarily simple: You remove whatever prevents the system from healing itself. Social restoration is no different.
We have the heart, knowledge, money and sense to optimize out social and ecological fabric.
It is time for all that is harmful to leave. One million escorts are here to transform the nightmares of empire and the disgrace of war on people and place. We are the transgressors and we are the forgivers.
“We” means all of us, everyone. There can be no green movement unless there is also a black, brown and copper movement. What is more harmful resides within is, the accumulated wounds of the past, the sorrow, shame, deceit, and ignominy shared by every culture, passed down to every person, as surely as DNA, as history of violence and greed. There is not question that the environmental movement is most critical to our survival. Our house is literally burning, and it is only logical that environmentalists expect the social justice movement to get on the environmental bus. But is actually the other way around; the only way we are going to put out this fire is to get on the social justice bus and heal our wounds, because in the end, there is only one bus.
Armed with that growing realization, we can address all that is harmful externally.
What will guide us is a living intelligence that creates miracles every second, carried forth by a movement with no name. ~ Paul Hawken,

310:Wales Visitation
White fog lifting & falling on mountain-brow
Trees moving in rivers of wind
The clouds arise
as on a wave, gigantic eddy lifting mist
above teeming ferns exquisitely swayed
along a green crag
glimpsed thru mullioned glass in valley raine—
Bardic, O Self, Visitacione, tell naught
but what seen by one man in a vale in Albion,
of the folk, whose physical sciences end in Ecology,
the wisdom of earthly relations,
of mouths & eyes interknit ten centuries visible
orchards of mind language manifest human,
of the satanic thistle that raises its horned symmetry
flowering above sister grass-daisies’ pink tiny
bloomlets angelic as lightbulbs—
Remember 160 miles from London’s symmetrical thorned tower
& network of TV pictures flashing bearded your Self
the lambs on the tree-nooked hillside this day bleating
heard in Blake’s old ear, & the silent thought of Wordsworth in eld Stillness
clouds passing through skeleton arches of Tintern Abbey—
Bard Nameless as the Vast, babble to Vastness!
All the Valley quivered, one extended motion, wind
undulating on mossy hills
a giant wash that sank white fog delicately down red runnels
on the mountainside
whose leaf-branch tendrils moved asway
in granitic undertow down—
and lifted the floating Nebulous upward, and lifted the arms of the trees
and lifted the grasses an instant in balance
and lifted the lambs to hold still
and lifted the green of the hill, in one solemn wave
97
A solid mass of Heaven, mist-infused, ebbs thru the vale,
a wavelet of Immensity, lapping gigantic through Llanthony Valley,
the length of all England, valley upon valley under Heaven’s ocean
tonned with cloud-hang,
—Heaven balanced on a grassblade.
Roar of the mountain wind slow, sigh of the body,
One Being on the mountainside stirring gently
Exquisite scales trembling everywhere in balance,
one motion thru the cloudy sky-floor shifting on the million feet of daisies,
one Majesty the motion that stirred wet grass quivering
to the farthest tendril of white fog poured down
through shivering flowers on the mountain’s head—
No imperfection in the budded mountain,
Valleys breathe, heaven and earth move together,
daisies push inches of yellow air, vegetables tremble,
grass shimmers green
sheep speckle the mountainside, revolving their jaws with empty eyes,
horses dance in the warm rain,
tree-lined canals network live farmland,
blueberries fringe stone walls on hawthorn’d hills,
pheasants croak on meadows haired with fern—
Out, out on the hillside, into the ocean sound, into delicate gusts of wet air,
Fall on the ground, O great Wetness, O Mother, No harm on your body!
Stare close, no imperfection in the grass,
each flower Buddha-eye, repeating the story,
myriad-formed—
Kneel before the foxglove raising green buds, mauve bells dropped
doubled down the stem trembling antennae,
& look in the eyes of the branded lambs that stare
breathing stockstill under dripping hawthorn—
I lay down mixing my beard with the wet hair of the mountainside,
smelling the brown vagina-moist ground, harmless,
tasting the violet thistle-hair, sweetness—
One being so balanced, so vast, that its softest breath
moves every floweret in the stillness on the valley floor,
trembles lamb-hair hung gossamer rain-beaded in the grass,
lifts trees on their roots, birds in the great draught
98
hiding their strength in the rain, bearing same weight,
Groan thru breast and neck, a great Oh! to earth heart
Calling our Presence together
The great secret is no secret
Senses fit the winds,
Visible is visible,
rain-mist curtains wave through the bearded vale,
gray atoms wet the wind’s kabbala
Crosslegged on a rock in dusk rain,
rubber booted in soft grass, mind moveless,
breath trembles in white daisies by the roadside,
Heaven breath and my own symmetric
Airs wavering thru antlered green fern
drawn in my navel, same breath as breathes thru Capel-Y-Ffn,
Sounds of Aleph and Aum
through forests of gristle,
my skull and Lord Hereford’s Knob equal,
All Albion one.
What did I notice? Particulars! The
vision of the great One is myriad—
smoke curls upward from ashtray,
house fire burned low,
The night, still wet & moody black heaven
starless
upward in motion with wet wind.
~ Allen Ginsberg,

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