greenhouse

* WISDOM TROVE *

1:Grains of error planted innocently in a well-kept greenhouse can become giant poisonous trees. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove

2:If the greenhouse effect is a blanket in which we wrap ourselves to keep warm, nuclear winter kicks the blanket off. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove

3:Isn't it sad that you can tell people that the ozone layer is being depleted, the forests are being cut down, the deserts are advancing steadily, that the greenhouse effect will raise the sea level 200 feet, that overpopulation is choking us, that pollution is killing us, that nuclear war may destroy us - and they yawn and settle back for a comfortable nap. But tell them that the Martians are landing, and they scream and run. ~ isaac-asimov, @wisdomtrove

4:The Christian is in a different position from other people who are trying to be good. They hope, by being good, to please God if there is one; or ‚Äî if they think there is not ‚Äî at least they hope to deserve approval from good men. But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us; just as the roof of a greenhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the sun shines on it. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove

* NEWFULLDB 2.4M *

1:water vapor is a greenhouse gas, ~ Hugh Ross,

2:Who loves a garden loves a greenhouse too. ~ William Cowper,

3:You could warm Mars up, over time, with greenhouse gases. ~ Elon Musk,

4:I cultivate hatred of action like a greenhouse flower. ~ Fernando Pessoa,

5:Her mother was a cultivated woman - she was born in a greenhouse ~ Spike Milligan,

6:You use care like a weapon,' he says. It's like a greenhouse breaking. ~ Cynan Jones,

7:The greenhouse scene! It was just so fun to have the romance and the action. ~ Lily Collins,

8:We just need the government to be that greenhouse that permits our faith to grow. ~ Max Lucado,

9:Because knowledge does not need an academic greenhouse. It can bloom, anywhere. ~ Rashmi Bansal,

10:My idea of a good novel was one you made enough money out of to buy a greenhouse. ~ Terry Pratchett,

11:You see, the Greenhouse Effect is a direct result of burning fossil or old carbon fuels. ~ Jack Herer,

12:omnivores contribute seven times the volume of greenhouse gases that vegans do. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer,

13:Sundance Supply has a neat material calculator and free greenhouse designs-Great Prices! ~ Shane Smith,

14:The clock is ticking as nature attempts to absorb the increased greenhouse gas emissions. ~ Ernest Moniz,

15:Grains of error planted innocently in a well-kept greenhouse can become giant poisonous trees. ~ Thomas Merton,

16:I cultivate hatred of action like a greenhouse flower. I dissent from life and am proud of it. ~ Fernando Pessoa,

17:The fellow who tends the greenhouse gardens? Trust me, Lady, you'd let him stake your tomatoes. ~ Kristin Cashore,

18:We have built a greenhouse, a human greenhouse, where once there bloomed a sweet and wild garden. ~ Bill McKibben,

19:Even if we were to stop putting out greenhouse gases right now, we'd still face decades of warming. ~ Jamais Cascio,

20:When Jace opened the greenhouse door, the scent hit Clary, soft as the padded blow of a cat's paw. ~ Cassandra Clare,

21:A vegan riding a hummer contributes less to greenhouse gas emissions than a meat eater riding a bicycle. ~ Paul Watson,

22:I cultivate hatred of action like a greenhouse flower. I’m proud of myself for dissenting from life. ~ Fernando Pessoa,

23:When Jace opened the greenhouse door, the scent hit Clary, soft as the padded blow of a cat's paw... ~ Cassandra Clare,

24:You are not a gentle flower who spends its whole life in a greenhouse. You are a wildfire, Lark. A wildfire. ~ Ilona Andrews,

25:Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany have detailed plans to cut their greenhouse emissions by 20 to 50 percent. ~ Donella Meadows,

26:If the greenhouse effect is a blanket in which we wrap ourselves to keep warm, nuclear winter kicks the blanket off. ~ Carl Sagan,

27:She was awake, alive, full of ideas like branches in a greenhouse, growing thick and rife against the glass. ~ Carolina De Robertis,

28:The road to energy independence, economic recovery, and greenhouse gas reductions runs through the building sector. ~ Edward Mazria,

29:oceans on Mars wouldn’t last. There might be some transient greenhouse warming, but in the end, Mars is just too cold. ~ Randall Munroe,

30:The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers. ~ Neal Stephenson,

31:Growing hemp as nature designed it is vital to our urgent need to reduce greenhouse gases and ensure the survival of our planet. ~ Jack Herer,

32:Look, any cut in greenhouse gases is going to be expensive for American consumers, who are in no mood to bear additional costs. ~ Robert Reich,

33:The US is responsible for 25 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. It should take responsibility for leading the way. ~ Tony Juniper,

34:China will soon emit more greenhouse gases than America, but its regime knows if it caps aspirations there will be a revolution. ~ James Lovelock,

35:On some issues, I'm a staunch Conservative — like curtailing greenhouse gas emissions so that we can Conserve the environment. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson,

36:...the global surface albedo [surface whiteness] and greenhouse gas changes account for practically the entire global climate change. ~ James Hansen,

37:If the US is the country that most contributes with greenhouse gases, in the world, it should assume more responsibility to reduce emissions ~ David Luiz,

38:The increase in the greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere are having an effect. Our ability to predict that effect is very limited. ~ Rex W Tillerson,

39:We have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions. ~ James Hansen,

40:The human race likes to give itself airs. One good volcano can produce more greenhouse gases in a year than the human race has in its entire history. ~ Ray Bradbury,

41:The planetary machinery tends to be jumpy, this is to respond disproportionately to disruptions that come with the manmade greenhouse effect. ~ Hans Joachim Schellnhuber,

42:domesticated cows deliver more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than do all the world’s vehicles—autos, trucks, trains, aircraft, ships—combined. Deforestation ~ Hugh Ross,

43:Is there some thought being given to subsidizing the clearing of rainforests in order for some countries to eliminate that production of greenhouse gases? ~ Dana Rohrabacher,

44:...99 percent confident that the world really was getting warmer and that there was a high degree of probability that it was due to human-made greenhouse gases. ~ James Hansen,

45:You have to be able to generate usable energy without greenhouse gas emissions and you have to be able to do it cheaply if you want people to choose that approach. ~ Ramez Naam,

46:Switching to light-coloured roofs and roadways would have the equivalent effect on greenhouse gas emissions to taking one billion cars off the road for eleven years. ~ Steven Chu,

47:I'm totally in favour of meeting our Paris commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But I don't think we should do that by making ourselves uncompetitive. ~ Chris Alexander,

48:Although they [light and medium trucks] have only 5% of the transportation market..., they account for fully 35% of greenhouse gas emissions from freight transportation. ~ David Suzuki,

49:That's right-the striking thing about greenhouse gases is the diversity of sources that emit them. A herd of cattle belching can be worse than highway full of hummers. ~ Thomas Friedman,

50:That's right-the striking thing about greenhouse gases is the diversity of sources that emit them. A herd of cattle belching can be worse than highway full of hummers. ~ Thomas L Friedman,

51:put us in touch with our spiritual core. For others, it’s a trip to a greenhouse. The point is that even the slightest attention to our impoverished areas can nurture them. ~ Julia Cameron,

52:Recent warming coincides with rapid growth of human-made greenhouse gases. The observed rapid warming gives urgency to discussions about how to slow greenhouse gas emissions. ~ James Hansen,

53:Warming of the climate system is unequivocal...most of the global average warming over the past 50 years is very likely due to anthropogenic greenhouse gases increases. ~ Rajendra K Pachauri,

54:We can debate this or that aspect of climate change, but the reality is that most people now accept our climate is indeed subject to change as a result of greenhouse gas emissions. ~ Tony Blair,

55:The US really has to get out in front. We are the biggest per person, by a substantial amount, greenhouse emitters, and we give the most foreign aid, not per person but in absolute. ~ Bill Gates,

56:The theory of man-made global warming and climate change based on human greenhouse gas emissions is the greatest international scientific fraud ever perpetrated on the world’s citizens! ~ John Casey,

57:Those who deny human-caused climate change offer no compelling evidence to better explain the undeniable rise in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases and global temperature. ~ Alan Lowenthal,

58:We have climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions, mostly from human power and transportation infrastructure. At the same time, we have 2 billion people who live in energy poverty. ~ Ramez Naam,

59:Because of technological limits, there is a certain amount of food that we can produce per acre. If we were to have intensive greenhouse agriculture, we could have much higher production. ~ Ralph Merkle,

60:...there is no substantive basis for predictions of sizeable global warming due to observed increases in minor greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and chlorofluorocarbons. ~ Richard Lindzen,

61:If you think that [Yale professor James] Saiers is in the greenhouse sceptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted. ~ Tom Wigley,

62:Greenhouse gas pollution, through its contribution to global climate change, presents a significant threat to Americans health and to the environment upon which our economy and security depends. ~ Gina McCarthy,

63:So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it's just that it will bankrupt them because they're going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted. ~ Barack Obama,

64:In an op-ed in the Lexington Herald Leader, Mitch McConnell urged states to ignore Obama’s regulatory order limiting greenhouse gas emissions. It was a stunning undermining of federal authority. ~ Steven Levitsky,

65:Factory farming is one of the biggest contributors to the most serious environmental problems. The meat industry causes more greenhouse gas emissions than all the cars, trucks, planes and ships in the world. ~ Joan Jett,

66: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,

67:Isn’t it daft? We make millions off people buying fuel and burning it, creating the greenhouse gases that caused these hurricanes to happen, sending prices back up for us to make millions off again.”) ~ Leah Mcgrath Goodman,

68:Researchers at the Naval Postgraduate School have told us that the entire Arctic ice cap may totally disappear in summer in as little as five years if nothing is done to curb emissions of greenhouse gas pollution. ~ Al Gore,

69:Temperature measurements in the arctic suggest that it was just as warm there in the 1930's...before most greenhouse gas emissions. Don't you ever wonder whether sea ice concentrations back then were low, too? ~ Roy Spencer,

70:The delicate exotic flower has to have the shelter of the greenhouse—it cannot endure the cold winds. It is the common weed that thrives in the wintry air—but it is not to be prized higher on that account. ~ Agatha Christie,

71:There is a natural greenhouse effect that contributes to warming. Greenhouse gases trap heat and thus warm the Earth because they prevent a significant portion of infrared radiation from escaping into space. ~ George W Bush,

72:Because of the inherent time lag in the climate system, the greenhouse gases that have already been pumped into the atmosphere will undoubtedly lead to a certain increase in temperature in the coming decades. ~ Hans von Storch,

73:The greenhouse effect of carbon-dioxide emissions does produce gentle warming if it is not counteracted by unpredictable natural phenomena, but it cannot be measured directly against the volume of such emissions. ~ Conrad Black,

74:Obama added, “. . . So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all the greenhouse gas that’s being emitted. ~ Mark R Levin,

75:You know what I always dreamed of? That with the greenhouse effect, one day Estonia can be what L.A. is right now. I always thought when the end of the world comes, I want to be in Estonia. I think then I'd survive. ~ Carmen Kass,

76:In front of us there is an immense garden of words and non-words, a serre, that is, a greenhouse in which are preserved by my care so many things of speech you have given me while leaving me free to cultivate them. ~ H l ne Cixous,

77:If we create a fee and dividend system in which we all paid a true cost of producing greenhouse gases, then the market can sort out the pros and cons. Then we can truly set our best minds, and our best technologies, free. ~ Bill Nye,

78:Unless we decide to reduce greenhouse gas emissions within just a few years from now, our destinies will already be chosen and our path towards hell unalterable as the carbon cycle feedbacks... kick in one after another. ~ Mark Lynas,

79:I did a lot of work on energy efficiency at the White House. By the time I left we had taken the equivalent of six hundred cars a year off the road in reduced greenhouse gas emissions just in the White House complex. ~ William J Clinton,

80:While the ranking of individual years can be affected by chaotic weather patterns, the long-term trends are attributable to drivers of climate change that right now are dominated by human emissions of greenhouse gases... ~ Gavin Schmidt,

81:I think it's crazy for us to play games with our children's future. We know what's happening to the climate, we have a highly predictable set of consequences if we continue to pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. ~ William J Clinton,

82:I think there is some overreach in the sense that the EPA now says: if Congress doesn't pass greenhouse emissions regulations or testing, we'll simply do it on our own. I think that's an arrogance of a regulatory body run amok. ~ Rand Paul,

83:Global warming results not from the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but from an unusually high level of solar radiation and a lengthy - almost throughout the last century - growth in its intensity. ~ Khabibullo Abdusamatov,

84:There are new smells on the wind, the healthy scent of green and growing things, the way a summer day can smell, or a greenhouse, sugarsmooth aroma of budding trees and water flowing free across coarse and sparkling sand. ~ Caitl n R Kiernan,

85:Climate change is the world's greatest environmental challenge. It is now plain that the emission of greenhouse gases, associated with industrialization and economic growth...is causing global warming at a rate that is unsustainable. ~ Tony Blair,

86:India was a late comer to industrialization, and as such, we have contributed very little to the accumulation of greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. But we are determined to be part of the solution to the problem. ~ Manmohan Singh,

87:Concentration of greenhouse gases, especially CO2, have increased substantially since the beginning of the industrial revolution. And the National Academy of Sciences indicates that the increase is due in large part to human activity. ~ George W Bush,

88:In March several of the Mandrakes threw a loud and raucous party in greenhouse three. This made Professor Sprout very happy. “The moment they start trying to move into each other’s pots, we’ll know they’re fully mature,” she told Harry. ~ J K Rowling,

89:Most of the people who have grabbed hold of climate change and greenhouse gases, pollution, oil dependency - they have another motive, and their motive is to attain the appearance of virtue without having actually done anything virtuous. ~ P J O Rourke,

90:In March several of the Mandrakes threw a loud and raucous party in greenhouse three. This made Professor Sprout very happy.
“The moment they start trying to move into each other’s pots, we’ll know they’re fully mature,” she told Harry. ~ J K Rowling,

91:Fossil-fuel plants pay virtually none of the cost of dumping greenhouse gases and other pollutants into the air. Instead, we all pay for it. If the cost of global warming is included, fossil fuels are the most expensive thing you can think of. ~ Bill Nye,

92:Choosing the most fuel-efficient vehicles within a class can save drivers at least $1,500 in fuel costs and avoid more than 15 tons of greenhouse gas pollution over the life of the vehicle, as well as help reduce dependence on foreign oil. ~ Carol Browner,

93:Just physically, if you looked at the house that I grew up in, my mother created this greenhouse. And surrounded the entire property. And there was, like, trees and sculptures and like - it was, like, this crazy, like, secret garden space. ~ Kehinde Wiley,

94:It has altered,” Leven says, “but only slightly. Nitrogen and oxygen, thank God, are still the main components. But the makeup is now one percent more oxygen, one percent less nitrogen. Greenhouse gases have returned to pre–Industrial Age levels. ~ Blake Crouch,

95:Its going to require a global effort to reduce greenhouse gases and hopefully derail some of the adverse impacts that we are experiencing today and the devastating impacts that we are going to experience in the future as a result of global warming. ~ Jerome Ringo,

96:One problem is that we are heavily dependent upon fossil fuels. And that's where the greenhouse gases come from, by and large, some deforestation, as well. But we have not yet come to grips with how to change that. So that's where we are right now. ~ Richard Harris,

97:Many governments are giving subsidies to fossil fuel production and consumption that encourage greenhouse gas emissions, at the same time as they are spending on projects to promote clean energy. This is a wasteful use of scarce budget resources. ~ Jose Angel Gurria,

98:You should see the way she smiles when I rattle off the names of the orchids in the greenhouse: oncidium, dendrobium, bulbophyllum, and epidendrum, tickling her face with each blossom. I wouldn't be surprised if 'Orchidaceae' was her first word. ~ Vanessa Diffenbaugh,

99:NASA's Aqua satellite is showing that water vapor, the dominant greenhouse gas, works to offset the effect of carbon dioxide - CO2. This information, contrary to the assumption used in all the warming models, is ignored by global warming alarmists. ~ Walter Cunningham,

100:Climate is not responding to greenhouse gases in the way we thought it might. If increasing carbon dioxide is in fact increasing climate change, its impact is smaller than natural variation. People are being misled by people making money out of this. ~ Chris de Freitas,

101:The sustainable alternative is one in which smaller and smaller regions produce more and more of the goods they need closer to where they are consumed. These economies will contribute little to the greenhouse effect and will survive the exhaustion of oil. ~ John B Cobb,

102:You will, I trust, resemble a forest plant, which has indeed, by some accident, been brought up in the greenhouse, and thus rendered delicate and effeminate, but which regains its native firmness and tenacity, when exposed for a season to the winter air. ~ Walter Scott,

103:Under that deal, announced late last year, the U.S. agreed to cut its greenhouse gas emissions more steeply. China didn’t commit to any specific reductions, but said it would try to have its emissions peak by 2030 — giving it 15 more years of rising pollution. ~ Anonymous,

104:I think the whole human-induced greenhouse gas thing is a red herring... . I see climate change as due to the ocean circulation pattern. I see this as a major cause of climate change... . These are natural processes. We shouldn't blame them on humans and CO2. ~ William M Gray,

105:...it is quite obvious that the temperature change during the last 100 years or so includes significant natural changes, both the linear change and fluctuations. It is very puzzling that the IPCC reports state that it is mostly due to the greenhouse effect. ~ Syun Ichi Akasofu,

106:Since stepping down as laboratory director in 1999, I have devoted an increasing fraction of my time to international issues. I am involved with energy, environment, and sustainability issues, particularly as they involve new energy sources free of greenhouse gases. ~ Burton Richter,

107:Something bad happened on both Mars with its dried-up watercourses and Venus with its runaway greenhouse effect. Could something bad happen on Earth too? Our species currently turns row upon row of environmental knobs, without much regard to long-term consequences. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson,

108:But after geological ages of rock-bound slumber, we’re now releasing—all at once—the same carbon dioxide responsible for the difference between the tropical greenhouse of the Devonian and the wintry climes of the Late Paleozoic Ice Age that followed. We do so at our peril. ~ Peter Brannen,

109:The EPA's greenhouse gas regulations, along with a host of other onerous regulations, are unnecessarily driving out conventional fuels as part of America's energy mix. The consequences are higher energy prices for families and a contraction of our nation's economic growth. ~ Gina McCarthy,

110:There is no evidence when we look to the past for any precedent for the rate of change in atmospheric composition that we’re causing, and the rates of change in climate that we can expect, as we continue to burn fossil fuels and elevate these greenhouse gas concentrations. ~ Thom Hartmann,

111:At this time, all students are to report to the greenhouse.”
Scowling, I waved my arm through the spell. It swirled like smoke before dissolving. “Freaking drama queen,” I muttered. “How hard would it have been to announce that last night? Or to just do the voice thing? ~ Rachel Hawkins,

112:I honestly don't know, but if America continues to refuse to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, I see a bleak future not only for American society, but for the world as a whole. This is a global problem that is not going away, and the United States is an obstacle to solving it. ~ Peter Singer,

113:A bunch of money-grubbin', greenhouse-gasing, seal-clubbing, oil-drilling, Bible-thumping, missile-firing, right-to-life-ing, lethal-injecting hypocrites. People whose idea of a good time is strapping a dead panda to a Lincoln Navigator and running over everybody in the gay parade. ~ Richard Jeni,

114:It is common sense that when women are able to plan their pregnancies, populations grow more slowly and as a result so do greenhouse gas emissions. Providing access to contraception and preventative health should be one of the many effective strategies used to fight climate change. ~ Kavita Ramdas,

115:The largest source of greenhouse gases in the coming decades will not be the US, Western Europe and Japan, but the developing economies of East Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. The coming eruption of carbon emissions from the poor world will dwarf any reductions in the North. ~ Ross Gelbspan,

116:I think you can grow your economy and at the same time do a better job of harnessing greenhouse gases. I don't think you can expect any American leader to wreck the economy, nor as an ally and a friend of America and a trading partner of America should you want us to wreck our economy. ~ George W Bush,

117:I am very proud that, since 2014, Sweden now tracks quarterly greenhouse gas emissions (the first and still the only country to do so). This is Factfulness in action...Climate change is way too important a global risk to be ignored or denied, and the vast majority of the world knows that. ~ Hans Rosling,

118:What we should be doing [in US] is accelerating every year our efforts to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, have a cleaner energy future, have much more energy conservation. And this won't hurt anybody. This will create a new economy for America, if we've got the discipline to do it. ~ William J Clinton,

119:If Earth ever suffers a runaway greenhouse effect (like what has happened on Venus), then our atmosphere would trap excess amounts of solar energy, the air temperature would rise, and the oceans would swiftly evaporate into the atmosphere as they sustained a rolling boil. This would be bad. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson,

120:The climate's sensitivity to greenhouse gases is considerably lower than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claims - so much lower, in fact, that the warming we would expect from doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be quite modest and offer very little risk. ~ Kenneth P Green,

121:Mars has global warming, but without a greenhouse and without the participation of Martians. These parallel global warmings - observed simultaneously on Mars and on Earth - can only be a straightline consequence of the effect of the one same factor: a long-time change in solar irradiance. ~ Khabibullo Abdusamatov,

122:Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased ~ Anonymous,

123:The message I am trying to get across is exactly this: Protecting the environment does not require us to be against large SUVs or trucks. Instead we should develop technology to cut down greenhouse gas emissions because that is where the action is - it's not about what the size of the car is. ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger,

124:The Kyoto Treaty wasn't perfect, but we signed it, in fact, helped to draft it. And I'm very proud of it, it was the world's first commitment to doing something comprehensive on greenhouse gases and trying to reduce global warming before we do irreversible damage to many civilizations around the world. ~ William J Clinton,

125:the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us; just as the roof of a greenhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the sun shines on it. ~ C S Lewis,

126:We have to create more and more vegetarians, and help people to understand that it is not only the suffering of the animals (which is what made me vegetarian) but also the incredible harm to the environment, the tremendous amount of greenhouse gas created by the whole vast machinery of intensive animal farming. ~ Jane Goodall,

127:But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us; just as the roof of a greenhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the sun shines on it. ~ C S Lewis,

128:The IPCC explicitly addressed—and rejected—the Marshall Institute argument for blaming the Sun. The upper limits on solar variability, they explained, are “small compared with greenhouse forcing and even if such a change occurred over the next few decades, it would be swamped by the enhanced greenhouse effect.”75 ~ Naomi Oreskes,

129:Connect with people, visibly and loudly showcase initiatives that reduce greenhouse gases emissions, nurture youth leaders, or spread the message by raising awareness through campaigns. I am convinced that your contributions will ensure that climate change solutions safely power our - and especially your - future. ~ Christiana Figueres,

130:Now, when you hear some people advocating or warning against “geoengineering” Earth by spraying sun-blocking aerosols into the upper atmosphere, they are proposing to induce a process that is constantly at work on Titan. I’ll return to the physics, and the wisdom, of such an anti-greenhouse project in chapter 4. Climate ~ David Grinspoon,

131:Because nitrous oxide [released by nitrate-fertilised soil] is 296 times stronger than CO₂ at global warming and methane [cow farts] is about 26 times as potent as CO₂, the combined greenhouse effect of our livestock worldwide is greater than the sum total of all the cars, trains, busses, trucks, ships, airplanes and jets. ~ Thom Hartmann,

132:How should one address a letter to the King?” I asked. Dogger leaned his shovel carefully against the greenhouse. “Theoretically, or in actual practice?” “In actual practice.” “Hmm,” he said. “I think I should look it up somewhere.” “Hold on,” I said. “Mrs. Mullet’s Inquire Within Upon Everything. She keeps it in the pantry. ~ Alan Bradley,

133:Being told about the effects of climate change is an appeal to our reason and to our desire to bring about change. But to see that Africans are the hardest hit by climate change, even though they generate almost no greenhouse gas, is a glaring injustice, which also triggers anger and outrage over those who seek to ignore it. ~ Sigmar Gabriel,

134:If our goal in legislating against carbon releases is not simply punishing the West and its power companies but truly trying to reduce the accumulation of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, the main event will be in the developing world. We must use the smartest possible economics, and that means investing in China and India. ~ Gregg Easterbrook,

135:The fact is that seven per cent of the global population emits 50 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, and the proportions are the same for the use of energy and raw materials, meat, wood, etc. Simply put, an infinitesimal minority consumes the most and imposes damage on the overwhelming majority, while asking it to change. ~ Yann Arthus Bertrand,

136:Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket… Because I’m capping greenhouse gasses, coal power plants, natural gas…you name it…whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, they would have to retro-fit their operations. That will cost money…they will pass that money on to the consumers. ~ Barack Obama,

137:Mr Cripp's last words were 'Good heavens! It's full of holes!' said Mary. 'Do you have any idea to what he was referring?'
'Most puzzling,' confessed the Vicar. 'He might have been referring to anything - the greenhouse, his cucumber, the plot - anything.'
'The plot?' echoed Mary.
'I mean the vegetable plot,' he said hurriedly. ~ Jasper Fforde,

138:When I was a child,” Theodora said lazily, “—‘many years ago,’ Doctor, as you put it so tactfully—I was whipped for throwing a brick through a greenhouse roof. I remember I thought about it for a long time, remembering the whipping but remembering also the lovely crash, and after thinking about it very seriously I went out and did it again. ~ Shirley Jackson,

139:When I was a child," Theodora said lazily, "'--many years ago,' Doctor, as you put it so tactfully--I was whipped for throwing a brick through a greenhouse roof. I remember I thought about if for a long time, remembering the whipping but remembering also the lovely crash, and after thinking about it very seriously I went out and did it again. ~ Shirley Jackson,

140:Voluntary actions by corporations should not go beyond innovative win - win 'no regrets' initiatives. Greenhouse gas control practices that are uneconomic penalize either consumers or stockholders while politicizing the issue of corporate responsibility. Few will be satisfied, and the ineffectual measures will eventually have to be abandoned. ~ Robert L Bradley Jr,

141:We will pay for this [climate change] one way or another. We will pay to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions today and we'll have to take an enormous hit of some kind. Or we will pay the price later in military terms. And that will involve human lives. There will be a human toll. There is no way out of this that does not have real costs attached to it. ~ Anthony Zinni,

142:Ben West, one of the effective altruists mentioned in chapter 4, has shown that even if your goal were solely to slow down climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, you could do that more effectively by donating to organizations that are encouraging people to go vegetarian or vegan than by donating to leading carbon-offsetting organizations. ~ Peter Singer,

143:Because methane is so powerful as a greenhouse gas, let’s phase it out as fast as we practically can, while we absolutely stop burning coal. It’s everything-all-at-once time. Coal, gas, oil … ultimately, they all have to go. The real key for the Next Great Generation will be to build a society that doesn’t need natural gas or fossil fuels of any kind at all. ~ Bill Nye,

144:It's there. The white rose among the dried flowers in the vase. Shriveled and fragile, but holding on to that unnatural perfection cultivated in Snows greenhouse. I grab the vase, stumble down to the kitchen, and throw its contents into the embers. As the flowers flare up, a burst of blue flame envelops the rose and devours it. Fire beats roses again. ~ Suzanne Collins,

145:... The reality is that atmospheric CO2 has a minimal impact on greenhouse gases and world temperature. Water vapor is responsible for 95 percent of the greenhouse effect. CO2 contributes just 3.6 percent, with human activity responsible for only 3.2 percent of that. That is why some studies claim CO2 levels are largely irrelevant to global warming. ~ Walter Cunningham,

146:London life was very full and exciting [...] But in London there would be no greenhouse with a glossy tank, and no apple-room, and no potting-shed, earthy and warm, with bunches of poppy heads hanging from the ceiling, and sunflower seeds in a wooden box, and bulbs in thick paper bags, and hanks of tarred string, and lavender drying on a tea-tray. ~ Sylvia Townsend Warner,

147:If Africa is left behind, she is going to continue pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, especially carbon. She's going to continue logging the forests, she's going to continue burning charcoal, she is going to continue practicing agricultural activities that destroy the environment, and sooner or later Africa's problem will become a global problem. ~ Wangari Maathai,

148:The greenhouse was made entirely of glass. Its ceiling reached five stories high, tall enough to fit a variety of fruit-bearing trees and vines. Butterflies flitted between sparkling flowers. Honeybees collected pollen for their hive, which conveniently drip honey right into glass jars. And watermelons, root beer melons, and orangeade melons grew along trellises. ~ Suzanne Selfors,

149:Parks straightened and held out the note Dante had written. He glanced at it and began reading. “I’m here, baby brother. I’m taking you home. When you come out of the greenhouse, don’t look for me, but know that I’m here. Leave a light on in your room tonight so we can find you. Você é melhor. Dante.” “Very sweet,” Parks murmured as he flicked the note onto the desk. ~ Sloane Kennedy,

150:We have at most ten years - not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions... We are near a tipping point, a point of no return, beyond which the built in momentum and feedbacks will carry us to levels of climate change with staggering consequences for humanity and all of the residents of this planet. ~ James Hansen,

151:analysis for the proposed Keystone XL pipeline downplays the significance the pipeline would have for development of the Canadian tar sands, according to a new analysis from a United Kingdom-based group. The analysis also argues that the State Department underestimated the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that would come with that development. The Carbon Tracker Initiative, a ~ Anonymous,

152:I've been vegan for 15 years, and it turns out it makes a very big impact on the environment to eat fewer animal products, which cause more greenhouse gases than all of transportation combined. The United Nations did a study just over two years ago, and that blew my mind. I started thinking that if people are vegetarian for just one day a week, that makes a huge difference! ~ Emily Deschanel,

153:Many of our actions degrade our habitat because we undertake them in order to reach goals whose allure blinds us to myriad dire consequences. In order to fuel our complex civilizations, we are lacing our planet's atmosphere with carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that, if it has not already begun doing so, will soon warm the Ice Age climate to which we owe our very existence. ~ Steven M Stanley,

154:People have not made the connection that the more of us there are, the more greenhouse gases go into the atmosphere. The Chinese have. They, unlike us, have a population policy. The right wingers just don't understand that the country they're in is probably the most overpopulated in the world, the one doing most of the destruction, and the one with horrendously bad leadership. ~ Paul R Ehrlich,

155:So Laura is placed for us: mushrooms, crushed flowers, country matters. In London she will miss the greenhouse with its glossy tank, the appleroom, everything “earthy and warm.” Laura is an anomaly in the world of easy literary symbolism: she is a spinster, completely uninterested in men. Nevertheless she belongs irrevocably to the sources of life: to earth, seeds, bulbs. ~ Sylvia Townsend Warner,

156:table sat an antique ormolu clock, its hands frozen on the twelve and the ten, 11:50. The magic hour. The time when Zee’s ghosts appeared in the greenhouse wall. Bits and pieces of two scenarios were coming back to her, fitting together like a child’s jigsaw puzzle. She had, indeed, come to this place—Mathew Brady’s New York studio—a short time earlier to have her portrait made ~ Becky Lee Weyrich,

157:Bush had vowed during the campaign to act on climate change by limiting greenhouse gas emissions, but once in office Cheney countermanded him. In what Cheney’s biographer Barton Gellman describes as a “case study in managing an errant boss,” Cheney shifted the administration’s position to arguing that the science on global warming was “inconclusive,” requiring “more scientific inquiry. ~ Jane Mayer,

158:in dawdling through the greenhouse, where the loss of her favorite plants, unwarily exposed, and nipped by the lingering frost, raised the laughter of Charlotte,-and in visiting her poultry-yard, where in the disappointed hopes of her dairymaid, by hens forsaking their nests, or being stolen by a fox, or in the rapid decease of a promising young brood, she found fresh sources of merriment. ~ Jane Austen,

159:Here’s hoping NASCAR officials and teams decide to do some new and cool things rather than the old and slow things. I hope NASCAR gets kids everywhere excited about innovating in automotive design, so that we can go farther on less fuel or even no fuel—just electrons—so that car exhaust is cleaner or nonexistent, so that we can reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and make a better planet for all of us, ~ Bill Nye,

160:In the current setting the situation of the poor is neglected despite the grotesque wealth of the capitalist elites, and the dangers to the well-being of humanity associated with climate change are ignored despite a strong scientific consensus warning of the adverse, and possibly irreversible, consequences of further delays in reducing the level of greenhouse gas emissions, especially carbon. ~ Richard A Falk,

161:With time environmental issues got much more complicated. It is pretty easy, if you know what you are doing, to stop a company from pouring poison into a lake where kids swim. It is much harder to address all the myriad greenhouse gases emitted by different sources - from petrochemical refineries to hundreds of millions of peasants cutting down trees for their incredibly inefficient cook stoves. ~ Denis Hayes,

162:... the consensus of the scientific community has shifted from skepticism to near-unanimous acceptance of the evidence of an artificial greenhouse effect. Second, while artificial climate change may have some beneficial effects, the odds are we're not going to like it. Third, reducing emissions of greenhouse gases may turn out to be much more practical and affordable than currently assumed. ~ Gregg Easterbrook,

163:The greenhouse crisis is the bill coming due for the Industrial Revolution. It's not an accident. It's the logical outcome of our world view - the idea that we can control the forces of nature, that we can have short-term expedient gains without paying for them, that there are no limits to exploitation of the environment, that we can produce and consume faster than nature's ability to replenish. ~ Jeremy Rifkin,

164:I am not a climatologist, but I don't think any of the other witnesses are either. I do work in the related field of atomic, molecular and optical physics. I have spent my professional life studying the interactions of visible and infrared radiation with gases - one of the main physical phenomena behind the greenhouse effect. I have published over 200 papers in peer reviewed scientific journals. ~ William Happer,

165:I really hope you like this," he says again, and flings open the door.
It's a glass room, a greenhouse, I realize. Within are tulips, hundreds, of all colors. Tulips bloom in the middle of July in Desi's lake house. In their own special room for a very special girl.
"I know tulips are your favorite, but the season is so short," Desi said. "So I fixed that for you. They'll bloom year-round. ~ Gillian Flynn,

166:Ma’am, do you mind me asking who you’re angry at, then?” As Antonia Soria opened her mouth, dozens of names filled the space behind her teeth, waiting to be said. But in that moment, as she saw Pete’s guileless face and, behind him, the outline of Francisco’s greenhouse and, in it, its sleepless occupant looking back at her, she realized that the only name that was true in that space was her own. ~ Maggie Stiefvater,

167:The money economy thus leaves a large ecological footprint, defined as the amount of land and resources required to meet a typical consumer's needs. For example, with only about 4% of the world's population, the United States, the largest money economy, consumes in excess of one-quarter of the world's energy and materials and generates in excess of 25 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. ~ Stuart L Hart,

168:I think we need to address greenhouse gas emissions. But I try to get involved in issues where I see a legislative result... So I just leave the issue alone because I don't see a way through it, and there are certain fundamentals, for example nuke power, that people on the left will never agree with me on. So why should I waste my time when I know the people on the left are going to reject nuclear power? ~ John McCain,

169:Child On Top Of A Greenhouse

The wind billowing out the seat of my britches,
My feet crackling splinters of glass and dried putty,
The half-grown chrysanthemums staring up like accusers,
Up through the streaked glass, flashing with sunlight,
A few white clouds all rushing eastward,
A line of elms plunging and tossing like horses,
And everyone, everyone pointing up and shouting! ~ Theodore Roethke,

170:Some time ago we discovered the carbon cycle - a long-term set of chemical reactions that govern climates based on how much carbon is free in the atmosphere. At that point, it became clear that humans were affecting our environments far more profoundly than we realized. By releasing so much carbon and greenhouse gas into the environment, we're making long-term changes to every aspect of the natural world. ~ Annalee Newitz,

171:The size of the greenhouse forcing is estimated, at this point, to be 2.5 w/m2. A miniature Christmas light gives off about four tenths of a watt of energy, mostly in the form of heat, so that, in effect (as Sophie supposedly explained to Connor), we have covered the earth with tiny bulbs, six for every square meter. These bulbs are burning twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, year in and year out. ~ Elizabeth Kolbert,

172:We [US] are the biggest per person, by a substantial amount, greenhouse emitters, and we give the most foreign aid, not per person but in absolute. This is another issue where hopefully we will take a long-term approach which, even though we sometimes have a hard time doing that, it's easier for us, as a rich country with this kind of scientific depth, than it is for the poor countries who will suffer the problems. ~ Bill Gates,

173:Are global temperatures rising? Surely, they were rising from the late 1970s to 1998, but 'there has been no net global warming since 1998.' Indeed, the more recent numbers show that there is now evidence of significant cooling [...] Mankind is responsible for just a fraction of one percent of the effect from greenhouse gases, and greenhouse gases are not responsible for most of what causes warming (e.g., the Sun). ~ John R Lott Jr,

174:It's very important that we expand our use of clean energy and make a long-term commitment to it. Biodiesel and ethanol are better for the environment and for the air we breathe. The use of biodiesel is a positive step toward minimizing pollutive emissions and greenhouse gases. By focusing on school buses, we can affect the health and wellbeing of the people most susceptible to that pollution - our children - today. ~ Julia Roberts,

175:The gradual depletion of the ozone layer and the related "greenhouse effect" has now reached crisis proportions as a consequence of industrial growth, massive urban concentrations and vastly increased energy needs. Industrial waste, the burning of fossil fuels, unrestricted deforestation, the use of certain types of herbicides, coolants and propellants: all of these are known to harm the atmosphere and environment. ~ Pope John Paul II,

176:It is critical that the world captures every last bit of energy efficiency, if we are to reduce greenhouse gas emissions enough to keep below dangerous rises in temperature. I am pleased that this important new study shows how information and communication technology can play an essential role in saving energy. Now we need more and effective government policies that reward such action and penalize delayed responses. ~ Christiana Figueres,

177:Isn't it sad that you can tell people that the ozone layer is being depleted, the forests are being cut down, the deserts are advancing steadily, that the greenhouse effect will raise the sea level 200 feet, that overpopulation is choking us, that pollution is killing us, that nuclear war may destroy us - and they yawn and settle back for a comfortable nap. But tell them that the Martians are landing, and they scream and run. ~ Isaac Asimov,

178:There are many who still do not believe that global warming is a problem at all. And it's no wonder: because they are the targets of a massive and well-organized campaign of disinformation lavishly funded by polluters who are determined to prevent any action to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming out of a fear that their profits might be affected if they had to stop dumping so much pollution into the atmosphere. ~ Al Gore,

179:The press would indeed take the “conservative” position. A New York Times reporter put it this way: “The Academy found that since there is no politically or economically realistic way of heading off the greenhouse effect, strategies must be prepared to adapt to a ‘high temperature world.’”50 But the Academy hadn’t found that; the committee had asserted it. And it wasn’t the Academy; it was Bill Nierenberg and a handful of economists. ~ Naomi Oreskes,

180:You can cross out all of the above when Remy is with Kit. At first, she seemed inclined to follow Kit around with her eyes instead of talking to her, but that changed when Kit offered to teach her how to lisp. Remy looked startled, but she agreed to take lessons and they went off to Amelia’s greenhouse together. Her lisp is hampered by her accent, but Kit doesn’t hold that against her and has generously given her extra instructions. ~ Mary Ann Shaffer,

181:Yet in many cases, the social components were the dominant system drivers. It was often said, for example, that climate change was caused by increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. Scientists understood that those greenhouse gases were accumulating because of the activities of human beings—deforestation and fossil fuel combustion—yet they rarely said that the cause was people, and their patterns of conspicuous consumption. ~ Naomi Oreskes,

182:In this greenhouse I see how much he loves this collection of bonsai trees. Each one has a name, age and a place of birth engraved on brass plaques. Most of them come from places I've ever heard of before. Mr. Kaye says each bonsai has its own life story and he knows every one of them. When I was a kid, he used to tell me some of the stories, but he was probably just making it all up. He always told me bonsai were balanced, but in a lopsided way. ~ Randall Platt,

183:What city doesn’t like to brag about itself? The gargoyle fauns leaned off the front of the buildings, whispering about their sex lives. The fat catfish in the greenhouse swore they had stock market tips. The horses on the carousel reared their heads, ready for a battle against the mermaid statues in the pond. An electric train rode around and around a tiny mountain in the toy-shop window, while its Lilliputian passengers dreamed in tiny berths. ~ Heather O Neill,

184:Instead of canals, a magical four-story central courtyard faces the interior walls. A greenhouse of sorts. The roof is glass and the floor is a sensuous garden filled with freestanding columns, whimsical twelfth-century lion stylobates, and all manner of statuary. A Roman mosaic sits at the center, surrounded by an ever-changing installation of flowers and shrubs. A pair of towering palm trees reach up to the sunlight, climbing beyond the third floor. ~ Barbara A Shapiro,

185:I know we need more nuclear power in order - nuclear power, after all, is not dependent on fossil fuels and emits no greenhouse gases. I believe we're going to be able to have coal-fired plants that have zero emissions. We need to work on carbon sequestration technologies. I mean, there's a lot we can do together and achieve the objective, which a lot of people want, which is the reduction of greenhouse gases, and at the same time, have viable economic growth. ~ George W Bush,

186:Over a 20-year period, methane is estimated to have a warming effect on Earth’s atmosphere 84 times that of carbon dioxide. By that metric, the Aliso Canyon leak produced the same amount of global warming as 1,735,404 cars in a full year. During the four months the leak lasted—25 days longer than the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico—the leak contributed roughly the same amount of warming as the greenhouse-gas emissions produced by the entire country of Lebanon. ~ Hope Jahren,

187:Hasselmann’s key insight was that climate scientists faced the same basic problem as communications engineers: how to detect a weak signal—the thing you’re interested in—amid lots of noise that you don’t care about. In climate science, the noise is caused by phenomena that are internal to the climate system, such as El Niño. The “signal” is something caused by things that are external to the Earth’s natural climate system: the Sun, volcanic dust, or man-made greenhouse gases. ~ Naomi Oreskes,

188:And thus yielding two remarkable and independent coincidences at the same time – the climate is exhibiting unusual change over the past 100 years, and yet exactly what scientists believe would cause such change – an increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations to levels not seen on earth in millions of years, is, by even more remarkable coincidence, itself otherwise not altering the climate of the earth while that climate bizarrely just starts to shift on its own, anyway. ~ Anonymous,

189:Bopha, Sandy, floods in Pakistan, droughts in China… How many reports from the likes of the World Bank, NASA and the International Energy Agency will it take? How many preventable catastrophes until our leaders realize that climate change will not be solved by nice speeches and empty promises? Countries like Canada and the U.S. have promised to reduce their greenhouse gas pollution and provide adequate financial support for developing countries, they have so far failed on both counts. ~ Steven Guilbeault,

190:A lot of what is done by the climate lobby is anti-science. But there is some science behind it. Like, there are greenhouse gases, and they do contribute to warming. But if you look at the last, say, 160 years, the first 80 of that period, they went up about four-tenths of a degree. And now, the second 80 that CO2 has increased by, what, 30 percent or something, it's gone up five-tenths of a degree. And there's been in the last 30 or 40 years, there's been no real increase in storms or bad weather. ~ Charles Koch,

191:How am I to become a legend, my dear? I’ve tried love, but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always springing forth from it like the lotus—the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, “to keep the filth of life away,” yes, there, even in the heart, where the filth is pumped in and courses and slanders and pollutes and determines. I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in that department, that greenhouse. ~ Frank O Hara,

192:The general public doesn't know and probably doesn't care about punctuated equilibria nor indeed should they, or the greenhouse effect on some other planet - they barely have the ability to cope with the greenhouse effect on their own planet. So I think you have to distinguish between the broad visibility of a scientist when he or she is speaking to a general public and trying to address general issues and the continued position that a scientist may have into the history of a particular subject. ~ Richard Lewontin,

193:Al Gore likes to say that mankind puts 70 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every day. What he probably doesn't know is that mother nature puts 24,000 times that amount of our main greenhouse gas-water vapor-into the atmosphere every day and removes about the same amount every day. While this does not 'prove' that global warming is not man-made, it shows that weather systems have by far the greatest control over the Earth's greenhouse effect, which is dominated by water vapor and clouds. ~ Roy Spencer,

194:Geologists and paleo-climatologists know that in the past the Earth's temperature has been substantially warmer than it is today, and that this warming has occurred under purely natural circumstances. Until we can say precisely how much of the current global warming and greenhouse gas increase is the result of this normal temperature cycle, we will not be able to measure how much human activity has added to this natural trend, nor will we be able to predict whether there will be any lasting negative effects. ~ Greg Benson,

195:George H. W. Bush, like most political leaders of both parties at the time, accepted the science without dispute. He vowed to protect the environment, promising to fight “the Greenhouse Effect with the White House Effect” and sending his secretary of state, James Baker, to the first international summit of climate scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Although Bush was a Republican, he was not an outlier in his party. For decades, the environmental movement had enjoyed bipartisan support. ~ Jane Mayer,

196:The unthinkable is that we're distorting this atmospheric balance. We're shifting the chemical balance so that we have more poisons in the atmosphere - ozones and acid rain on ground level - while we're also changing the thermal climate of the earth through the greenhouse effect and - get this - simultaneously causing destruction of our primary filter of ultraviolet light. It's incredible. Talk about the national-debt crisis - we're piling up debts in the atmosphere, and the piper will want to be paid. ~ Michael Oppenheimer,

197:There would be no call for ecological campaigning had nature not been exploited and abused. We experience the ground now bringing forth thistles as soil erosion devastates formerly arable land and deserts overtake fertile farms. Rivers and the atmosphere are polluted thoughtlessly and we are fearful of the consequences of a depleted ozone layer and the devastation of the greenhouse effect. We are not quite at home in our world, and somewhere in each of us there is a nostalgia for a paradise that has been lost. ~ Desmond Tutu,

198:We've continued progress in the six months since Trump got elected, and the good thing about what we're doing is that success begets success. As we bring down greenhouse gases, for example, we've closed half of the coal-fired power plants in the country in recent years. There's more impetus to try to close the other half because you can see that it is working. So, you know, I had hoped that Trump would not do that, and it doesn't make any sense to me, but regardless, it is not as cataclysmic as it could be. ~ Michael Bloomberg,

199:If, as a society, we ate meat less, the world would indeed be a brighter and more beautiful place. Consider, for example, the impact on global warming. Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at the Bard Center, and Pamela A. Martin, Assistant Professor of Geophysics at the University of Chicago, have calculated the benefits that would occur if Americans were to reduce beef consumption by 20 percent. Such a change would decrease our greenhouse gas emissions as substantially as if we exchanged all our cars and trucks for Priuses. ~ John Robbins,

200:Extreme weather like the droughts in Russia, China and Brazil and the flooding in Pakistan and Australia [in 2010] have contributed to a level of food price volatility we haven't seen since the oil crisisof 40 years ago. Unfortunately, this could be just a taste of things to come because in the next few decades the build-up of greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere could greatly increase the risk of droughts, flooding, pest infestation and water scarcity for agriculture systems already under tremendous stress. ~ John Beddington,

201:Venus is kept that way by a thick, dense atmosphere that’s full of carbon dioxide. It’s the greenhouse effect gone wild—runaway, as it is oft described. In fact, the models of climate change here on Earth were developed in part by scientists, James Hansen especially, who were studying the atmosphere of Venus. They observed that visible light passes the atmosphere, hits the surface, and then is reradiated as heat that is then trapped by carbon dioxide. This process has a big influence on whether or not a planet is habitable. ~ Bill Nye,

202:The models that have been constructed agree that when, as has been predicted, the level of carbon dioxide or its equivalent in other greenhouse gases doubles from pre-Industrial Revolution concentrations, the global average temperature will increase, and that the increase will be 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius or 3 to 8 degrees Fahrenheit... In Dallas, for instance, a doubled level of carbon dioxide and other gases like methane, would increase the number of days a year with temperatures above 100 degrees from 19 to 78 each year. ~ Bill McKibben,

203:Global warming results not from the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but from an unusually high level of solar radiation and a lengthy - almost throughout the last century - growth in its intensity. It is no secret that when they go up, temperatures in the world's oceans trigger the emission of large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So the common view that man's industrial activity is a deciding factor in global warming has emerged from a misinterpretation of cause and effect relations. ~ Khabibullo Abdusamatov,

204:To her surprise, Jack didn’t seem at all fazed by all the exotic ideas she had had and wanted to try. She detailed them out, from a small single-story greenhouse that incorporated rabbit hutches to an extensive two-story generator-powered setup with pigs, cows, and chickens on the upper story, their excrement washed down through gunnels by a sprinkler system where it hit a vat, fermented, created methane to run the generator, and then was fed through a hydroponics system directly to the roots of the plants she was trying to grow. ~ Sara King,

205:The more greenhouse gas we create, the more warming we will get today, and the more warming we will continue to get in the coming decades and centuries. To make the situation even more serious and the need for action even more apparent and urgent, bear in mind that there is no stopping a large fraction of future warming, because billions and billions of tons of the gases that are going to bring it on are already in the air. Even the most fragile of them do not break down for decades. Their effects will be felt for millennia to come. ~ Bill Nye,

206:So we now know the formula for extinction. Something happens to increase global temperatures five to six degrees, which triggers a melting of the frozen carbon and methane oceanic reserves that then leads to further global warming devastating life on Earth. Thus, the pressing question for us today is this: Can seven billion people on the planet burning fossil fuels imitate the sort of carbon greenhouse gas release caused by the Permian lava flows, or the K/T mass extinction impact or whatever warming caused the PETM? The answer is yes. ~ Thom Hartmann,

207:The Christian is in a different position from other people who are trying to be good. They hope, by being good, to please God if there is one; or — if they think there is not — at least they hope to deserve approval from good men. But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us; just as the roof of a greenhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the sun shines on it. ~ C S Lewis,

208: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,

209:That is why the Christian is in a different position from other people who are trying to be good. They hope, by being good, to please God if there is one; or—if they think there is not—at least they hope to deserve approval from good men. But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us; just as the roof of a greenhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the sun shines on it. ~ C S Lewis,

210:One common strategy on which we should all be able to agree is to take steps to reduce the risk of human extinction when those steps are also highly effective in benefiting existing sentient beings. For example, eliminating or decreasing the consumption of animal products will benefit animals, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and lessen the chances of a pandemic resulting from a virus evolving among the animals crowded into today’s factory farms, which are an ideal breeding ground for viruses. That therefore looks like a high-priority strategy. Other ~ Peter Singer,

211:Soils could also be giving up their carbon stores: evidence emerged in 2005 that a vast expanse of western Siberia was undergoing an unprecedented thaw. The region, the largest frozen peat bog in the world, had begun to melt for the first time since it formed 11,000 years ago. Scientists believe the bog could begin to release billions of tonnes of methane locked up in the soils, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide. The World Meteorological Organisation recently reported the largest annual rise of methane levels in the atmosphere for a decade. ~ David Adam,

212:Regardless of where they strike, large asteroids would boil seas, fill the air with dust and acidic compounds, and perhaps induce carbon dioxide to cook off out of the rocks and into the air, triggering a strong greenhouse effect, all of which in turn would change the world’s climate faster than living things could adjust to. Giant impactors could create enormous waves in the ocean and in the atmosphere that could upset weather patterns around the world for extended periods. Perhaps asteroids have also helped unleash Earth’s internal heat and caused subsequent volcanism. ~ Bill Nye,

213:Millennials in the workplace have been called “orchids”2 (can’t survive outside the greenhouse) and “teacups”3 (chip easily and then are ruined), but to me the most prescient metaphor for young adults sent out into the world after being overparented is “veal”—a term coined by Massachusetts educator Joe Maruszczak—meaning they’re raised in controlled environments and led, metaphorically, to slaughter. None of us took a course called “how to hold your kid back,” but overparenting appears to be seriously poor preparation for life in the work world. In 2014, interested ~ Julie Lythcott Haims,

214:I must say that when I first learned of the existence of the Australian Greenhouse Office, I assumed it was responsible for supplying tomatoes to the Parliament House kitchen. But, no, as I soon learnt as industry minister, it was in fact a government funded redoubt of veritable soldiers in a war against carbon dioxide. The zealotry and obsessive passion of these warriors in the battle against the apparent evils of carbon dioxide remains a curiosity to me. After fighting these people for three years as industry minister, I really did wish they would just go away and grow tomatoes. ~ Nick Minchin,

215:After Venus lost its oceans to a runaway greenhouse, the interior also would have started to dry out, and this might have shut down plate tectonics. The question has forced a closer look at how and why plate tectonics works on Earth. We’ve learned there are many ways that plate tectonics is aided and lubricated by the presence of our planet’s pervasive hydrosphere. Venus could have started out with Earth-style plate tectonics and then lost its ability to recycle its surface and interior, as it lost its water to a runaway greenhouse, and the interior of the planet was slowly wrung dry. ~ David Grinspoon,

216:Increasingly, our leaders must deal with dangers that threaten the entire world, where an understanding of those dangers and the possible solutions depends on a good grasp of science. The ozone layer, the greenhouse effect, acid rain, questions of diet and heredity. All require scientific literacy. Can Americans choose the proper leaders and support the proper programs if they themselves are scientifically illiterate? The whole premise of democracy is that it is safe to leave important questions to the court of public opinion - but is it safe to leave them to the court of public ignorance? ~ Isaac Asimov,

217:Sorry, old girl," I said to [my bicycle] Gladys in the gray dishwater light of early morning, "but I have to leave you at home."

I could see that she was disappointed, even though she managed to put on a brave face.

"I need you to stay here as a decoy," I whispered. "When they see you leaning against the greenhouse, they'll think I'm still in bed."

Gladys brightened considerably at the thought of a conspiracy. [...]

At the corner of the garden, I turned, and mouthed the words, "Don't do anything I wouldn't do," and Gladys signaled that she wouldn't.

I was off like a shot. ~ Alan Bradley,

218:Some of the scientists on Dr. Molina’s committee like to point out that people can be pretty intelligent about managing risk in their personal lives. It is unlikely that your house will burn down, yet you spend hundreds of dollars a year on insurance. When you drive to work in the morning, the odds are low that some careless driver will slam into you, but it is possible, so we have spent tens of billions of dollars putting seatbelts and air bags in our cars. The issue of how much to spend on lowering greenhouse gases is, in essence, a question about how much insurance we want to buy against worst-case outcomes. ~ Anonymous,

219:We waited several long moments and I was sure it hadn’t worked until I saw Aleks come out of the greenhouse. I’d warned him not to look in our direction since he’d be in view of the security cameras, but as he headed towards the house, he cast a glance over his shoulder and scanned the fence line. When his eyes came to rest on us, I froze and I swore my heart stopped beating. The encounter lasted mere seconds, but it was enough. And even if I hadn’t been certain that he’d seen the note, his slight nod just before he turned and went into the house would have told me all I needed to know. My brother knew I had finally come for him. ~ Sloane Kennedy,

220:Okay, so we have a ghost-spy.”
“A ghost-spy who can do magic,” Jenna added.
I nodded. “Even better. Which means that maybe the playing field is leveled after all.”
Jenna squeezed my hand, and I was actually feeling kind of optimistic as we approached the greenhouse. I mean, I wasn’t going to start skipping or anything (mostly because I was afraid I’d slip in all the muck), but all in all, I felt worlds better.
Through the glass walls of the greenhouse, I could see most of the other students standing in a circle, and I was in a good enough mood to joke to Jenna, “Ooh, wonder if we’re gonna play Duck, Duck, Demon. ~ Rachel Hawkins,

221:In Bangladesh alone, tens of millions are expected to have to flee from low-lying plains in coming years because of sea level rise and more severe weather, creating a migrant crisis that will make today's pale in significance. With considerable justice, Bangladesh's leading climate scientist says that "These migrants should have the right to move to the countries from which all these greenhouse gases are coming. Millions should be able to go to the United States." And to the other rich countries that have grown wealthy while bringing about a new geological era, the Anthropocene, marked by radical human transformation of the environment. ~ Noam Chomsky,

222:for the next century could raise the world’s temperature some 4°C (7.2°F), bringing serious coastal flooding and other damage.” The Conservation Foundation urged renewed funding for Keeling’s CO 2 project and pressed the National Academy of Sciences to pay attention to the subject. From then on, awareness of climate change ascended right along with the Keeling Curve. In 1971 Barry Commoner’s environmentalist bestseller, The Closing Circle, gave an early public warning about greenhouse gases. In 1978 a young congressman from Tennessee, Albert Gore, held hearings on global warming, starring his Harvard teacher Roger Revelle, who had sponsored the Keeling CO 2 research ~ Stewart Brand,

223:Cold men destroy women,” my mother wrote me years later. “They woo them with something personable that they bring out for show, something annexed to their souls like a fake greenhouse, lead you in, and you think you see life and vitality and sun and greenness, and then when you love them, they lead you out into their real soul, a drafty, cavernous, empty ballroom, inexorably arched and vaulted and mocking you with its echoes—you hear all you have sacrificed, all you have given, landing with a loud clunk. They lock the greenhouse and you are as tiny as a figure in an architect’s drawing, a faceless splotch, a blur of stick limbs abandoned in some voluminous desert of stone. ~ Lorrie Moore,

224:Higher temperatures means more forest fires means fewer trees means less carbon absorption, means more carbon in the atmosphere, means a hotter planet still—and so on. A warmer planet means more water vapor in the atmosphere, and, water vapor being a greenhouse gas, this brings higher temperatures still—and so on. Warmer oceans can absorb less heat, which means more stays in the air, and contain less oxygen, which is doom for phytoplankton—which does for the ocean what plants do on land, eating carbon and producing oxygen—which leaves us with more carbon, which heats the planet further. And so on. These are the systems climate scientists call “feedbacks”; there are more. ~ David Wallace Wells,

225:I don’t want anything else bad to happen,” she whispered, her voice choked with tears. “I’m so sick to death of bad things happening, of seeing bad things that happened in the past! And I’m guilty of so many things. I’m sorry that I killed Mrs. Matthias and wrecked her stupid greenhouse back in the Eighties and I’m sorry I left you here alone while I went around the world.”

“I wasn’t alone though, I knew you were doing what you wanted to do and that you were still alive, so I wasn’t really alone, I knew you were still there somewhere,” Alecto told her. His damaged smile and downcast, sorrowful eyes were draped in the shadow of the night, saving Mandy the trouble of seeing. ~ Rebecca McNutt,

226:The IPCC had clearly stated that the unrestricted fossil fuel use would produce a “rate of increase of global mean temperature during the next century of about .3 C per decade; this is greater than that seen over the past 10,000 years.”86 Singer rejected this, asserting instead that “the scientific base for [greenhouse warming] includes some facts, lots of uncertainty, and just plain ignorance.” He concluded emphatically, “The scientific base for a greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time.”87 This, of course, was precisely what he had said about acid rain. And ozone depletion. It was easy to see why many working scientists didn’t like Fred Singer. ~ Naomi Oreskes,

227:All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they’d grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain’t what it used to be. The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers. ~ Neal Stephenson,

228:Canadian team created the Enviropig, an environmentally friendly transgenic pig containing an E. coli gene that allowed the animals to better digest a phosphorus-containing compound called phytate. Normal pig manure retains high phosphorus levels that leach into streams and rivers, causing algal blooms, the death of aquatic animals, and the production of greenhouse gases; Enviropig manure contained 75 percent less phosphorus, which could have been an enormous benefit to the planet and to the people who lived and worked near pig farms. Despite this, though, and despite reassuring safety data, consumers decried the Enviropig, causing the project’s financial backers to pull the plug. ~ Jennifer A Doudna,

229:Look at it!” George’s voice shuddered with barely contained awe. “Look at it! Don’t you want to experience it? Don’t you want to be brave? You are not a gentle flower who spends its whole life in a greenhouse. You are a wildfire, Lark. A wildfire.”
A sun burst on the images, its violent fury drowning the cosmos.
“Dare to take that step and I will show you wonders beyond your imagination. I will give you a chance to make a difference. Come with me.” George offered his hand to her. “Live. Join me or not, but live, gods damn you, because I cannot stand the thought of you slowly aging here like some dusty fossil under glass. Take my hand and bring your sword. The universe is waiting. ~ Ilona Andrews,

230:That night I kept thinking about Pandora's box. I wondered why someone would put a good thing as Hope in a box with sickness and kidnapping and murder. It was fortunate that it was there, though. If not, people would have the birds of sadness nesting in their hair all the time, because of nuclear war and the greenhouse effect and bombs and stabbings and lunatics.
There must have been another box with all the good things in it, like sunshine and love and trees and all that. Who had the good fortune to open that one, and was there one bad thing down there in the bottom of the good box? Maybe it was Worry. Even when everything seems fine and good, I worry that something will go wrong and change everything. ~ Sharon Creech,

231:We had been growing sweet potatoes under the greenhouse gas levels predicted for the next several hundred years, the levels that we’re likely to see if we, as a society, do nothing about carbon emissions. The potatoes grew bigger as carbon dioxide increased. This was not a surprise. We also saw that these big potatoes were less nutritious, much lower in protein content, no matter how much fertilizer we gave them. This was a bit of a surprise. It is also bad news, because the poorest and hungriest nations of the world rely on sweet potatoes for a significant amount of dietary protein. It looks as if the bigger potatoes of the future might feed more people while nourishing them less. I don’t have an answer for that one. The ~ Hope Jahren,

232:Sir, come quick. They've found a body in the canal."
I blew out my breath. Saved by the corpse.
...The corpse in question was Nigel Nicabar.
The watchers had collected the bodies found in Nigel's house, garden, and canal, and put them in the greenhouse located at the back of the garden. The necromancer's talents weren't with living things, so the greenhouse's tables were pretty much empty - at least of plants. Dead goblins lay under sheets and tarps. I couldn't help feeling that Nigel would have approved. What he wouldn't have approved of was being included among them. Nigel wouldn't have been caught dead surrounded by goblins, yet that's exactly how and where he was. I don't think he would have appreciated the irony. ~ Lisa Shearin,

233:What is the Paris Climate Agreement? 195 countries signed a pledge to keep global temperature rise below 2°C (3.6°F), and, if possible, below 1.5°C (2.7°F). All countries agree to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions to net zero as soon as possible in the second half of the century. The U.S. pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. India aims to install 175 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity by 2022. China will peak its CO2 emissions by 2030. Developed countries will provide $100 billion in climate finance by 2020. Countries should raise the ambition of their initial commitments over time to make sure we meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement entered into force on November 4, 2016. ~ Al Gore,

234:Tony Blair, who held the presidency of the G8 in 2005, spent the months leading up to that year’s summit trying to convince Bush that, in his words, “the time to act is now.” It’s plain, Blair said in an address devoted to climate change, that “the emission of greenhouse gases … is causing global warming at a rate that began as significant, has become alarming, and is simply unsustainable in the long-term. And by ‘long-term’I do not mean centuries ahead. I mean within the lifetime of my children certainly; and possibly within my own. And by ‘unsustainable,’ I do not mean a phenomenon causing problems of adjustment. I mean a challenge so far-reaching in its impact and irreversible in its destructive power, that it alters radically human existence. ~ Elizabeth Kolbert,

235:Global warming is not 'yes' or 'no', nor is it 'today's weather forever' or 'doomsday tomorrow'. It is a function that gets worse over time as long as we continue to produce greenhouse gas. And so the experience of life in a climate transformed by human activity is not just a matter of stepping from one stable ecosystem into another, somewhat worse one, no matter how degraded or destructive the transformed climate is. The effects will grow and build as the planet continues to warm: from 1 degree to 1/5 to almost certainly 2 degrees and beyond. The last few years of climate disasters may look like about as much as the planet can take. In fact, we are only just entering our brave, new world, one that collapses below us as soon as we set foot on it. ~ David Wallace Wells,

236:Think of Type X behavior as coal and Type I behavior as the sun. For most of recent history, coal has been the cheapest, easiest, most efficient resource. But coal has two downsides. First, it produces nasty things like air pollution and greenhouse gases. Second, it’s finite; getting more of it becomes increasingly difficult and expensive each year. Type X behavior is similar. An emphasis on rewards and punishments spews its own externalities (as enumerated in Chapter 2). And “if-then” motivators always grow more expensive. But Type I behavior, which is built around intrinsic motivation, draws on resources that are easily replenished and inflict little damage. It is the motivational equivalent of clean energy: inexpensive, safe to use, and endlessly renewable. ~ Daniel H Pink,

237:There is no doubt that the United States has much to atone for, both domestically and abroad...To produce this horrible confection at home, start with our genocidal treatment of the Native Americans, add a couple hundred years of slavery, along with our denial of entry to Jewish refugees fleeing the death camps of the Third Reich, stir in our collusion with a long list of modern despots and our subsequent disregard for their appalling human rights records, add our bombing of Cambodia and the Pentagon Papers to taste, and then top with our recent refusals to sign the Kyoto protocol for greenhouse emissions, to support any ban on land mines, and to submit ourselves to the rulings of the International Criminal Court. The result should smell of death, hypocrisy, and fresh brimstone. ~ Sam Harris,

238:It's already happening. After falling for years, California's greenhouse gas emissions rose 1.7 percent in 2012, pushed up by the drought and the closure of the San Onofre nuclear plant in San Diego County. The state has not yet released emissions data for 2013. Experts say a sustained drought wouldn't prevent California from reaching its climate change goals. Instead, years of dry weather would force energy providers to find new strategies - ones that would likely cost more. In addition to being clean, hydropower tends to be cheap. "It makes things harder," said Victor Niemeyer, program manager for greenhouse gas reductions at the Electric Power Research Institute. "If there's less hydro, the power has to come from somewhere. You have to burn more gas, and that costs more money, all things considered. ~ Anonymous,

239:Complexity is a delicate business. Chemical and molecular bonds require a particular range of temperature in which to operate. Liquid water exists over a mere one hundred degree range on the centigrade scale. Even Earth-based life is concentrated towards particular climatic zones. The temperature at the Earth's surface keeps it tantalizingly balanced between recurrent ice ages and the roasting that results from a runaway greenhouse effect. Very slight differences in the size of our planet or its distance from the Sun would have tipped the scales irretrievably towards one or other of these fates. That such a delicate balance, which is essentially the outcome of those random symmetry-breakings that we discussed in Chapter 6, should be so crucial suggests that natural complexity may be a rather rare thing in the Universe. ~ John D Barrow,

240:I remembered what Morrie said during our visit: “The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it.”

"Morrie true to these words, had developed his own culture – long before he got sick. Discussion groups, walks with friends, dancing to his music in the Harvard Square church. He started a project called Greenhouse, where poor people could receive mental health services. He read books to find new ideas for his classes, visited with colleagues, kept up with old students, wrote letters to distant friends. He took more time eating and looking at nature and wasted not time in front of TV sitcoms or “Movies of the Week.” He had created a cocoon of human activities– conversations, interaction, affection–and it filled his life like an overflowing soup bowl. ~ Mitch Albom,

241:Samuel Gardner
I who kept the greenhouse,
Lover of trees and flowers,
Oft in life saw this umbrageous elm,
Measuring its generous branches with my eye,
And listened to its rejoicing leaves
Lovingly patting each other
With sweet aeolian whispers.
And well they might:
For the roots had grown so wide and deep
That the soil of the hill could not withhold
Aught of its virtue, enriched by rain,
And warmed by the sun;
But yielded it all to the thrifty roots,
Through which it was drawn and whirled to the trunk,
And thence to the branches, and into the leaves,
Wherefrom the breeze took life and sang.
Now I, an under-tenant of the earth, can see
That the branches of a tree
Spread no wider than its roots.
And how shall the soul of a man
Be larger than the life he has lived?
~ Edgar Lee Masters,

242:Venus is very much like Earth in size and composition, but its surface temperature is about 460° C (860 F), hotter than your oven when it’s set to “broil.” The difference between the temperatures of Earth and Venus is not because Venus is slightly closer to the Sun. No, Venus is hot primarily because its atmosphere is full of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that keeps the Sun’s heat trapped in the planet’s atmosphere. Venus is the extreme case of climate change: There is no way life, as we know it, could survive at those beyond-broiling temperatures. It would take a big change in Earth’s geology and chemistry for it to become exactly like Venus. But humans are pouring carbon dioxide into Earth’s atmosphere right now at an alarming rate, shoving our climate in that high-carbon direction, which is a terrifying prospect. We do not want to become even a little like Venus. We ~ Bill Nye,

243:the destruction of Indian societies by European epidemics both decreased native burning and increased tree growth. Each subtracted carbon dioxide from the air. In 2010 a research team led by Robert A. Dull of the University of Texas estimated that reforesting former farmland in American tropical regions alone could have been responsible for as much as a quarter of the temperature drop—an analysis, the researchers noted, that did not include the cutback in accidental fires, the return to forest of unfarmed but cleared areas, and the entire temperate zone. In the form of lethal bacteria and viruses, in other words, the Columbian Exchange (to quote Dull’s team) “significantly influenced Earth’s carbon budget.” It was today’s climate change in reverse, with human action removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere rather than adding them—a stunning meteorological overture to the Homogenocene. ~ Charles C Mann,

244:The Great Oxygenation Event was contemporaneous with one of the most severe ice ages this world has ever known, an event known to geo-nerds as the Paleoproterozoic Snowball Earth episode.* This was probably no coincidence. At the time, Earth’s climate was likely being kept above freezing by a methane greenhouse. Methane is such a powerful infrared absorber that a very small amount of it can significantly warm a planet. It is also, however, an organic molecule that is easily and eagerly consumed by oxygen. So when all that oxygen released by the cyanobacteria built up in the atmosphere, it quickly destroyed the methane greenhouse, the atmosphere suddenly became more transparent to infrared radiation, and the temperature plummeted, plunging our planet into a complete global freeze. Such a deeply frozen condition could even potentially become a permanent dead-end state for a planet like Earth. ~ David Grinspoon,

245:I was so distracted when walking out of the restroom that I hadn't noticed Rose standing nearby with Dimitri Belikov. They stood arm in arm, smiling at my surprise. I hadn't seen Dimitri tonight, and his black and white guardian attire told me why. He was on duty here and had undoubtedly been one of the shadows darting among the trees of the greenhouse, keeping a watch on everyone. He must be on break now because there was no way he'd be standing so casually here, even with Rose, otherwise. And really, "casual" for Dimitri meant he could still leap into battle at any moment.

They were a striking couple. His dark-haired, dark-eyed looks matched hers, and they were both dazzlingly attractive. It was no wonder Adrian had fallen for her, and I felt surprised at how uncomfortable that memory made me. Like Sonya and Mikhail, there was a bond of love between Rose and Dimitri and Rose that was almost palpable. ~ Richelle Mead,

246:Tomorrow
for: max and alyssa
malyyssax worelish
tomorrow we'll see the lightbulb in schenectady,
go to gems farms in schodack, then on to howe caverns,
then to see the wayne thiebaud show at the clark
where we'll stop to notice the melting ice sculpture
then excellent spinach sap soup at the thai restaurant
in williamstown, a brief stop at the octagonal museum,
on to northampton to see the smith college art museum
& greenhouse where we'll see a green heron
it would be nice to be able to walk today
so we could go to opus 40 in saugerties
followed by a dinner of oysters & mussels at the bear
then on to check out the sheep at the sheepherding inn
where we're able to buy riccotta cheese
which means twice-baked, with which we're able
to make a pizza with fresh figs gotten from the berry farm
war what is it good for?
absolutely nothing
~ Bernadette Mayer,

247:Orchid Anatomy
This evening's study the anatomy of the orchid,
the greenhouse glows—jut of glass at the third story
of the science building—a small, tended jungle
thriving in its humid room. Wearing identical
lab aprons, they lean over the misting table
or peer into the daintier air-orchids
in order to name and sketch the parts,
committing to memory the sepials, inner whorl
of petals, the column where male and female
fuse, and the sticky, stigmatic surface
of the pouting lip where birds, moths,
and bees would land if allowed this sterile
world. Each wall even the vaulted roof
a canvas, all their breathing dissolves
into the ordered atmosphere of this
one, sustained season—until, if seen
from the outside, the glass's weeping would
render them recognizable but changed,
their bodies, braids, aprons, the green leaves running
into a pleasing, impressionistic bleed.
~ Claudia Emerson,

248:It was a dazed, shambling kind of afternoon, a day seen through a scrim, the time gliding by. When I first met a lot of orchid people, they also said that time spent in a greenhouse had a rare, shapeless quality - a day could go by and they wouldn't even notice it had passed if they had spent it among their orchids. That afternoon at Dewey's the light shifted and still we roved around the shadehouse picking up plants, smelling things, rubbing fingers on slick leaves, poking thumbs into dirt, and every couple of minutes Dewey and Laroche would pause and both would light cigarettes and stand in front of some delicate green sprig of something, smoking hard and wordlessly admiring it. I wasn't in any hurry to leave, even though I should have been. Being int he shadehouse was restful in a way that being around people can never be, and it was vivid the way being around lifeless objects can never be, and in the veil of evening air it was as fantastic as a dream. ~ Susan Orlean,

249:Dickens knew there were vast reserves of methane hydrate trapped frozen in sea-beds all around the world and wondered what would happen if a lot of that frozen methane on the sea floor had melted from a solid into a gas, and bubbled up from the ocean’s depths? Would it be enough to account for the “signature” of carbon-12 that geologists were finding in the rocks associated with the Permian Mass Extinction? So he went back to the lab and melted frozen methane in water warm enough. The results were dramatic. The gas not only dissolved into the water, but it also rose up out of the water and into the air. Dickens published a paper in 1999 suggesting that a 5 degree Celsius increase in ocean temperatures would have been adequate to melt enough methane hydrate crystals to create the Permian carbon-12 signature. And such a massive release of methane, itself a greenhouse gas vastly more potent than CO2, would also trigger a catastrophic, swift warming of the planet. ~ Thom Hartmann,

250:We deserve healthy, organic and whole food that nourishes the body and the brain, that allows for both the full course of energy and the full rest of sleep at the end of a day well-lived and balances with service, love and dreaming, We deserve to know life without the threat of heart attacks at 50, or strokes or diabetes and blindness because the food we have access to and can afford os a loaded gun. And shelter. We deserve that too. Not the shelter that's lined with asbestos in the walls, or walls that are too thin to keep out the cold. Not the shelter with pipes that poor lead based water onto our skin, down our throats, in Flint, North Dakota, in New York, Mississippi. In places that don't make the news. We deserve the kind of shelter that is not a cage, whether that cage is a prison or its free-world equivalent. A shelter where our gifts are watered, where they have the space to grow, a greenhouse for all the we pull from our dreaming and are allowed to plant. ~ Patrisse Khan Cullors,

251:Jaidee studies the general's desk. "I wasn't aware that the Environment Ministry only inspected cargo at others' convenience."

"I am trying to reason with you. My hands are full with tigers: blister rust, weevil, the coal war, Trade Ministry infiltrators, yellow cards, greenhouse quotas, fa' gan outbreaks. . . And yet you choose to add another."

Jaidee looks up. "Who is it?"

"What do you mean?"

"Who is so angry that you're pissing your pants this way? Coming to ask me not to fight? It's Trade, yes? Someone in the Trade Ministry has you by the balls."

Pracha doesn't say anything for a moment. "I don't know who it is. Better that you don't know, either. What you do not know, you cannot fight." He slides a card across the desk. "This arrived today, under my door." His eyes lock on Jaidee so that Jaidee cannot look away. "Right here in the office. Inside the compound, you understand? We are completely infiltrated."

Jaidee turns over the card. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi,

252:I look at the bushes, the clods of dirt hanging from their roots, and catch my breath as the word rose registers. I’m about to yell vicious things at Peeta when the full name comes to me. Not plain rose but evening primrose. The flower my sister was named for. I give Peeta a nod of assent and hurry back into the house, locking the door behind me. But the evil thing is inside, not out. Trembling with weakness and anxiety, I run up the stairs. My foot catches on the last step and I crash onto the floor. I force myself to rise and enter my room. The smell’s very faint but still laces the air. It’s there. The white rose among the dried flowers in the vase. Shriveled and fragile, but holding on to that unnatural perfection cultivated in Snow’s greenhouse. I grab the vase, stumble down to the kitchen, and throw its contents into the embers. As the flowers flare up, a burst of blue flame envelops the rose and devours it. Fire beats roses again. I smash the vase on the floor for good measure. Back ~ Suzanne Collins,

253:Therefore they spent such time as I was housekeeping, eating or sleeping, alone in the greenhouse, and I had to manage as best I could when, after these intervals, I went back to them, not to be knocked over by their joyful welcome. Gradually, however, things settled down. The secret of peace with puppies, I discovered—up to then I had had only ready-made dogs (except Bijou, who doesn’t count), and had everything to learn,—is to give them a great deal of exercise, and a great deal of food. They should be gorged; regularly. Then they will sleep for hours—quite long enough, I found, in Ingo and Ivo’s case, for me to deal justly with Mr. Anstruther, against whom I had been feeling rather a grudge. This, then, was the line I took; and presently a new rug was able safely to be put in the greenhouse, and while they lay on it, stupefied by well-being, lost to the world, a relaxed heap of paws and ears and tails, with two tightly-filled bellies to point the moral, I got on, once again, with Fräulein Schmidt. ~ Elizabeth von Arnim,

254:When the Earth was only about a third of its eventual size, it was probably already beginning to form an atmosphere, mostly of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, methane and sulphur. Hardly the sort of stuff that we would associate with life, and yet from this noxious stew life formed. Carbon dioxide is a powerful greenhouse gas. This was a good thing, because the Sun was significantly dimmer back then. Had we not had the benefit of a greenhouse effect, the Earth might well have frozen over permanently25, and life might never have got a toehold. But somehow life did. For the next 500 million years the young Earth continued to be pelted relentlessly by comets, meteorites and other galactic debris, which brought water to fill the oceans and the components necessary for the successful formation of life. It was a singularly hostile environment, and yet somehow life got going. Some tiny bag of chemicals twitched and became animate. We were on our way. Four billion years later, people began to wonder how it had all happened. ~ Bill Bryson,

255:And when the ocean starts rising to the level of whatever building they're in and whatever floor they're on as they write their editorials, yeah, then they'll agree that there's a greenhouse effect and we'd better do something about it. Sure, no matter how lunatic people are, at some point or other they're going to realize that these problems exist, and they are approaching fast. It's just that the next thing they'll ask is, "So how can we make some money off it?" In fact, anybody in business who didn't ask that question would find themselves out of business—just because that's the way that capitalist institutions work. I mean, if some executive came along and said," I'm not going to look at it that way, I'm going to do things differently," well, they'd get replaced by someone who would try to make more money off it―because these are simply institutional facts, these are facts about the structure of the institutions. And if you don't like them, and I don't, then you're going to have to change the institutions. There really is no other way. ~ Noam Chomsky,

256:Over your lifetime, your individual greenhouse gas contribution will only increase the temperature of the planet by about a half a billionth of a degree Celsius. That, you might think, is such a small difference as to be negligible, so you shouldn't bother trying to reduce your personal emissions. This reasoning, however, doesn't consider expected value. It's true that increasing the planet's temperature by half a billionth of a degree probably won't make a difference to anyone, but sometimes it will make a difference, and when it does, the difference will be very large. Occasionally , that increase of half a billionth of a degree will cause a flood or a heatwave that wouldn't have happened otherwise. In which case the expected harm of raising global temperatures by half a billionth of a degree would be fairly great. We know that something like this has to be the case because we know that, if millions of people emit greenhouse gases, the bad effects are very large, and millions of people emitting greenhouse gases is just the sum of millions of individual actions. ~ William MacAskill,

257:A brief survey of Mere Christianity supplies the following list: becoming a Christian (passing over from life to death) is like joining a campaign of sabotage, like falling at someone’s feet or putting yourself in someone’s hands, like taking on board fuel or food, like laying down your rebel arms and surrendering, saying sorry, laying yourself open, turning full speed astern; it is like killing part of yourself, like learning to walk or to write, like buying God a present with his own money; it is like a drowning man clutching at a rescuer’s hand, like a tin soldier or a statue coming alive, like waking after a long sleep, like getting close to someone or becoming infected, like dressing up or pretending or playing; it is like emerging from the womb or hatching from an egg; it is like a compass needle swinging to north, or a cottage being made into a palace, or a field being plowed and resown, or a horse turning into a Pegasus, or a greenhouse roof becoming bright in the sunlight; it is like coming around from anesthetic, like coming in out of the wind, like going home. ~ Holly Ordway,

258:Having spent the better part of my life for the past several decades trying to learn from experts on the climate crisis and working with technology and policy innovators to develop solutions for the unprecedented challenge humanity faces, I have never been more hopeful. At this point in the fight to solve the climate crisis, there are only three questions remaining: Must we change? Can we change? Will we change? In the pages that follow, you will find the best available evidence supporting the overwhelming conclusion that the answer to the first two of these three questions is a resounding “Yes.” I am convinced that the answer to the third question—“Will we change?”—is also “Yes,” but that conclusion, unlike the answer to the first two questions, is in the nature of a prediction. And in order for that prediction to come true, there must be a continued strengthening of the global consensus embodied in the Paris Agreement of December 2015, in which virtually every nation on Earth agreed to take concerted action to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions to zero as early in the second half of this century as possible. ~ Al Gore,

259:Titan, by our standards, is really cold, at -290 degrees Fahrenheit. Without any methane greenhouse, it would be much colder still, by about 22 degrees. Yet, if we put all that methane into a basic climate model, we find that there should be about twice the level of greenhouse warming that is actually observed. What’s missing from the model? This question led to the discovery of the “anti-greenhouse effect.”5 It has to do with all that orange organic haze suspended in Titan’s upper atmosphere. It turns out that the passage of radiation through this haze is having an effect exactly opposite from that of a greenhouse gas: it blocks visible light but allows infrared light to pass through. Such a haze will prevent sunlight from warming a planet yet will allow the planet to cool efficiently into space. The effect on Titan’s climate is to negate about half the value of the greenhouse warming caused by methane. The Titan anti-greenhouse effect turns out also to be a pretty good match for what happens to Earth’s climate in the immediate aftermath of a huge asteroid impact or giant volcanic eruption and what would happen to it in the aftermath of a nuclear ~ David Grinspoon,

260:Imagine the problem is not physical. Imagine the problem has never been physical, that it is not biodiversity, it is not the ozone layer, it is not the greenhouse effect, the whales, the old-growth forest, the loss of jobs, the crack in the ghetto, the abortions, the tongue in the mouth, the diseases stalking everywhere as love goes on unconcerned. Imagine the problem is not some syndrome of our society that can be solved by commissions or laws or a redistribution of what we call wealth. Imagine that it goes deeper, right to the core of what we call our civilization and that no one outside of ourselves can effect real change, that our civilization, our governments are sick and that we are mentally ill and spiritually dead and that all our issues and crises are symptoms of this deeper sickness. Imagine the problem is not physical and no amount of driving, no amount of road will deal with the problem. Imagine that the problem is not that we are powerless or that we are victims but that we have lost the fire and belief and courage to act. We hear whispers of the future but we slap our hands against our ears, we catch glimpses but turn our faces swiftly aside. ~ Charles Bowden,

261:the TTAPS study and the wider debate it ignited helped drive home the absurdity of nuclear strategies dependent on massive deterrence. The United States and the USSR had created a situation where even a limited nuclear conflict would cause a climate disaster that could quite possibly, among other things, collapse global agriculture, dooming civilization as we know it. With these weapons, there was no destroying your enemy without also destroying yourself. It brought to mind Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant Cold War dark comedy, Dr. Strangelove, in which the Soviets create a “doomsday machine” that will detonate if a nuclear war starts, rendering the entire world uninhabitable. The TTAPS nuclear winter study revealed that we had, unwittingly, built such a machine. These results were widely discussed in the security communities of both superpowers, and are often cited as helping to motivate the partial disarmament that both sides undertook as the Cold War wound down. Anti-Greenhouse In all these studies, Pollack and his collaborators were discovering variations that can be induced, by changes in quantities of gases or suspended particles, in a planetary greenhouse. ~ David Grinspoon,

262:I sat down on my bed, trying to catch my breath, as Jenna opened the door. The Vandy stood there, glaring at us, and my heart plummeted. They knew. They’d sensed magic happening in here, and now they’d sent the Vandy to come collect us.
I sat there, trying not to pant in terror, while Jenna openly trembled.
“You were told to report to the greenhouse,” the Vandy said, her eyes going back and forth between us. “Now, get your skinny butts down there.”
You know when you have the most inappropriate reaction to something ever? I was so happy that we weren’t being hauled off to be murdered that I burst out laughing. I mean, big, loud, honking laughter. Jenna shot me a panicked look as the Vandy’s scowl got even darker. “What’s so funny, Miss Mercer?”
I stood up on wobbly legs and did my best to stop cracking up. “Sorry, it’s just, um…”
“You said ‘butts,’” Jenna blurted out. “And Sophie’s got a really immature sense of humor.”
“Right,” I said, seizing on that. “Butts. Ha ha!”
I think if the Vandy could have murdered us right then and there, she probably would have. Instead she just thrust one finger toward the staircase and said, “Move it.”
We scrambled from the room. ~ Rachel Hawkins,

263:In the eighteenth century, there was said to be a man who had read every book written. But nowadays, if you read one book a day, it would take you many tens of thousands of years to read through the books in a national library. By which time, many more books would have been written.
This has meant that no one person can be the master of more than a small corner of human knowledge. People have to specialise, in narrower and narrower fields. This is likely to be a major limitation in the future. We certainly cannot continue, for long, with the exponential rate of growth of knowledge that we have had in the last 300 years. An even greater limitation and danger for future generations is that we still have the instincts, and in particular the aggressive impulses, that we had in caveman days. Aggression, in the form of subjugating or killing other men and taking their women and food, has had definite survival advantage up to the present time. But now it could destroy the entire human race and much of the rest of life on Earth. A nuclear war is still the most immediate danger, but there are others, such as the release of a genetically engineered virus. Or the greenhouse effect becoming unstable. ~ Stephen Hawking,

264:And this is one of the first things one learns from Musk’s example—he is relentless in his pursuit of the bold and, the bigger point, totally unfazed by scale. When he couldn’t get a job, he started a company. When Internet commerce stalled, he reinvented banking. When he couldn’t find decent launch services for his Martian greenhouse, he went into the rocket business. And as a kicker, because he never lost interest in the problem of energy, he started both an electric car and a solar energy company. It is also worth pointing out that Tesla is the first successful car company started in America in five decades and that SolarCity has become one of the nation’s largest residential solar providers.9 All told, in slightly less than a dozen years, Musk’s appetite for bold has created an empire worth about $30 billion.10 So what’s his secret? Musk has a few, but none are more important to him than passion and purpose. “I didn’t go into the rocket business, the car business, or the solar business thinking this is a great opportunity. I just thought, in order to make a difference, something needed to be done. I wanted to have an impact. I wanted to create something substantially better than what came before. ~ Peter H Diamandis,

265:In the house Jake shoved his hands deep in his pockets as he stood at the window watching the women, his expression a mixture of stupefaction and ire. “Gawdamighty,” he breathed, glancing at Ian, who was scowling at the unopened, note in his hand. “The women are chasin’ you clear into Scotland! That’ll stop soon as the news is out that yer betrothed.” Reaching up, he idly scratched his bushy red hair and turned back to the window, peering down the path. The women had vanished from view, and he left the window. Unable to hide a tinge of admiration, he added, “Tell you one thing, that blond gel had spunk, you have to give her that. Cool as can be, she stood there tauntin’ you with your own words and callin’ you a swine. I don’t know a man what would dare to do that!”
“She’d dare anything,” Ian said, remembering the young temptress he’d known. When most girls her age were blushing and simpering, Elizabeth Cameron had asked him to dance at their first meeting. That same night she’d defied a group of men in the card room; the next day she’d risked her reputation to meet him in a cottage in the woods-and all that merely to indulge in what she’d described in the greenhouse as a “little weekend dalliance. ~ Judith McNaught,

266:All these beefy Caucasians with guns. Get enough of them together,looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain't what it used to be. The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers. But as long as you have that four-wheel-drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain it, keep moving just quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste stream. In twenty years, ten million white people will converge on the north pole and park their bagos there. The low-grade waste heat of their thermodynamically intense lifestyle will turn the crystalline icescape pliable and treacherous. It will melt a hole through the polar icecap, and all that metal will sink to the bottom, sucking the biomass down with it. ~ Neal Stephenson,

267:One consequence, presumably unintended, of America’s failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocol has been the emergence of a not-quite-grassroots movement. In February 2005, Greg Nickels, the mayor of Seattle, began to circulate a set of principles that he called the “U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement.” Within four months, more than a hundred and seventy mayors, representing some thirty-six million people, had signed on, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York; Mayor John Hickenlooper of Denver; and Mayor Manuel Diaz of Miami. Signatories agreed to “strive to meet or beat the Kyoto Protocol targets in their own communities.” At around the same time, officials from New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Maine announced that they had reached a tentative agreement to freeze power plant emissions from their states at current levels and then begin to cut them. Even Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Hummer collector, joined in; an executive order he signed in June 2005 called on California to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 2000 levels by 2010 and to 1990 levels by 2020. “I say the debate is over,” Schwarzenegger declared right before signing the order. ~ Elizabeth Kolbert,

268:Crutzen wrote up his idea in a short essay, “Geology of Mankind,” that ran in Nature. “It seems appropriate to assign the term ‘Anthropocene’ to the present, in many ways human-dominated, geological epoch,” he observed. Among the many geologic-scale changes people have effected, Crutzen cited the following: • Human activity has transformed between a third and a half of the land surface of the planet. • Most of the world’s major rivers have been dammed or diverted. • Fertilizer plants produce more nitrogen than is fixed naturally by all terrestrial ecosystems. • Fisheries remove more than a third of the primary production of the oceans’ coastal waters. • Humans use more than half of the world’s readily accessible fresh water runoff. Most significantly, Crutzen said, people have altered the composition of the atmosphere. Owing to a combination of fossil fuel combustion and deforestation, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air has risen by forty percent over the last two centuries, while the concentration of methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas, has more than doubled. “Because of these anthropogenic emissions,” Crutzen wrote, the global climate is likely to “depart significantly from natural behavior for many millennia to come. ~ Elizabeth Kolbert,

269:I was too awestruck to speak. Vines of bright pink flowers danced over a wrought-iron arbor. I recognized them immediately as the very same variety, bougainvillea, that grew in Greenhouse No. 4 at the New York Botanical Garden. Just beyond, two potted trees stood at attention- a lemon, its shiny yellow globes glistening in the sunlight, and what looked like an orange, studded with the tiniest fruit I'd ever seen.
"What is this?" I asked, fascinated.
"A kumquat," she said. "Lady Anna used to pick them for the children." She reached out to pluck one of the tiny oranges from the tree. "Here, try for yourself."
I held it in my hand, admiring its smooth, shiny skin.
I sank my teeth into the flesh of the fruit. Its thin skin disintegrated in my mouth, releasing a burst of sweet and sour that made my eyes shoot open and a smile spread across my face. "Oh, my," I said. "I've never had anything like it."
Mrs. Dilloway nodded. "You should try the clementines, then. They're Persian."
I walked a few paces further, admiring the potted orchids- at least a hundred specimens, so exquisite they looked like Southern belles in hoop skirts. On the far wall were variegated ferns, bleeding hearts, and a lilac tree I could smell from the other end of the room. ~ Sarah Jio,

270:He's outwardly respectable. (They say he cheats at cards.)
And his footprints are not found in any file of Scotland Yard's.
And when the larder's looted, or the jewel-case is rifled,
Or when the milk is missing, or another Peke's been stifled,
Or the greenhouse glass is broken, and the trellis past repair -
Ay, there's the wonder of the thing! Macavity's not there!

And when the Foreign Office find a Treaty's gone astray,
Or the Admiralty lose some plans and drawings by the way,
There may be a scrap of paper in the hall or on the stair -
But it's useless to investigate - Mcavity's not there!
And when the loss has been disclosed, the Secret Service say:
'It must have been Macavity!' - but he's a mile away.
You'll be sure to find him resting, or a-licking of his thumbs,
Or engaged in doing complicated long-division sums.

Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity,
There never was a Cat of such deceitfulness and suavity.
He always has an alibi, and one or two to spaer:
At whatever time the deed took place - MACAVITY WASN'T THERE!
And they say that all the Cats whose wicked deeds are widely known
(I might mention Mungojerrie, I might mention Griddlebone)
Are nothing more than agents for the Cat who all the time
Just controls their operations: the Napoleon of Crime! ~ T S Eliot,

271:Some of the world’s biggest banks and investor groups have swung behind a pledge to raise $200bn by the end of next year to combat climate change. In a move the UN said was unprecedented, leading insurers, pension funds and banks have joined forces to help channel the money to projects that will help poorer countries deal with the effect of global warming and cut reliance on fossil fuels. The announcement came at the start of a UN climate summit in New York aimed at bolstering momentum for a global agreement to lower planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions due to be signed in Paris at the end of 2015. “Change is in the air,” said UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon. “Today’s climate summit has shown an entirely new, co-operative global approach to climate change.” The summit opened with business and government pledges to make cities greener, create a renewable energy “corridor” in Africa and rein in the clearing of forests for palm oil plantations. The private sector’s contributions marked a “major departure” from past climate summits, the UN said, adding in a statement that financial groups “had never previously acted together on climate change at such a large scale”. One obstacle to the Paris agreement is developing countries’ insistence that richer nations must fulfil pledges made nearly five years ago to raise $100bn a year by 2020 for climate action. ~ Anonymous,

272:The lumbering bagos and topheavy
four-wheelers form a moving slalom course for Hiro on his black
motorcycle.
All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking for
the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like
overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools,
portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers,
they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a
blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them,
altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain't
what it used to be.
The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse
abuse, televangelists, and serial killers. But as long as you have that fourwheel-
drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain it, keep moving
just quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste stream. In twenty
years, ten million white people will converge on the north pole and park their
bagos there. The low-grade waste heat of their thermodynamically intense
lifestyle will turn the crystalline icescape pliable and treacherous. It will
melt a hole through the polar icecap, and all that metal will sink to the
bottom, sucking the biomass down with it. ~ Neal Stephenson,

273:Organic farming is environmentally friendlier to every acre of land. But it requires more acres. The trade-off is a harsh one. Would we rather have pesticides on farmland and nitrogen runoffs from them? Or would we rather chop down more forest?

How much more forest would we have to chop down? If we wanted to reduce pesticide use and nitrogen runoff by turning all of the world’s farmland to organic farming, we’d need about 50 percent more farmland than we have today. Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug, whose work helped triple crop yields over the last fifty years and arguably saved billions from starvation, estimates that the world would need an additional 5 to 6 billion head of cattle to produce enough manure to fertilize that farmland. There are only an estimated 1.3 billion cattle on the planet today.

Combined, we’d need to chop down roughly half of the world’s remaining forest to grow crops and to graze cattle that produce enough manure to fertilize those crops. Clearing that much land would produce around 500 billion tons of CO2, or almost as much as the total cumulative CO2 emissions of the world thus far. And the cattle needed to fertilize that land would produce far more greenhouse gases, in the form of methane, than all of agriculture does today, possibly enough to equal all human greenhouse gases emitted from all sources today.

That’s not a viable path. ~ Ramez Naam,

274:It is a myth that the free market breaks down national barriers. The free market does not threaten national sovereignty, it undermines democracy. As the disparity between the rich and the poor grows, the fight to corner resources is intensifying. To push through their 'sweetheart deals', to corporatize the crops we grow, the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the dreams we dream, corporate globalization needs an international confederation of loyal, corrupt, authoritarian governments in poorer countries to push through unpopular reforms and quell the mutinies. Corporate globalization - or shall we call by its name? Imperialism - needs a press that pretends to be free. It needs courts that pretend to dispense justice.
Meanwhile, the countries of the north harden their borders and stockpile weapons of mass destruction. Afterall, they have to make sure that it is only money, goods, patents, and services that are globalized. Not a respect for human rights. Not international treaties on racial discrimnation or chemical and nuclear weapons or greenhouse gas emissions or climate change or - God forid - justice.
So this - all this - is Empire. This loyal confederation, this obscene accumulation of power, this greatly increased distance between those who make the decisions and those who have to suffer them.
Our fight, our goal, our vision of another world must be to eliminate that distance. So how do we resist Empire? ~ Arundhati Roy,

275:What are you doing?” Alecto asked in surprise, stepping back. Laughing brightly, she dragged him towards the greenhouse, the shattered glass reflecting rainbows as brilliant as a million Kodak flashcubes, glittering as they were cascaded through the breeze. “See, don’t be afraid of the glass, it can’t hurt us,” Mandy laughed, spectacularly eccentric, her eyes reflecting the fallen glass.

“I wasn’t afraid of the glass, but this isn’t a very secluded place that you just decided to vandalize,” Alecto cautioned, smiling despite his words.

Before Mandy could reply, she heard loud whispering in the air, behind the trees… it sounded like a group of people, all whispering in unison… “Somebody’s out there,” she exclaimed nervously.

“Yeah, you’re right,” Alecto replied. Suddenly a sharp new vibrancy seemed to fill his eyes and he smiled coldly, taking the tree branch from Mandy and rapidly smashing in all of Mrs. Matthias’ stained glass house windows with it. Blue, green, yellow, red, turquoise, purple and an array of other colors showered through the sky noisily, sounding like wind chimes and crashing waves. “They’ll go away,” he told her, glancing up at the sky.

“…Alecto, do you like me?” Mandy questioned, holding out her arms like a lopsided scarecrow as the glass fell through her dark red hair.

“Yeah, sure,” he answered.

“Will you be my friend, then? A real friend, not just another person who feels sorry for me?” Mandy asked.

“…Alright, Mandy Valems,” Alecto agreed. ~ Rebecca McNutt,

276:Nothing in science can account for the way people feel about orchids. Orchids seem to drive people crazy. Those who love them love them madly. Orchids arouse passion more than romance. They are the sexiest flowers on earth. The name "orchid" derives from the Latin orchis, which means testicle. This refers not only to the testicle-shaped tubers of the plant but to the fact that it was long believed that orchids sprang from the spilled semen of mating animals. The British Herbal Guide of 1653 advised that orchids be used with discretion. "They are hot and moist in operation, under the dominion of Venus, and provoke lust exceedingly." In Victorian England the orchid hobby grew so consuming that it was sometimes called "orchidelirium"; under its influence many seemingly normal people, once smitten with orchids, became less like normal people and more like John Laroche. Even now, there is something delirious in orchid collecting. Every orchid lover I met told me the same story - how one plant in the kitchen had led to a dozen, and then to a backyard greenhouse, and then, in some cases, to multiple greenhouses and collecting trips to Asia and Africa and an ever-expanding orchid budget and a desire for oddities so stingy in their rewards that only a serious collector could appreciate them - orchids like the Stanhopea, which blooms only once a year for at most one day. "The bug hits you," a collector from Guatemala explained to me. "You can join A.A. to quit drinking, but once you get into orchids you can't do anything to kick the habit. ~ Susan Orlean,

277:Well, it's been obvious for centuries that capitalism is going to self-destruct: that's just inherent in the logic of system―because to the extent that a system is capitalist, that means maximizing short-term profit and not being concerned with long-term effects. In fact, the motto of capitalism was, "private vices, public benefits"―somehow it's gonna work out. Well, it doesn't work out, and it's never going to work out: if you're maximizing short-term profits without concern for the long-term effects, you are going to destroy the environment, for one thing. I mean, you can pretend up to a certain point that the world has infinite resources and that it's an infinite wastebasket―but at some point you're going to run into the reality, which is that that isn't true.
Well, we're running into that reality now―and it's very profound. Take something like combustion: anything you burn, no matter what it is, is increasing the greenhouse effect―and this was known to scientists decades ago, they knew exactly what was happening. But in a capitalist system, you don't care about long-term effects like that, what you have to care about is tomorrow's profits. So the greenhouse effect has been building for years, and there's no known technological fix on the horizon―there may not be any answer to this, it could be so serious that there's no remedy. That's possible, and then human beings will turn out to have been a lethal mutation, which maybe destroys a lot of life with us. Or it could be that there's some way of fixing it, or some ameliorating way―nobody knows. ~ Noam Chomsky,

278:He took a napkin-wrapped package out of the bag and offered it to her. “Also,” he added, “I make a mean cheese sandwich. Try one.”

Clary smiled reluctantly and sat down across from him. The stone floor of the greenhouse was cold against her skin, but it was pleasant after so many days of relentless heat. Out of the paper bag Jace drew some apples, a bar of fruit and nut chocolate, and a bottle of water. “Not a bad haul,” she said admiringly.

The cheese sandwich was warm and a little limp, but it tasted fine. From one of the innumerable pockets inside his jacket, Jace produced a bone-handled knife that looked capable of disemboweling a grizzly. He set to work on the apples, carving them into meticulous eighths. “Well, it’s not birthday cake,” he said, handing her a section, “but hopefully it’s better than nothing.”

“Nothing is what I was expecting, so thanks.” She took a bite. The apple tasted green and cool.

“Nobody should get nothing on their birthday.” He was peeling the second apple, the skin coming away in long curling strips. “Birthdays should be special. My birthday was always the one day my father said I could do or have anything I wanted.”

“Anything?” She laughed. “Like what kind of anything did you want?”

“Well, when I was five, I wanted to take a bath in spaghetti.”

“But he didn’t let you, right?”

“No, that’s the thing. He did. He said it wasn’t expensive, and why not if that was what I wanted? He had the servants fill a bath with boiling water and pasta, and when it cooled down …” He shrugged. “I took a bath in it.”

Servants? Clary thought. Out loud she said, “How was it?”

“Slippery. ~ Cassandra Clare,

279:So what then is “climate change”? As the WMO defines it, “climate change refers to a statistically significant variation in either the mean state of the climate or in its variability, persisting for an extended period (typically decades or longer).” The important thing to keep in mind here is that the climate changes because it is forced to change. And it is forced to change either by natural forces or by forces introduced by mankind. In other words, the climate varies naturally because of its own complex internal dynamics, but it changes because something forces it to change. The most important natural forces inducing climate change are changes in the earth’s orbit—which change the intensity of the sun’s radiation hitting different parts of the earth, which changes the thermal energy balance of the lower atmosphere, which can change the climate. Climate change, scientists know, can also be triggered by large volcanic eruptions, which can release so many dust particles into the air that they act as an umbrella and shield the earth from some of the sun’s radiation, leading to a cooling period. The climate can be forced to change by natural, massive releases of greenhouses gases from beneath the earth’s surface—gases, like methane, that absorb much more heat than carbon dioxide and lead to a sudden warming period. What is new about this moment in the earth’s history is that the force driving climate change is not a change in the earth’s orbit, not a volcanic eruption, not a sudden natural release of greenhouse gases—but the burning of fossil fuels, the cultivation of rice and livestock, and the burning and clearing of forests by mankind, which together are pumping carbon dioxide, methane, and other heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere a hundred times faster than nature normally does. ~ Thomas L Friedman,

280:ethanol may actually make some kinds of air pollution worse. It evaporates faster than pure gasoline, contributing to ozone problems in hot temperatures. A 2006 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that ethanol does reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 12 percent relative to gasoline, but it calculated that devoting the entire U.S. corn crop to make ethanol would replace only a small fraction of American gasoline consumption. Corn farming also contributes to environmental degradation due to runoff from fertilizer and pesticides.
But to dwell on the science is to miss the point. As the New York Times noted in the throes of the 2000 presidential race, ―Regardless of whether ethanol is a great fuel for cars, it certainly works wonders in Iowa campaigns. The ethanol tax subsidy increases the demand for corn, which puts money in farmers‘ pockets. Just before the Iowa caucuses, corn farmer Marvin Flier told the Times, ―Sometimes I think [the candidates] just come out and pander to us, he said. Then he added, ―Of course, that may not be the worst thing. The National Corn Growers Association figures that the ethanol program increases the demand for corn, which adds 30 cents to the price of every bushel sold.
Bill Bradley opposed the ethanol subsidy during his three terms as a senator from New Jersey (not a big corn-growing state). Indeed, some of his most important accomplishments as a senator involved purging the tax code of subsidies and loopholes that collectively do more harm than good. But when Bill Bradley arrived in Iowa as a Democratic presidential candidate back in 1992, he ―spoke to some farmers‖ and suddenly found it in his heart to support tax breaks for ethanol. In short, he realized that ethanol is crucial to Iowa voters, and Iowa is crucial to the presidential race. ~ Charles Wheelan,

281:As far as food is concerned, the great extravagance is not caviar or truffles, but beef, pork and poultry. Some 38 percent of the world's grain crop is now fed to animals, as well as large quantities of soybeans. There are three times as many domestic animals on this planet as there are human beings. The combined weight of the world's 1.28 billion cattle alone exceeds that of the human population. While we look darkly at the number of babies being born in poorer parts of the world, we ignore the over-population of farm animals, to which we ourselves contribute...[t]hat, however, is only part of the damage done by the animals we deliberately breed. The energy intensive factory farming methods of the industrialised nations are responsible for the consumption of huge amounts of fossil fuels. Chemical fertilizers, used to grow the feed crops for cattle in feedlots and pigs and chickens kept indoors in sheds, produce nitrous oxide, another greenhouse gas. Then there is the loss of forests. Everywhere, forest-dwellers, both human and non-human, can be pushed out. Since 1960, 25 percent of the forests of Central America have been cleared for cattle. Once cleared, the poor soils will support grazing for a few years; then the graziers must move on. Shrub takes over the abandoned pasture, but the forest does not return. When the forests are cleared so the cattle can graze, billions of tons of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere. Finally, the world's cattle are thought to produce about 20 percent of the methane released into the atmosphere, and methane traps twenty-five times as much heat from the sun as carbon dioxide. Factory farm manure also produces methane because, unlike manured dropped naturally in the fields, it dies not decompose in the presence of oxygen. All of this amounts to a compelling reason...for a plant based diet. ~ Peter Singer,

282:The last encounter was one Ian enjoyed, because Elizabeth was with him after they’d had their second-and last permissible-dance. Viscount Mondevale had approached them with Valerie hanging on his arm, and the rest of their group fanned around them. The sight of the young woman who’d caused them both so much pain evoked almost as much ire in Ian as the sight of Mondevale watching Elizabeth like a lovelorn swain.
“Mondevale,” Ian had said curtly, feeling the tension in Elizabeth’s fingers when she looked at Valerie, “I applaud your taste. I’m certain Miss Jamison will make you a fine wife, if you ever get up the spine to ask her. If you do, however, take my advice, and hire her a tutor, because she can’t write and she can’t spell.” Transferring his blistering gaze to the gaping young woman, Ian clipped, “’Greenhouse’ has a ‘u’ in it. Shall I spell ‘malice’ for you as well?”
“Ian,” Elizabeth chided gently as they walked away. “It doesn’t matter anymore.” She looked up at him and smiled, and Ian grinned back at her. Suddenly he felt completely in harmony with the world.
The feeling was so lasting that he managed to endure the remaining three weeks-with all the requisite social and courtship rituals and betrothal formalities-with equanimity while he mentally marked off each day before he could make her his and join his starving body with hers.
With a polite smile on his face Ian appeared at teas and mentally composed letters to his secretary; he sat through the opera and slowly undressed her in his mind; he endured eleven Venetian breakfasts where he mentally designed an entirely new kind of mast for his fleet of ships; he escorted her to eighteen balls and politely refrained from acting our his recurring fantasy of dismembering the fops who clustered around her, eyeing her lush curves and mouthing platitudes to her.
It was the longest three weeks of his life.
It was the shortest three weeks of hers. ~ Judith McNaught,

283:Adding carbon dioxide, or any other greenhouse gas, to the atmosphere by, say, burning fossil fuels or leveling forests is, in the language of climate science, an anthropogenic forcing. Since preindustrial times, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen by roughly a third, from 280 to 378 parts per million. During the same period, the concentration of methane has more than doubled, from .78 to 1.76 parts per million. Scientists measure forcings in terms of watts per square meter, or w/m2, by which they mean that a certain number of watts have been added (or, in the case of a negative forcing, like aerosols, subtracted) for every single square meter of the earth’s surface. The size of the greenhouse forcing is estimated, at this point, to be 2.5 w/m2. A miniature Christmas light gives off about four tenths of a watt of energy, mostly in the form of heat, so that, in effect (as Sophie supposedly explained to Connor), we have covered the earth with tiny bulbs, six for every square meter. These bulbs are burning twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, year in and year out. If greenhouse gases were held constant at today’s levels, it is estimated that it would take several decades for the full impact of the forcing that is already in place to be felt. This is because raising the earth’s temperature involves not only warming the air and the surface of the land but also melting sea ice, liquefying glaciers, and, most significant, heating the oceans, all processes that require tremendous amounts of energy. (Imagine trying to thaw a gallon of ice cream or warm a pot of water using an Easy-Bake oven.) The delay that is built into the system is, in a certain sense, fortunate. It enables us, with the help of climate models, to foresee what is coming and therefore to prepare for it. But in another sense it is clearly disastrous, because it allows us to keep adding CO2 to the atmosphere while fobbing the impacts off on our children and grandchildren. ~ Elizabeth Kolbert,

284:Elizabeth was standing at the edge of the grassy plateau, a few yards beyond where they’d held their shooting match. Wind ruffled through the trees, blowing her magnificent hair about her shoulders like a shimmering veil. He stopped a few steps away from her, looking at her, but seeing her as she had looked long ago-a young goddess in royal blue, descending a staircase, aloof, untouchable; an angry angel defying a roomful of men in a card room; a beguiling temptress in a woodcutter’s cottage, lifting her wet hair in front of the fire-and at the end, a frightened girl thrusting flowerpots into his hands to keep him from kissing her. He drew in a deep breath and shoved his hands into his pockets to keep from reaching for her.
“It’s a magnificent view,” she commented, glancing at him.
Instead of replying to her remark, Ian drew a long, harsh breath and said curtly, “I’d like you to tell me again what happened that last night. Why were you in the greenhouse?”
Elizabeth suppressed her frustration. “You know why I was there. You sent me a note. I thought it was from Valerie-Charise’s sister-and I went to the greenhouse.”
“Elizabeth, I did not send you a note, but I did receive one.”
Sighing with irritation, Elizabeth leaned her shoulders against the tree behind her. “I don’t see why we have to go through this again. You won’t believe me, and I can’t believe you.” She expected an angry outburst; instead he said, “I do believe you. I saw the letter you left on the table in the cottage. You have a lovely handwriting.”
Caught completely off balance by his solemn tone and his quiet compliment, she stared at him. “Thank you,” she said uncertainly.
“The note you received,” he continued. “What was the handwriting like?”
“Awful,” she replied, and she added with raised brows, “You misspelled ‘greenhouse.’”
His lips quirked with a mirthless smile. “I assure you I can spell it, and while my handwriting may not be as attractive as yours, it’s hardly an illegible scrawl. If you doubt me, I’ll be happy to prove it inside. ~ Judith McNaught,

285:You have insulted me and degraded me every time I’ve been in your presence. If my brother were here, he’d call you out! Since he is not here,” she continued almost mindlessly, “I shall demand my own satisfaction. If I were a man, I’d have the right to satisfaction on the field of honor, and as a woman I refuse to be denied that right.”
“You’re ridiculous.”
“Perhaps,” Elizabeth said softly, “but I also happen to be an excellent shot. I’m a far worthier opponent for you on the dueling field than my brother. Now, will you meet me outside, or shall I-I finish you here?” she threatened, so beside herself with fury that she never stopped to think how reckless, how utterly empty her threat was. Her coachman had insisted she learn to fire a weapon for her own protection, but although her aim was excellent when she’d practiced with targets, she had never shot a living thing.
“I’ll do no such silly damned thing.”
Elizabeth raised the gun higher. “Then I’ll have your apology right now.”
“What am I to apologize for?” he asked, still infuriatingly calm.
“You may start by apologizing for luring me into the greenhouse with that note.”
“I didn’t write a note. I received a note from you.”
“You have great difficulty sorting out the notes you send and don’t send, do you not?” she said. Without waiting for a reply she continued, “Next, you can apologize for trying to seduce me in England, and for ruining my reputation-“
“Ian!” Jake said, thunderstruck. “It’s one thing to insult a lady’s handwriting, but spoilin’ her reputation is another. A thing like that could ruin her whole life!”
Ian shot him an ironic glance. “Thank you, Jake, for that helpful bit of inflammatory information. Would you now like to help her pull the trigger?”
Elizabeth’s emotions veered crazily from fury to mirth as the absurdity of the bizarre tableau suddenly struck her: Here she was, holding a gun on a man in his own home, while poor Lucinda held another man at umbrella point-a man who was trying ineffectually to sooth matters by inadvertently heaping more fuel on the volatile situation. And then she recognized the stupid futility of it all, and that banished her flicker of mirth. ~ Judith McNaught,

286:Nostalgia
Remember the 1340's? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called "Find the Cow."
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.
Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet
marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags
of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.
Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle
while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.
These days language seems transparent a badly broken code.
The 1790's will never come again. Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the very tops of hills
and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.
I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the serenity of last month when we picked
berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.
Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.
As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
43
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess.
~ Billy Collins,

287:The principal energy sources of our present industrial civilization are the so-called fossil fuels. We burn wood and oil, coal and natural gas, and, in the process, release waste gases, principally CO2, into the air. Consequently, the carbon dioxide content of the Earth’s atmosphere is increasing dramatically. The possibility of a runaway greenhouse effect suggests that we have to be careful: Even a one- or two-degree rise in the global temperature can have catastrophic consequences. In the burning of coal and oil and gasoline, we are also putting sulfuric acid into the atmosphere. Like Venus, our stratosphere even now has a substantial mist of tiny sulfuric acid droplets. Our major cities are polluted with noxious molecules. We do not understand the long-term effects of our course of action. But we have also been perturbing the climate in the opposite sense. For hundreds of thousands of years human beings have been burning and cutting down forests and encouraging domestic animals to graze on and destroy grasslands. Slash-and-burn agriculture, industrial tropical deforestation and overgrazing are rampant today. But forests are darker than grasslands, and grasslands are darker than deserts. As a consequence, the amount of sunlight that is absorbed by the ground has been declining, and by changes in the land use we are lowering the surface temperature of our planet. Might this cooling increase the size of the polar ice cap, which, because it is bright, will reflect still more sunlight from the Earth, further cooling the planet, driving a runaway albedo* effect? Our lovely blue planet, the Earth, is the only home we know. Venus is too hot. Mars is too cold. But the Earth is just right, a heaven for humans. After all, we evolved here. But our congenial climate may be unstable. We are perturbing our poor planet in serious and contradictory ways. Is there any danger of driving the environment of the Earth toward the planetary Hell of Venus or the global ice age of Mars? The simple answer is that nobody knows. The study of the global climate, the comparison of the Earth with other worlds, are subjects in their earliest stages of development. They are fields that are poorly and grudgingly funded. In our ignorance, we continue to push and pull, to pollute the atmosphere and brighten the land, oblivious of the fact that the long-term consequences are largely unknown. ~ Carl Sagan,

288:Do you think you would like to test it with me?” Pete asked. He held out his hand, and Beatriz thought for a moment before taking it. Together they climbed onto the amber-brown dance stage and walked across the boards into the very center. They stopped and faced each other. “I don’t know how to dance,” Beatriz admitted. “I don’t either,” Pete said. “I guess we’ll figure it out.” Beatriz took his free hand and put it on her waist. “It’s cold,” Beatriz said. “It is,” Pete said. He stood a little closer to her so that they were warm together. “There’s no music,” Beatriz said. “We need the radio.” But the station had long since gone quiet, and Diablo Diablo had long since turned back into Joaquin. Pete put his voice right by Beatriz’s ear so that his breath warmed her skin, and he began to sing. It was nothing extravagant, just Patsy Cline sung in his low and uneven voice, and they began to dance. It was very quiet. No one else would have seen if not for the desert. But when the desert heard Pete Wyatt singing a love song, it took notice. The desert loved him, after all, and wanted him happy. So when it heard Pete singing, it rose a wind around them until the breeze sang gently like strings, and when it heard Pete singing, it provoked the air to heat and cool around every stone and plant so that each of these things sounded in harmony with his voice, and when it heard Pete singing, it roused Colorado’s grasshoppers to action and they rubbed their legs together like a soft horn section, and when it heard Pete singing, it shifted the very ground beneath Bicho Raro so that the sand and the dirt pounded a beat that matched the sound of the incomplete heart that lived in Pete Wyatt. The sound of this roused the Sorias from their sleep. Francisco looked out of his greenhouse and saw Pete and Beatriz dancing, and he missed Antonia. Antonia looked out the window of her house and saw Pete and Beatriz dancing, and she missed Francisco. Luis the one-handed took out his future love’s box of gloves from beside his bed and counted them. Nana reached for the photograph of her long-dead husband. Michael had been sleeping rolled up in his own lengthy beard, but he woke up and returned to sleep rolled up with Rosa instead. Judith looked out her window and wept with happiness to see her sister happy, and Eduardo wept, too, because he always liked to dress to match his wife when he could. ~ Maggie Stiefvater,

289:People employ what economists call “rational ignorance.” That is, we all spend our time learning about things we can actually do something about, not political issues that we can’t really affect. That’s why most of us can’t name our representative in Congress. And why most of us have no clue about how much of the federal budget goes to Medicare, foreign aid, or any other program. As an Alabama businessman told a Washington Post pollster, “Politics doesn’t interest me. I don’t follow it. … Always had to make a living.” Ellen Goodman, a sensitive, good-government liberal columnist, complained about a friend who had spent months researching new cars, and of her own efforts study the sugar, fiber, fat, and price of various cereals. “Would my car-buying friend use the hours he spent comparing fuel-injection systems to compare national health plans?” Goodman asked. “Maybe not. Will the moments I spend studying cereals be devoted to studying the greenhouse effect on grain? Maybe not.” Certainly not —and why should they? Goodman and her friend will get the cars and the cereal they want, but what good would it do to study national health plans? After a great deal of research on medicine, economics, and bureaucracy, her friend may decide which health-care plan he prefers. He then turns to studying the presidential candidates, only to discover that they offer only vague indications of which health-care plan they would implement. But after diligent investigation, our well-informed voter chooses a candidate. Unfortunately, the voter doesn’t like that candidate’s stand on anything else — the package-deal problem — but he decides to vote on the issue of health care. He has a one-in-a-hundred-million chance of influencing the outcome of the presidential election, after which, if his candidate is successful, he faces a Congress with different ideas, and in any case, it turns out the candidate was dissembling in the first place. Instinctively realizing all this, most voters don’t spend much time studying public policy. Give that same man three health insurance plans that he can choose from, though, and chances are that he will spend time studying them. Finally, as noted above, the candidates are likely to be kidding themselves or the voters anyway. One could argue that in most of the presidential elections since 1968, the American people have tried to vote for smaller government, but in that time the federal budget has risen from $178 billion to $4 trillion. ~ David Boaz,

290:It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding remotely; that it is strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines, not an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life undeformed; that it is a crisis of the “natural” world, not the human one; that those two are distinct, and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not inescapably within and literally overwhelmed by it; that wealth can be a shield against the ravages of warming; that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth; that growth, and the technology it produces, will allow us to engineer our way out of environmental disaster; that there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat, in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence in staring it down. None of this is true. But let’s begin with the speed of change. The earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a wiping of the fossil record that it functioned as an evolutionary reset, the planet’s phylogenetic tree first expanding, then collapsing, at intervals, like a lung: 86 percent of all species dead, 450 million years ago; 70 million years later, 75 percent; 125 million years later, 96 percent; 50 million years later, 80 percent; 135 million years after that, 75 percent again. Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high school textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs involved climate change produced by greenhouse gas. The most notorious was 250 million years ago; it began when carbon dioxide warmed the planet by five degrees Celsius, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane, another greenhouse gas, and ended with all but a sliver of life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster. The rate is one hundred times faster than at any point in human history before the beginning of industrialization. And there is already, right now, fully a third more carbon in the atmosphere than at any point in the last 800,000 years—perhaps in as long as 15 million years. There were no humans then. The oceans were more than a hundred feet higher. ~ David Wallace Wells,

291:I only have the story in two parts from Miss Throckmorton-Jones. The first time she spoke she was under the influence of laudanum. Today she was under the influence of what I can only describe as the most formidable temper I’ve ever seen. However, while I may not have the complete story, I certainly have the gist of it, and if half what I’ve heard is true, then it’s obvious that you are completely without either a heart or a conscience! My own heart breaks when I imagine Elizabeth enduring what she has for nearly two years. When I think of how forgiving of you she has been-“
“What did the woman tell you?” Ian interrupted shortly, turning and walking over to the window.
His apparent lack of concern so enraged the vicar that he surged to his feet and stalked over to Ian’s side, glowering at his profile. “She told me you ruined Elizabeth Cameron’s reputation beyond recall,” he snapped bitterly. “She told me that you convinced that innocent girl-who’d never been away from her country home until a few weeks before meeting you-that she should meet you in a secluded cottage, and later in a greenhouse. She told me that the scene was witnessed by individuals who made great haste to spread the gossip, and that it was all over the city in a matter of days. She told me Elizabeth’s fiancé heard of it and withdrew his offer because of you. When he did that, society assumed Elizabeth’s character must indeed be of the blackest nature, and she was summarily dropped by the ton. She told me that a few days later Elizabeth’s brother fled England to escape their creditors, who would have been paid off when Elizabeth made an advantageous marriage, and that he’s never returned.” With grim satisfaction the vicar observed the muscle that was beginning to twitch in Ian’s rigid jaw. “She told me the reason for Elizabeth’s going to London in the first place had been the necessity for making such a marriage-and that you destroyed any chance of that ever happening. Which is why that child will now have to marry a man you describe as a lecher three times her age!” Satisfied that his verbal shots were finding their mark, he fired his final, most killing around. “As a result of everything you have done, that brave, beautiful girl has been living in shamed seclusion for nearly two years. Her house, of which she spoke with such love, has been stripped of its valuables by creditors. I congratulate you, Ian. You have made an innocent girl into an impoverished leper! And all because she fell in love with you on sight. Knowing what I now know of you, I can only wonder what she saw in you! ~ Judith McNaught,

292:Cripples And Other Stories
My doctor, the comedian
I called you every time
and made you laugh yourself
when I wrote this silly rhyme...
Each time I give lectures
or gather in the grants
you send me off to boarding school
in training pants.
God damn it, father-doctor,
I'm really thirty-six.
I see dead rats in the toilet.
I'm one of the lunatics.
Disgusted, mother put me
on the potty. She was good at this.
My father was fat on scotch.
It leaked from every orifice.
Oh the enemas of childhood,
reeking of outhouses and shame!
Yet you rock me in your arms
and whisper my nickname.
Or else you hold my hand
and teach me love too late.
And that's the hand of the arm
they tried to amputate.
Though I was almost seven
I was an awful brat.
I put it in the Easy Wringer.
It came out nice and flat.
I was an instant cripple
from my finger to my shoulder.
The laundress wept and swooned.
52
My mother had to hold her.
I know I was a cripple.
Of course, I'd known it from the start.
My father took the crowbar
and broke the wringer's heart.
The surgeons shook their heads.
They really didn't knowWould the cripple inside of me
be a cripple that would show?
My father was a perfect man,
clean and rich and fat.
My mother was a brilliant thing.
She was good at that.
You hold me in your arms.
How strange that you're so tender!
Child-woman that I am,
you think that you can mend her.
As for the arm,
unfortunately it grew.
Though mother said a withered arm
would put me in Who's Who.
For years she has described it.
She sang it like a hymn.
By then she loved the shrunken thing,
my little withered limb.
My father's cells clicked each night,
intent on making money.
And as for my cells, they brooded,
little queens, on honey.
Oh boys too, as a matter of fact,
and cigarettes and cars.
Mother frowned at my wasted life.
My father smoked cigars.
53
My cheeks blossomed with maggots.
I picked at them like pearls.
I covered them with pancake.
I wound my hair in curls.
My father didn't know me
but you kiss me in my fever.
My mother knew me twice
and then I had to leave her.
But those are just two stories
and I have more to tell
from the outhouse, the greenhouse
where you draw me out of hell.
Father, I am thirty-six,
yet I lie here in your crib.
I'm getting born again, Adam,
as you prod me with your rib.
~ Anne Sexton,

293:them out if they make dumb choices. Let them struggle; let them learn; let them take responsibility. They need to figure out the importance of working hard, saving money, being smart. For God’s sake, don’t be a damned fool and then go begging the government to save you.” This is not a stupid argument. I come at the issues differently, of course, as someone who supports a strong social safety net. But this more conservative view represents a considered and consistent position, worthy of respect. Lower-income conservatives are making the same kind of argument that rich liberals are making. They are willing to make monetary sacrifices to answer the call of their fundamental values. For liberals, those values are more about the common good and enlightened self-interest. For conservatives, those values are more about the importance of independence and personal responsibility. But both sides rightfully see their voting behavior as needing to reflect more than just a vulgar calculation about their immediate pocketbook needs. If one side deserves respect, then so does the other.*1 Of course, respecting our opponent’s argument doesn’t mean we have to just accept it and give in. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t argue passionately about the best approach to taxes or spending—especially in a society as complex as ours, with the stakes as high as they are. In fact, we should disagree and debate. Debate is the lifeblood of democracy, after all. Disagreement is a good thing—even heated disagreement. Only in a dictatorship does everybody have to agree. In a democracy, nobody has to agree. That’s called freedom. It’s the whole point of America. But at the base of too many of our public discussions sits the same destructive assumption: I’m right. And you’re wrong. We proceed on both sides as if our side is grounded in “the Truth” and the other side is always insane and delusional. And some version of this flawed concept has become the default setting throughout American political discourse. It is one thing to say, “I disagree with you because we have different values and priorities.” It’s quite another to say, “I disagree with you because you are an uneducated idiot—a pawn—and a dupe.” The prevalence of the latter set of arguments is why the Democratic Party stinks of elitism. Here’s another liberal favorite: “How can we argue with conservatives? They don’t believe in facts anymore—only ‘alternative facts.’ At least, liberals believe in science. Right-wingers don’t!” I understand the source of liberal exasperation here. Even though any high school student can reproduce the greenhouse-gas effect in a laboratory beaker, ~ Van Jones,

294:People employ what economists call “rational ignorance.” That is, we all spend our time learning about things we can actually do something about, not political issues that we can’t really affect. That’s why most of us can’t name our representative in Congress. And why most of us have no clue about how much of the federal budget goes to Medicare, foreign aid, or any other program. As an Alabama businessman told a Washington Post pollster, “Politics doesn’t interest me. I don’t follow it. … Always had to make a living.” Ellen Goodman, a sensitive, good-government liberal columnist, complained about a friend who had spent months researching new cars, and of her own efforts study the sugar, fiber, fat, and price of various cereals. “Would my car-buying friend use the hours he spent comparing fuel-injection systems to compare national health plans?” Goodman asked. “Maybe not. Will the moments I spend studying cereals be devoted to studying the greenhouse effect on grain? Maybe not.” Certainly not —and why should they? Goodman and her friend will get the cars and the cereal they want, but what good would it do to study national health plans? After a great deal of research on medicine, economics, and bureaucracy, her friend may decide which health-care plan he prefers. He then turns to studying the presidential candidates, only to discover that they offer only vague indications of which health-care plan they would implement. But after diligent investigation, our well-informed voter chooses a candidate. Unfortunately, the voter doesn’t like that candidate’s stand on anything else — the package-deal problem — but he decides to vote on the issue of health care. He has a one-in-a-hundred-million chance of influencing the outcome of the presidential election, after which, if his candidate is successful, he faces a Congress with different ideas, and in any case, it turns out the candidate was dissembling in the first place. Instinctively realizing all this, most voters don’t spend much time studying public policy. Give that same man three health insurance plans that he can choose from, though, and chances are that he will spend time studying them. Finally, as noted above, the candidates are likely to be kidding themselves or the voters anyway. One could argue that in most of the presidential elections since 1968, the American people have tried to vote for smaller government, but in that time the federal budget has risen from $178 billion to $4 trillion. George Bush made one promise that every voter noticed in the 1988 campaign: “Read my lips, no new taxes.” Then he raised them. If we are the government, why do we get so many policies we don’t want? ~ David Boaz,

295:Am I to assume the Valerie I was introduced to earlier was the Valerie of our greenhouse notes?” He realized his mistake the instant her eyes clouded over and she glanced in the direction he’d looked.
“Yes.”
“Shall I ask Willington to clear his ballroom so you have the requisite twenty paces? Naturally, I’ll stand as your second.”
Elizabeth drew a shaky breath, and a smile curved her lips. “Is she wearing a bow?”
Ian looked and shook his head. “I’m afraid not.”
“Does she have an earring?”
He glanced again and frowned. “I think that’s a wart.”
Her smile finally reached her eyes. “It’s not a large target, but I suppose-“
“Allow me,” he gravely replied, and she laughed.
The last strains of their waltz were dying away, and as they left the dance floor Ian watched Mondevale making his way toward the Townsendes, who’d returned to the ballroom.
“Now that you’re a marquess,” Elizabeth asked, “will you live in Scotland or in England?”
“I only accepted the title, not the money or the lands,” he replied absently, watching Mondevale. “I’ll explain everything to you tomorrow morning at your house. Mondevale is going to ask you to dance as soon as we reach the Townsendes, so listen closely-I’m going to ask you to dance again later. Turn me down.”
She sent him a puzzled look, but she nodded. “Is there anything else?” she asked when he was about to relinquish her to her friends.
“There’s a great deal else, but it will have to wait until tomorrow.”
Mystified, Elizabeth turned her attention to Viscount Mondevale.
Alex watched the byplay between Elizabeth and Ian but her mind was elsewhere. While the couple danced, Alex had told her husband exactly what she thought of Ian Thornton who’d first ruined Elizabeth’s reputation and now deceived her into thinking he was still a man of very modest means. Instead of agreeing that Thornton was completely without principles, Jordan had calmly insisted that Ian intended to set matters aright in the morning, and then he’d made her, and his grandmother, promise not to tell Elizabeth anything until Ian had been given the opportunity to do so himself. Dragging her thoughts back to the ballroom, Alex hoped more than anything that Ian Thornton would do nothing more to hurt her good friend.

By the end of the evening a majority of the guests at the Willington ball had drawn several conclusions: first, that Ian Thornton was definitely the natural grandson of the Duke of Stanhope (which everyone claimed to have always believed); second, that Elizabeth Cameron had very probably rebuffed his scandalous advances two years ago (which everyone claimed to have always believed); third, that since she had rejected his second request for a dance tonight, she might actually prefer her former suitor Viscount Mondevale (which hardly anyone could really believe). ~ Judith McNaught,

296:On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I'd seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny -- Philemon Holland's -- and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon -- the unimaginable universe.

I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity. ~ Jorge Luis Borges,

297:About 4.6 billion years ago, a great swirl of gas and dust some 15 billion miles across accumulated in space where we are now and began to aggregate. Virtually all of it—99.9 percent of the mass of the solar system—went to make the Sun. Out of the floating material that was left over, two microscopic grains floated close enough together to be joined by electrostatic forces. This was the moment of conception for our planet. All over the inchoate solar system, the same was happening. Colliding dust grains formed larger and larger clumps. Eventually the clumps grew large enough to be called planetesimals. As these endlessly bumped and collided, they fractured or split or recombined in endless random permutations, but in every encounter there was a winner, and some of the winners grew big enough to dominate the orbit around which they traveled. It all happened remarkably quickly. To grow from a tiny cluster of grains to a baby planet some hundreds of miles across is thought to have taken only a few tens of thousands of years. In just 200 million years, possibly less, the Earth was essentially formed, though still molten and subject to constant bombardment from all the debris that remained floating about. At this point, about 4.5 billion years ago, an object the size of Mars crashed into Earth, blowing out enough material to form a companion sphere, the Moon. Within weeks, it is thought, the flung material had reassembled itself into a single clump, and within a year it had formed into the spherical rock that companions us yet. Most of the lunar material, it is thought, came from the Earth’s crust, not its core, which is why the Moon has so little iron while we have a lot. The theory, incidentally, is almost always presented as a recent one, but in fact it was first proposed in the 1940s by Reginald Daly of Harvard. The only recent thing about it is people paying any attention to it. When Earth was only about a third of its eventual size, it was probably already beginning to form an atmosphere, mostly of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, methane, and sulfur. Hardly the sort of stuff that we would associate with life, and yet from this noxious stew life formed. Carbon dioxide is a powerful greenhouse gas. This was a good thing because the Sun was significantly dimmer back then. Had we not had the benefit of a greenhouse effect, the Earth might well have frozen over permanently, and life might never have gotten a toehold. But somehow life did. For the next 500 million years the young Earth continued to be pelted relentlessly by comets, meteorites, and other galactic debris, which brought water to fill the oceans and the components necessary for the successful formation of life. It was a singularly hostile environment and yet somehow life got going. Some tiny bag of chemicals twitched and became animate. We were on our way. Four billion years later people began to wonder how it had all happened. And it is there that our story next takes us. ~ Bill Bryson,

298:About 4.6 billion years ago, a great swirl of gas and dust some 24 billion kilometres across accumulated in space where we are now and began to aggregate. Virtually all of it – 99.9 per cent of the mass of the solar system21 – went to make the Sun. Out of the floating material that was left over, two microscopic grains floated close enough together to be joined by electrostatic forces. This was the moment of conception for our planet. All over the inchoate solar system, the same was happening. Colliding dust grains formed larger and larger clumps. Eventually the clumps grew large enough to be called planetesimals. As these endlessly bumped and collided, they fractured or split or recombined in endless random permutations, but in every encounter there was a winner, and some of the winners grew big enough to dominate the orbit around which they travelled. It all happened remarkably quickly. To grow from a tiny cluster of grains to a baby planet some hundreds of kilometres across is thought to have taken only a few tens of thousands of years. In just 200 million years, possibly less22, the Earth was essentially formed, though still molten and subject to constant bombardment from all the debris that remained floating about. At this point, about 4.4 billion years ago, an object the size of Mars crashed into the Earth, blowing out enough material to form a companion sphere, the Moon. Within weeks, it is thought, the flung material had reassembled itself into a single clump, and within a year it had formed into the spherical rock that companions us yet. Most of the lunar material, it is thought, came from the Earth’s crust, not its core23, which is why the Moon has so little iron while we have a lot. The theory, incidentally, is almost always presented as a recent one, but in fact it was first proposed in the 1940s by Reginald Daly of Harvard24. The only recent thing about it is people paying any attention to it. When the Earth was only about a third of its eventual size, it was probably already beginning to form an atmosphere, mostly of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, methane and sulphur. Hardly the sort of stuff that we would associate with life, and yet from this noxious stew life formed. Carbon dioxide is a powerful greenhouse gas. This was a good thing, because the Sun was significantly dimmer back then. Had we not had the benefit of a greenhouse effect, the Earth might well have frozen over permanently25, and life might never have got a toehold. But somehow life did. For the next 500 million years the young Earth continued to be pelted relentlessly by comets, meteorites and other galactic debris, which brought water to fill the oceans and the components necessary for the successful formation of life. It was a singularly hostile environment, and yet somehow life got going. Some tiny bag of chemicals twitched and became animate. We were on our way. Four billion years later, people began to wonder how it had all happened. And it is there that our story next takes us. ~ Bill Bryson,

299:Much of the so-called environmental movement today has transmuted into an aggressively nefarious and primitive faction. In the last fifteen years, many of the tenets of utopian statism have coalesced around something called the “degrowth” movement. Originating in Europe but now taking a firm hold in the United States, the “degrowthers,” as I shall characterize them, include in their ranks none other than President Barack Obama. On January 17, 2008, Obama made clear his hostility toward, of all things, electricity generated from coal and coal-powered plants. He told the San Francisco Chronicle, “You know, when I was asked earlier about the issue of coal . . . under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. . . .”3 Obama added, “. . . So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all the greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”4 Degrowthers define their agenda as follows: “Sustainable degrowth is a downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions and equity on the planet. It calls for a future where societies live within their ecological means, with open localized economies and resources more equally distributed through new forms of democratic institutions.”5 It “is an essential economic strategy to pursue in overdeveloped countries like the United States—for the well-being of the planet, of underdeveloped populations, and yes, even of the sick, stressed, and overweight ‘consumer’ populations of overdeveloped countries.”6 For its proponents and adherents, degrowth has quickly developed into a pseudo-religion and public-policy obsession. In fact, the degrowthers insist their ideology reaches far beyond the environment or even its odium for capitalism and is an all-encompassing lifestyle and governing philosophy. Some of its leading advocates argue that “Degrowth is not just an economic concept. We shall show that it is a frame constituted by a large array of concerns, goals, strategies and actions. As a result, degrowth has now become a confluence point where streams of critical ideas and political action converge.”7 Degrowth is “an interpretative frame for a social movement, understood as the mechanism through which actors engage in a collective action.”8 The degrowthers seek to eliminate carbon sources of energy and redistribute wealth according to terms they consider equitable. They reject the traditional economic reality that acknowledges growth as improving living conditions generally but especially for the impoverished. They embrace the notions of “less competition, large scale redistribution, sharing and reduction of excessive incomes and wealth.”9 Degrowthers want to engage in polices that will set “a maximum income, or maximum wealth, to weaken envy as a motor of consumerism, and opening borders (“no-border”) to reduce means to keep inequality between rich and poor countries.”10 And they demand reparations by supporting a “concept of ecological debt, or the demand that the Global North pays for past and present colonial exploitation in the Global South.”11 ~ Mark R Levin,

300:He stared at her in insolent silence, unable to believe the alluring, impulsive girl he remembered had become this coolly aloof, self-possessed young woman. Even with her dusty clothes and the smear of dirt on her cheek, Elizabeth Cameron was strikingly beautiful, but she’d changed so much that-except for the eyes-he scarcely recognized her. One thing hadn’t changed: She was still a schemer and a liar.
Straightening abruptly from his stance in the doorway, Ian walked forward. “I’ve had enough of this charade, Miss Cameron. No one invited you here, and you damn well know it.”
Blinded with wrath and humiliation, Elizabeth groped in her reticule and snatched out the handwritten letter her uncle had received inviting Elizabeth to join Ian there. Marching up to him, she slapped the invitation against his chest. Instinctively he caught it but didn’t open it.
“Explain that,” she commanded, backing away and then waiting.
“Another note, I’ll wager,” he drawled sarcastically, thinking of the night he’d gone to the greenhouse to meet her and recalling what a fool he’d been about her.
Elizabeth stood beside the table, determined to have the satisfaction of hearing his explanation before she left-not that anything he said could make her stay. When he showed no sign of opening it, she turned furiously to Jake, who was sorely disappointed that Ian was deliberately chasing off two females who could surely be persuaded to do the cooking if they stayed. “Make him read it aloud!” she ordered the startled Jake.
“Now, Ian,” Jake said, thinking of his empty stomach and the bleak future that lay ahead for it if the ladies went away, “why don’t you jes’ read that there little note, like the lady asked?”
When Ian Thornton ignored the older man’s suggestion, Elizabeth lost control of her temper. Without thinking what she was actually doing, she reached out and snatched the pistol off the table, primed it, cocked it, and leveled it at Ian Thornton’s broad chest. “Read that note!”
Jake, whose concern was still on his stomach, held up his hands as if the gun were pointed at him. “Ian, it could be a misunderstanding, you know, and it’s not nice to be rude to these ladies. Why don’t you read it, and then we’ll all sit down and have a nice”-he inclined his head meaningfully to the sack of provisions on the table-“supper.”
“I don’t need to read it,” Ian snapped. “The last time I read a note from Lady Cameron I met her in a greenhouse and got shot in the arm for my trouble.”
“Are you implying I invited you into that greenhouse?” Elizabeth scoffed furiously.
With an impatient sigh Ian said, “Since you’re obviously determined to enact a Cheltenham tragedy, let’s get it over with before you’re on your way.”
“Do you deny you sent me a note?” she snapped.
“Of course I deny it!”
“Then what were you doing in the greenhouse?” she shot back at him.
“I came in response to that nearly illegible note you sent me,” he said in a bored, insulting drawl. “May I suggest that in future you devote less of your time to theatrics and some of it to improving your handwriting?” His gaze shifted to the pistol. “Put the gun down before you hurt yourself. ~ Judith McNaught,

301:Speaking of debutantes,” Jake continued cautiously when Ian remained silent, “what about the one upstairs? Do you dislike her especially, or just on general principle?”
Ian walked over to the table and poured some Scotch into a glass. He took a swallow, shrugged, and said, “Miss Cameron was more inventive than some of her vapid little friends. She accosted me in a garden at a party.”
“I can see how bothersome that musta been,” Jake joked, “having someone like her, with a face that men dream about, tryin’ to seduce you, usin’ feminine wiles on you. Did they work?”
Slamming the glass down on the table, Ian said curtly, “They worked.” Coldly dismissing Elizabeth from his mind, he opened the deerskin case on the table, removed some papers he needed to review, and sat down in front of the fire.
Trying to suppress his avid curiosity, Jake waited a few minutes before asking, “Then what happened?”
Already engrossed in reading the documents in his hand, Ian said absently and without looking up, “I asked her to marry me; she sent me a note inviting me to meet her in the greenhouse; I went there; her brother barged in on us and informed me she was a countess, and that she was already betrothed.”
The topic thrust from his mind, Ian reached for the quill lying on the small table beside his chair and made a note in the margin of the contract.
“And?” Jake demanded avidly.
“And what?”
“And then what happened-after the brother barged in?”
“He took exception to my having contemplated marrying so far above myself and challenged me to a duel,” Ian replied in a preoccupied voice as he made another note on the contract.
“So what’s the girl doin’ here now?” Jake asked, scratching his head in bafflement over the doings of the Quality.
“Who the hell knows,” Ian murmured irritably. “Based on her behavior with me, my guess is she finally got caught in some sleezy affair or another, and her reputation’s beyond repair.”
“What’s that got to do with you?”
Ian expelled his breath in a long, irritated sigh and glanced at Jake with an expression that made it clear he was finished answering questions. “I assume,” he bit out, “that her family, recalling my absurd obsession with her two years ago, hoped I’d come up to scratch again and take her off their hands.”
“You think it’s got somethin’ to do with the old duke talking about you bein’ his natural grandson and wantin’ to make you his heir?” He waited expectantly, hoping for more information, but Ian ignored him, reading his documents. Left with no other choice and no prospect for further confidences, Jake picked up a candle, gathered up some blankets, and started for the barn. He paused at the door, struck by a sudden thought. “She said she didn’t send you any note about meetin’ her in the greenhouse.”
“She’s a liar and an excellent little actress,” Ian said icily, without taking his gaze from the papers. “Tomorrow I’ll think of some way to get her out of here and off my hands.”
Something in Ian’s face made him ask, “Why the hurry? You afraid of fallin’ fer her wiles again?”
“Hardly.”
“Then you must be made of stone,” he teased. “That woman’s so beautiful she’d tempt any man who was alone with her for an hour-includin’ me, and you know I ain’t in the petticoat line at all.”
“Don’t let her catch you alone,” Ian replied mildly.
“I don’t think I’d mind.” Jake laughed as he left. ~ Judith McNaught,

302:Straightening reluctantly, she strolled about the room with forced nonchalance, her hands clasped behind her back, looking blindly at the cobwebs in the corner of the ceiling, trying to think what to say. And then inspiration struck. The solution was demeaning but practical, and properly presented, it could appear she was graciously doing him a favor. She paused a moment to arrange her features into what she hoped was the right expression of enthusiasm and compassion, then she wheeled around abruptly. “Mr. Thornton!” Her voice seemed to explode in the room at the same time his startled amber gaze riveted on her face, then drifted down her bodice, roving boldly over her ripened curves. Unnerved but determined, Elizabeth forged shakily ahead: “It appears as if no one has occupied this house in quite some time.”
“I commend you on that astute observation, lady Cameron,” Ian mocked lazily, watching the tension and emotion play across her expressive face. For the life of him he could not understand what she was doing here or why she seemed to be trying to ingratiate herself this morning. Last night the explanation he’d given Jake had made sense; now, looking at her, he couldn’t quite believe any of it. Then he remembered that Elizabeth Cameron had always robbed him of the ability to think rationally.
“Houses do have a way of succumbing to dirt when no one looks after them,” she stated with a bright look.
“Another creditable observation. You’ve certainly a quick mind.”
“Must you make this so very difficult!” Elizabeth exclaimed.
“I apologize,” he said with mocking gravity. “Do go on. You were saying?”
“Well, I was thinking, since we’re quite stranded here-Lucinda and I, I mean-with absolutely nothing but time on our hands, that this house could certainly use a woman’s touch.”
“Capital idea!” burst out Jake, returning from his mission to locate the butter and casting a highly hopeful look at Lucinda.
He was rewarded with a glare from her that could have pulverized rock. “It could use an army of servants carrying shovels and wearing masks on their faces,” the duenna countered ruthlessly.
“You needn’t help, Lucinda,” Elizabeth explained, aghast. “I never meant to imply you should. But I could! I-“ She whirled around as Ian Thornton surged to his feet and took her elbow in a none-too-gentle grasp.
“Lady Cameron,” he said. “I think you and I have something to discuss that may be better spoken in private. Shall we?”
He gestured to the open door and then practically dragged her along in his wake. Outdoors in the sunlight he marched her forward several paces, then dropped her arm. “Let’s hear it,” he said.
“Hear what?” Elizabeth said nervously.
“An explanation-the truth, if you’re capable of it. Last night you drew a gun on me, and this morning you’re awash with excitement over the prospect over the prospect of cleaning my house. I want to know why.”
“Well,” Elizabeth burst out in defense of her actions with the gun, “you were extremely disagreeable!”
“I am still disagreeable,” he pointed out shortly, ignoring Elizabeth’s raised brows. “I haven’t changed. I am not the one who’s suddenly oozing goodwill this morning.”
Elizabeth turned her head to the lane, trying desperately to think of an explanation that wouldn’t reveal to him her humiliating circumstances.
“The silence is deafening, Lady Cameron, and somewhat surprising. As I recall, the last time we met you could scarcely contain all the edifying information you were trying to impart to me.” Elizabeth knew he was referring to her monologue on the history of hyacinths in the greenhouse. “I just don’t know where to begin,” she admitted.
“Let’s stick to the salient points. What are you doing here? ~ Judith McNaught,

303:Elegy: Walking the Line
Every month or so, Sundays, we walked the line,
The limit and the boundary. Past the sweet gum
Superb above the cabin, along the wall—
Stones gathered from the level field nearby
When first we cleared it. (Angry bumblebees
Stung the two mules. They kicked. Thirteen, I ran.)
And then the field: thread-leaf maple, deciduous
Magnolia, hybrid broom, and, further down,
In light shade, one Franklinia Alatamaha
In solstice bloom, all white, most graciously.
On the sunnier slope, the wild plums that my mother
Later would make preserves of, to give to friends
Or sell, in autumn, with the foxgrape, quince,
Elderberry, and muscadine. Around
The granite overhang, moist den of foxes;
Gradually up a long hill, high in pine,
Park-like, years of dry needles on the ground,
And dogwood, slopes the settlers terraced; pine
We cut at Christmas, berries, hollies, anise,
And cones for sale in Mister Haymore's yard
In town, below the Courthouse Square. James Haymore,
One of the two good teachers at Boys' High,
Ironic and demanding, chemistry;
Mary Lou Culver taught us English: essays,
Plot summaries, outlines, meters, kinds of clauses
(Noun, adjective, and adverb, five at a time),
Written each day and then revised, and she
Up half the night to read them once again
Through her pince-nez, under a single lamp.
Across the road, on a steeper hill, the settlers
Set a house, unpainted, the porch fallen in,
The road a red clay strip without a bridge,
A shallow stream that liked to overflow.
Oliver Brand's mules pulled our station wagon
Out of the gluey mire, earth's rust. Then, here
And there, back from the road, the specimen
Shrubs and small trees my father planted, some
Taller than we were, some in bloom, some berried,
And some we still brought water to. We always
14
Paused at the weed-filled hole beside the beech
That, one year, brought forth beech nuts by the thousands,
A hole still reminiscent of the man
Chewing tobacco in among his whiskers
My father happened on, who, discovered, told
Of dreaming he should dig there for the gold
And promised to give half of what he found.
During the wars with Germany and Japan,
Descendents of the settlers, of Oliver Brand
And of that man built Flying Fortresses
For Lockheed, in Atlanta; now they build
Brick mansions in the woods they left, with lawns
To paved and lighted streets, azaleas, camellias
Blooming among the pines and tulip trees—
Mercedes Benz and Cadillac Republicans.
There was another stream further along
Divided through a marsh, lined by the fence
We stretched to posts with Mister Garner's help
The time he needed cash for his son's bail
And offered all his place. A noble spring
Under the oak root cooled his milk and butter.
He called me "honey," working with us there
(My father bought three acres as a gift),
His wife pale, hair a country orange, voice
Uncanny, like a ghost's, through the open door
Behind her, chickens scratching on the floor.
Barred Rocks, our chickens; one, a rooster, splendid
Sliver and grey, red comb and long sharp spurs,
Once chased Aunt Jennie as far as the daphne bed
The two big king snakes were familiars of.
My father's dog would challenge him sometimes
To laughter and applause. Once, in Stone Mountain,
Travelers, stopped for gas, drove off with Smokey;
Angrily, grievingly, leaving his work, my father
Traced the car and found them way far south,
Had them arrested and, bringing Smokey home,
Was proud as Sherlock Holmes, and happier.
Above the spring, my sister's cats, black Amy,
Grey Junior, down to meet us. The rose trees,
Domestic, Asiatic, my father's favorites.
The bridge, marauding dragonflies, the bullfrog,
15
Camellias cracked and blackened by the freeze,
Bay tree, mimosa, mountain laurel, apple,
Monkey pine twenty feet high, banana shrub,
The owls' tall pine curved like a flattened S.
The pump house Mort and I built block by block,
Smooth concrete floor, roof pale aluminum
Half-covered by a clematis, the pump
Thirty feet down the mountain's granite foot.
Mort was the hired man sent to us by Fortune,
Childlike enough to lead us. He brought home,
Although he could not even drive a tractor,
Cheated, a worthless car, which we returned.
When, at the trial to garnishee his wages,
Frank Guess, the judge, Grandmother's longtime neighbor,
Whose children my mother taught in Cradle Roll,
Heard Mort's examination, he broke in
As if in disbelief on the bank's attorneys:
"Gentlemen, must we continue this charade?"
Finally, past the compost heap, the garden,
Tomatoes and sweet corn for succotash,
Okra for frying, Kentucky Wonders, limas,
Cucumbers, squashes, leeks heaped round with soil,
Lavender, dill, parsley, and rosemary,
Tithonia and zinnias between the rows;
The greenhouse by the rock wall, used for cuttings
In late spring, frames to grow them strong for planting
Through winter into summer. Early one morning
Mort called out, lying helpless by the bridge.
His ashes we let drift where the magnolia
We planted as a stem divides the path
The others lie, too young, at Silver Hill,
Except my mother. Ninety-five, she lives
Three thousand miles away, beside the bare
Pacific, in rooms that overlook the Mission,
The Riviera, and the silver range
La Cumbre east. Magnolia grandiflora
And one druidic live oak guard the view.
Proudly around the walls, she shows her paintings
Of twenty years ago: the great oak's arm
Extended, Zeuslike, straight and strong, wisteria
Tangled among the branches, amaryllis
16
Around the base; her cat, UC, at ease
In marigolds; the weeping cherry, pink
And white arms like a blessing to the blue
Bird feeder Mort made; cabin, scarlet sweet gum
Superb when tribes migrated north and south.
Alert, still quick of speech, a little blind,
Active, ready for laughter, open to fear,
Pity, and wonder that such things may be,
Some Sundays, I think, she must walk the line,
Aunt Jennie, too, if she were still alive,
And Eleanor, whose story is untold,
Their presences like muses, prompting me
In my small study, all listening to the sea,
All of one mind, the true posterity.
~ Edgar Bowers,

304:A Roxbury Garden
Hoops
Blue and pink sashes,
Criss-cross shoes,
Minna and Stella run out into the garden
To play at hoop.
Up and down the garden-paths they race,
In the yellow sunshine,
Each with a big round hoop
White as a stripped willow-wand.
Round and round turn the hoops,
Their diamond whiteness cleaving the yellow sunshine.
The gravel crunches and squeaks beneath them,
And a large pebble springs them into the air
To go whirling for a foot or two
Before they touch the earth again
In a series of little jumps.
Spring, Hoops!
Spit out a shower of blue and white brightness.
The little criss-cross shoes twinkle behind you,
The pink and blue sashes flutter like flags,
The hoop-sticks are ready to beat you.
Turn, turn, Hoops! In the yellow sunshine.
Turn your stripped willow whiteness
Along the smooth paths.
Stella sings:
'Round and round, rolls my hoop,
Scarcely touching the ground,
With a swoop,
And a bound,
Round and round.
With a bumpety, crunching, scattering sound,
Down the garden it flies;
24
In our eyes
The sun lies.
See it spin
Out and in;
Through the paths it goes whirling,
About the beds curling.
Sway now to the loop,
Faster, faster, my hoop.
Round you come,
Up you come,
Quick and straight as before.
Run, run, my hoop, run,
Away from the sun.'
And the great hoop bounds along the path,
Leaping into the wind-bright air.
Minna sings:
'Turn, hoop,
Burn hoop,
Twist and twine
Hoop of mine.
Flash along,
Leap along,
Right at the sun.
Run, hoop, run.
Faster and faster,
Whirl, twirl.
Wheel like fire,
And spin like glass;
Fire's no whiter
Glass is no brighter.
Dance,
Prance,
Over and over,
About and about,
With the top of you under,
And the bottom at top,
But never a stop.
Turn about, hoop, to the tap of my stick,
I follow behind you
To touch and remind you.
25
Burn and glitter, so white and quick,
Round and round, to the tap of a stick.'
The hoop flies along between the flower-beds,
Swaying the flowers with the wind of its passing.
Beside the foxglove-border roll the hoops,
And the little pink and white bells shake and jingle
Up and down their tall spires;
They roll under the snow-ball bush,
And the ground behind them is strewn with white petals;
They swirl round a corner,
And jar a bee out of a Canterbury bell;
They cast their shadows for an instant
Over a bed of pansies,
Catch against the spurs of a columbine,
Jostle the quietness from a cluster of monk's-hood.
Pat! Pat! behind them come the little criss-cross shoes,
And the blue and pink sashes stream out in flappings of colour.
Stella sings:
'Hoop, hoop,
Roll along,
Faster bowl along,
Hoop.
Slow, to the turning,
Now go! - Go!
Quick!
Here's the stick.
Rat-a-tap-tap it,
Pat it, flap it.
Fly like a bird or a yellow-backed bee,
See how soon you can reach that tree.
Here is a path that is perfectly straight.
Roll along, hoop, or we shall be late.'
Minna sings:
'Trip about, slip about, whip about
Hoop.
Wheel like a top at its quickest spin,
Then, dear hoop, we shall surely win.
First to the greenhouse and then to the wall
26
Circle and circle,
And let the wind push you,
Poke you,
Brush you,
And not let you fall.
Whirring you round like a wreath of mist.
Hoopety hoop,
Twist,
Twist.'
Tap! Tap! go the hoop-sticks,
And the hoops bowl along under a grape arbour.
For an instant their willow whiteness is green,
Pale white-green.
Then they are out in the sunshine,
Leaving the half-formed grape clusters
A-tremble under their big leaves.
'I will beat you, Minna,' cries Stella,
Hitting her hoop smartly with her stick.
'Stella, Stella, we are winning,' calls Minna,
As her hoop curves round a bed of clove-pinks.
A humming-bird whizzes past Stella's ear,
And two or three yellow-and-black butterflies
Flutter, startled, out of a pillar rose.
Round and round race the little girls
After their great white hoops.
Suddenly Minna stops.
Her hoop wavers an instant,
But she catches it up on her stick.
'Listen, Stella!'
Both the little girls are listening;
And the scents of the garden rise up quietly about them.
'It's the chaise! It's Father!
Perhaps he's brought us a book from Boston.'
Twinkle, twinkle, the little criss-cross shoes
Up the garden path.
Blue - pink - an instant, against the syringa hedge.
But the hoops, white as stripped willow-wands,
Lie in the grass,
And the grasshoppers jump back and forth
27
Over them.
II
Battledore and Shuttlecock
The shuttlecock soars upward
In a parabola of whiteness,
Turns,
And sinks to a perfect arc.
Plat! the battledore strikes it,
And it rises again,
Without haste,
Winged and curving,
Tracing its white flight
Against the clipped hemlock-trees.
Plat!
Up again,
Orange and sparkling with sun,
Rounding under the blue sky,
Dropping,
Fading to grey-green
In the shadow of the coned hemlocks.
'Ninety-one.' 'Ninety-two.' 'Ninety-three.'
The arms of the little girls
Come up - and up Precisely,
Like mechanical toys.
The battledores beat at nothing,
And toss the dazzle of snow
Off their parchment drums.
'Ninety-four.' Plat!
'Ninety-five.' Plat!
Back and forth
Goes the shuttlecock,
Icicle-white,
Leaping at the sharp-edged clouds,
Overturning,
Falling,
Down,
And down,
Tinctured with pink
28
From the upthrusting shine
Of Oriental poppies.
The little girls sway to the counting rhythm;
Left foot,
Right foot.
Plat! Plat!
Yellow heat twines round the handles of the battledores,
The parchment cracks with dryness;
But the shuttlecock
Swings slowly into the ice-blue sky,
Heaving up on the warm air
Like a foam-bubble on a wave,
With feathers slanted and sustaining.
Higher,
Until the earth turns beneath it;
Poised and swinging,
With all the garden flowing beneath it,
Scarlet, and blue, and purple, and white Blurred colour reflections in rippled water Changing - streaming For the moment that Stella takes to lift her arm.
Then the shuttlecock relinquishes,
Bows,
Descends;
And the sharp blue spears of the air
Thrust it to earth.
Again it mounts,
Stepping up on the rising scents of flowers,
Buoyed up and under by the shining heat.
Above the foxgloves,
Above the guelder-roses,
Above the greenhouse glitter,
Till the shafts of cooler air
Meet it,
Deflect it,
Reject it,
Then down,
Down,
Past the greenhouse,
Past the guelder-rose bush,
29
Past the foxgloves.
'Ninety-nine,' Stella's battledore springs to the impact.
Plunk! Like the snap of a taut string.
'Oh! Minna!'
The shuttlecock drops zigzagedly,
Out of orbit,
Hits the path,
And rolls over quite still.
Dead white feathers,
With a weight at the end.
III
Garden Games
The tall clock is striking twelve;
And the little girls stop in the hall to watch it,
And the big ships rocking in a half-circle
Above the dial.
Twelve o'clock!
Down the side steps
Go the little girls,
Under their big round straw hats.
Minna's has a pink ribbon,
Stella's a blue,
That is the way they know which is which.
Twelve o'clock!
An hour yet before dinner.
Mother is busy in the still-room,
And Hannah is making gingerbread.
Slowly, with lagging steps,
They follow the garden-path,
Crushing a leaf of box for its acrid smell,
Discussing what they shall do,
And doing nothing.
'Stella, see that grasshopper
Climbing up the bank!
What a jump!
Almost as long as my arm.'
30
Run, children, run.
For the grasshopper is leaping away,
In half-circle curves,
Shuttlecock curves,
Over the grasses.
Hand in hand, the little girls call to him:
'Grandfather, grandfather gray,
Give me molasses, or I'll throw you away.'
The grasshopper leaps into the sunlight,
Golden-green,
And is gone.
'Let's catch a bee.'
Round whirl the little girls,
And up the garden.
Two heads are thrust among the Canterbury bells,
Listening,
And fingers clasp and unclasp behind backs
In a strain of silence.
White bells,
Blue bells,
Hollow and reflexed.
Deep tunnels of blue and white dimness,
Cool wine-tunnels for bees.
There is a floundering and buzzing over Minna's head.
'Bend it down, Stella. Quick! Quick!'
The wide mouth of a blossom
Is pressed together in Minna's fingers.
The stem flies up, jiggling its flower-bells,
And Minna holds the dark blue cup in her hand,
With the bee
Imprisoned in it.
Whirr! Buzz! Bump!
Bump! Whiz! Bang!
BANG!!
The blue flower tears across like paper,
And a gold-black bee darts away in the sunshine.
'If we could fly, we could catch him.'
31
The sunshine is hot on Stella's upturned face,
As she stares after the bee.
'We'll follow him in a dove chariot.
Come on, Stella.'
Run, children,
Along the red gravel paths,
For a bee is hard to catch,
Even with a chariot of doves.
Tall, still, and cowled,
Stand the monk's-hoods;
Taller than the heads of the little girls.
A blossom for Minna.
A blossom for Stella.
Off comes the cowl,
And there is a purple-painted chariot;
Off comes the forward petal,
And there are two little green doves,
With green traces tying them to the chariot.
'Now we will get in, and fly right up to the clouds.
Fly, Doves, up in the sky,
With Minna and me,
After the bee.'
Up one path,
Down another,
Run the little girls,
Holding their dove chariots in front of them;
But the bee is hidden in the trumpet of a honeysuckle,
With his wings folded along his back.
The dove chariots are thrown away,
And the little girls wander slowly through the garden,
Sucking the salvia tips,
And squeezing the snapdragons
To make them gape.
'I'm so hot,
Let's pick a pansy
And see the little man in his bath,
And play we're he.'
A royal bath-tub,
Hung with purple stuffs and yellow.
32
The great purple-yellow wings
Rise up behind the little red and green man;
The purple-yellow wings fan him,
He dabbles his feet in cool green.
Off with the green sheath,
And there are two spindly legs.
'Heigho!' sighs Minna.
'Heigho!' sighs Stella.
There is not a flutter of wind,
And the sun is directly overhead.
Along the edge of the garden
Walk the little girls.
Their hats, round and yellow like cheeses,
Are dangling by the ribbons.
The grass is a tumult of buttercups and daisies;
Buttercups and daisies streaming away
Up the hill.
The garden is purple, and pink, and orange, and scarlet;
The garden is hot with colours.
But the meadow is only yellow, and white, and green,
Cool, and long, and quiet.
The little girls pick buttercups
And hold them under each other's chins.
'You're as gold as Grandfather's snuff-box.
You're going to be very rich, Minna.'
'Oh-o-o! Then I'll ask my husband to give me a pair of garnet earrings
Just like Aunt Nancy's.
I wonder if he will.
I know. We'll tell fortunes.
That's what we'll do.'
Plump down in the meadow grass,
Stella and Minna,
With their round yellow hats,
Like cheeses,
Beside them.
Drop,
Drop,
Daisy petals.
'One I love,
Two I love,
Three I love I say . . .'
33
The ground is peppered with daisy petals,
And the little girls nibble the golden centres,
And play it is cake.
A bell rings.
Dinner-time;
And after dinner there are lessons.
~ Amy Lowell,

305:A Castaway
Poor little diary, with its simple thoughts,
its good resolves, its "Studied French an hour,"
"Read Modern History," "Trimmed up my grey hat,"
"Darned stockings," "Tatted," "Practised my new song,"
"Went to the daily service," "Took Bess soup,"
"Went out to tea." Poor simple diary!
and did I write it? Was I this good girl,
this budding colourless young rose of home?
did I so live content in such a life,
seeing no larger scope, nor asking it,
than this small constant round -- old clothes to mend,
new clothes to make, then go and say my prayers,
or carry soup, or take a little walk
and pick the ragged-robins in the hedge?
Then for ambition, (was there ever life
that could forego that?) to improve my mind
and know French better and sing harder songs;
for gaiety, to go, in my best white
well washed and starched and freshened with new bows,
and take tea out to meet the clergyman.
No wishes and no cares, almost no hopes,
only the young girl's hazed and golden dreams
that veil the Future from her.
So long since:
and now it seems a jest to talk of me
as if I could be one with her, of me
who am ...... me.
And what is that? My looking-glass
answers it passably; a woman sure,
no fiend, no slimy thing out of the pools,
a woman with a ripe and smiling lip
that has no venom in its touch I think,
with a white brow on which there is no brand;
a woman none dare call not beautiful,
not womanly in every woman's grace.
Aye let me feed upon my beauty thus,
be glad in it like painters when they see
at last the face they dreamed but could not find
look from their canvass on them, triumph in it,
the dearest thing I have. Why, 'tis my all,
let me make much of it: is it not this,
this beauty, my own curse at once and tool
to snare men's souls -- (I know what the good say
of beauty in such creatures) -- is it not this
that makes me feel myself a woman still,
some little pride, some little -Here's a jest!
what word will fit the sense but modesty?
A wanton I but modest!
Modest, true;
I'm not drunk in the streets, ply not for hire
at infamous corners with my likenesses
of the humbler kind; yes, modesty's my word -'twould shape my mouth well too, I think I'll try:
"Sir, Mr What-you-will, Lord Who-knows-what,
my present lover or my next to come,
value me at my worth, fill your purse full,
for I am modest; yes, and honour me
as though your schoolgirl sister or your wife
could let her skirts brush mine or talk of me;
for I am modest."
Well, I flout myself:
but yet, but yet -Fie, poor fantastic fool,
why do I play the hypocrite alone,
who am no hypocrite with others by?
where should be my "But yet"? I am that thing
called half a dozen dainty names, and none
dainty enough to serve the turn and hide
the one coarse English worst that lurks beneath:
just that, no worse, no better.
And, for me,
I say let no one be above her trade;
I own my kindredship with any drab
who sells herself as I, although she crouch
in fetid garrets and I have a home
all velvet and marqueterie and pastilles,
although she hide her skeleton in rags
and I set fashions and wear cobweb lace:
the difference lies but in my choicer ware,
that I sell beauty and she ugliness;
our traffic's one -- I'm no sweet slaver-tongue
to gloze upon it and explain myself
a sort of fractious angel misconceived -our traffic's one: I own it. And what then?
I know of worse that are called honourable.
Our lawyers, who, with noble eloquence
and virtuous outbursts, lie to hang a man,
or lie to save him, which way goes the fee:
our preachers, gloating on your future hell
for not believing what they doubt themselves:
our doctors, who sort poisons out by chance,
and wonder how they'll answer, and grow rich:
our journalists, whose business is to fib
and juggle truths and falsehoods to and fro:
our tradesmen, who must keep unspotted names
and cheat the least like stealing that they can:
our -- all of them, the virtuous worthy men
who feed on the world's follies, vices, wants,
and do their businesses of lies and shams
honestly, reputably, while the world
claps hands and cries "good luck," which of their trades,
their honourable trades, barefaced like mine,
all secrets brazened out, would shew more white?
And whom do I hurt more than they? as much?
The wives? Poor fools, what do I take from them
worth crying for or keeping? If they knew
what their fine husbands look like seen by eyes
that may perceive there are more men than one!
But, if they can, let them just take the pains
to keep them: 'tis not such a mighty task
to pin an idiot to your apron-string;
and wives have an advantage over us,
(the good and blind ones have), the smile or pout
leaves them no secret nausea at odd times.
Oh they could keep their husbands if they cared,
but 'tis an easier life to let them go,
and whimper at it for morality.
Oh! those shrill carping virtues, safely housed
from reach of even a smile that should put red
on a decorous cheek, who rail at us
with such a spiteful scorn and rancourousness,
(which maybe is half envy at the heart),
and boast themselves so measurelessly good
and us so measurelessly unlike them,
what is their wondrous merit that they stay
in comfortable homes whence not a soul
has ever thought of tempting them, and wear
no kisses but a husband's upon lips
there is no other man desires to kiss -refrain in fact from sin impossible?
How dare they hate us so? what have they done,
what borne, to prove them other than we are?
What right have they to scorn us -- glass-case saints,
Dianas under lock and key -- what right
more than the well-fed helpless barn-door fowl
to scorn the larcenous wild-birds?
Pshaw, let be!
Scorn or no scorn, what matter for their scorn?
I have outfaced my own -- that's harder work.
Aye let their virtuous malice dribble on -mock snowstorms on the stage -- I'm proof long since:
I have looked coolly on my what and why,
and I accept myself.
Oh I'll endorse
the shamefullest revilings mouthed at me,
cry "True! Oh perfect picture! Yes, that's I!"
and add a telling blackness here and there,
and then dare swear you, every nine of ten,
my judges and accusers, I'd not change
my conscience against yours, you who tread out
your devil's pilgrimage along the roads
that take in church and chapel, and arrange
a roundabout and decent way to hell.
Well, mine's a short way and a merry one:
so says my pious hash of ohs and ahs,
choice texts and choicer threats, appropriate names,
(Rahabs and Jezebels), some fierce Tartuffe
hurled at me through the post. We had rare fun
over that tract digested with champagne.
Where is it? where's my rich repertory
of insults biblical? 'I prey on souls' -only my men have oftenest none I think:
'I snare the simple ones' -- but in these days
there seem to be none simple and none snared,
and most men have their favourite sinnings planned
to do them civilly and sensibly:
'I braid my hair' -- but braids are out of date:
'I paint my cheeks' -- I always wear them pale:
'I -- '
Pshaw! the trash is savourless to-day:
one cannot laugh alone. There, let it burn.
What, does the windy dullard think one needs
his wisdom dove-tailed on to Solomon's,
his threats out-threatening God's, to teach the news
that those who need not sin have safer souls?
We know it, but we've bodies to save too;
and so we earn our living.
Well lit, tract!
at least you've made me a good leaping blaze.
Up, up, how the flame shoots! and now 'tis dead.
Oh proper finish, preaching to the last -no such bad omen either; sudden end,
and no sad withering horrible old age.
How one would clutch at youth to hold it tight!
and then to know it gone, to see it gone,
be taught its absence by harsh, careless looks,
to live forgotten, solitary, old -the cruellest word that ever woman learns.
Old -- that's to be nothing, or to be at best
a blurred memorial that in better days
there was a woman once with such a name.
No, no, I could not bear it: death itself
shews kinder promise ...... even death itself,
since it must come one day -Oh this grey gloom!
This rain, rain, rain, what wretched thoughts it brings!
Death: I'll not think of it.
Will no one come?
'Tis dreary work alone.
Why did I read
that silly diary? Now, sing song, ding dong,
come the old vexing echoes back again,
church bells and nursery good-books, back again
upon my shrinking ears that had forgotten -I hate the useless memories: 'tis fools' work
singing the hacknied dirge of 'better days:'
best take Now kindly, give the past good-bye,
whether it were a better or a worse.
Yes, yes, I listened to the echoes once,
the echoes and the thoughts from the old days.
The worse for me: I lost my richest friend,
and that was all the difference. For the world
would not have that flight known. How they'd roar:
"What! Eulalie, when she refused us all,
'ill' and 'away,' was doing Magdalene,
tears, ashes, and her Bible, and then off
hide her in a Refuge ... for a week!"
A wild whim that, to fancy I could change
my new self for my old, because I wished!
since then, when in my languid days there comes
that craving, like homesickness, to go back
to the good days, the dear old stupid days,
to the quiet and the innocence, I know
'tis a sick fancy and try palliatives.
What is it? You go back to the old home,
and 'tis not your home, has no place for you,
and, if it had, you could not fit you in it.
And could I fit me to my former self?
If I had had the wit, like some of us,
to sow my wild-oats into three per cents,
could I not find me shelter in the peace
of some far nook where none of them would come,
nor whisper travel from this scurrilous world,
that gloats and moralizes through its leers,
to blast me with my fashionable shame?
There I might -- oh my castle in the clouds!
and where's its rent? -- but there, were there a there,
I might again live the grave blameless life
among such simple pleasures, simple cares:
but could they be my pleasures, be my cares?
The blameless life, but never the content -never. How could I henceforth be content
in any life but one that sets the brain
in a hot merry fever with its stir?
what would there be in quiet rustic days,
each like the other, full of time to think,
to keep one bold enough to live at all?
Quiet is hell, I say -- as if a woman
could bear to sit alone, quiet all day,
and loathe herself, and sicken on her thoughts.
They tried it at the Refuge, and I failed:
I could not bear it. Dreary hideous room,
coarse pittance, prison rules, one might bear these
and keep one's purpose; but so much alone,
and then made faint and weak and fanciful
by change from pampering to half-famishing -good God, what thoughts come! Only one week more
and 'twould have ended: but in one day more
I must have killed myself. And I loathe death,
the dreadful foul corruption, with who knows
what future after it.
Well, I came back,
Back to my slough. Who says I had my choice?
Could I stay there to die of some mad death?
and if I rambled out into the world,
sinless but penniless, what else were that
but slower death, slow pining shivering death
by misery and hunger? Choice! what choice
of living well or ill? could I have that?
and who would give it me? I think indeed
some kind hand, a woman's -- I hate men -had stretched itself to help me to firm ground,
taken a chance and risked my falling back,
could have gone my way not falling back:
but, let her be all brave, all charitable,
how could she do it? Such a trifling boon,
little work to live by, 'tis not much,
and I might have found will enough to last:
but where's the work? More sempstresses than shirts;
and defter hands at white work than are mine
drop starved at last: dressmakers, milliners,
too many too they say; and then their trades
need skill, apprenticeship. And who so bold
as hire me for their humblest drudgery?
not even for scullery slut; not even, I think,
for governess, although they'd get me cheap.
And after all it would be something hard,
with the marts for decent women overfull,
if I could elbow in and snatch a chance
and oust some good girl so, who then perforce
must come and snatch her chance among our crowd.
Why, if the worthy men who think all's done
if we'll but come where we can hear them preach,
could bring us all, or any half of us,
into their fold, teach all us wandering sheep,
or only half of us, to stand in rows
and baa them hymns and moral songs, good lack,
what would they do with us? what could they do?
Just think! with were't but half of us on hand
to find work for ... or husbands. Would they try
to ship us to the colonies for wives?
Well, well; I know the wise ones talk and talk:
"Here's cause, here's cure:" "No, here it is and here:"
and find society to blame, or law,
the Church, the men, the women, too few schools,
too many schools, too much, too little taught:
somewhere or somehow someone is to blame:
10
but I say all the fault's with God himself
who puts too many women in the world.
We ought to die off reasonably and leave
as many as the men want, none to waste.
Here's cause; the woman's superfluity:
and for the cure, why, if it were the law,
say, every year, in due percentages,
balancing them with men as the times need,
to kill off female infants, 'twould make room;
and some of us would not have lost too much,
losing life ere we know what it can mean.
The other day I saw a woman weep
beside her dead child's bed: the little thing
lay smiling, and the mother wailed half mad,
shrieking to God to give it back again.
I could have laughed aloud: the little girl
living had but her mother's life to live;
there she lay smiling, and her mother wept
to know her gone!
My mother would have wept.
Oh mother, mother, did you ever dream,
you good grave simple mother, you pure soul
no evil could come nigh, did you once dream
in all your dying cares for your lone girl
left to fight out her fortune all alone
that there would be this danger? -- for your girl,
taught by you, lapped in a sweet ignorance,
scarcely more wise of what things sin could be
than some young child a summer six months old
where in the north the summer makes a day,
of what is darkness ... darkness that will come
to-morrow suddenly. Thank God at least
for this much of my life, that when you died,
that when you kissed me dying, not a thought
of this made sorrow for you, that I too
was pure of even fear.
Oh yes, I thought,
still new in my insipid treadmill life,
11
(my father so late dead), and hopeful still
here might be something pleasant somewhere in it,
some sudden fairy come, no doubt, to turn
any pumpkin to a chariot, I thought then
that I might plod, and plod, and drum the sounds
of useless facts into unwilling ears,
tease children with dull questions half the day,
then con dull answers in my room at night
ready for next day's questions, mend quill pens
and cut my fingers, add up sums done wrong
and never get them right; teach, teach, and teach -what I half knew, or not at all -- teach, teach
for years, a lifetime -- I!
And yet, who knows?
it might have been, for I was patient once,
and willing, and meant well; it might have been
had I but still clung on in my first place -a safe dull place, where mostly there were smiles
but never merry-makings; where all days
jogged on sedately busy, with no haste;
where all seemed measured out, but margins broad:
a dull home but a peaceful, where I felt
my pupils would be dear young sisters soon,
and felt their mother take me to her heart,
motherly to all lonely harmless things.
But I must have a conscience, must blurt out
my great discovery of my ignorance!
And who required it of me? And who gained?
What did it matter for a more or less
the girls learnt in their schoolbooks, to forget
in their first season? We did well together:
they loved me and I them: but I went off
to housemaid's pay, six crossgrained brats to teach,
wrangles and jangles, doubts, disgrace ... then this;
and they had a perfection found for them,
who has all ladies' learning in her head
abridged and scheduled, speaks five languages,
knows botany and conchology and globes,
draws, paints, plays, sings, embroiders, teaches all
on a patent method never known to fail:
and now they're finished and, I hear, poor things,
12
are the worst dancers and worst dressers out.
And where's their profit of those prison years
all gone to make them wise in lesson books?
who wants his wife to know weeds' Latin names?
who ever chose a girl for saying dates?
or asked if she had learned to trace a map?
Well, well, the silly rules this silly world
makes about women! This is one of them.
Why must there be pretence of teaching them
what no one ever cares that they should know,
what, grown out of the schoolroom, they cast off
like the schoolroom pinafore, no better fit
for any use of real grown-up life,
for any use to her who seeks or waits
the husband and the home, for any use,
for any shallowest pretence of use,
to her who has them? Do I not know this,
I like my betters, that a woman's life,
her natural life, her good life, her one life,
is in her husband, God on earth to her,
and what she knows and what she can and is
is only good as it brings good to him?
Oh God, do I not know it? I the thing
of shame and rottenness, the animal
that feed men's lusts and prey on them, I, I,
who should not dare to take the name of wife
on my polluted lips, who in the word
hear but my own reviling, I know that.
I could have lived by that rule, how content:
my pleasure to make him some pleasure, pride
to be as he would have me, duty, care,
to fit all to his taste, rule my small sphere
to his intention; then to lean on him,
be guided, tutored, loved -- no not that word,
that loved which between men and women means
all selfishness, all putrid talk, all lust,
all vanity, all idiocy -- not loved
but cared for. I've been loved myself, I think,
some once or twice since my poor mother died,
but cared for, never: -- that a word for homes,
13
kind homes, good homes, where simple children come
and ask their mother is this right or wrong,
because they know she's perfect, cannot err;
their father told them so, and he knows all,
being so wise and good and wonderful,
even enough to scold even her at times
and tell her everything she does not know.
Ah the sweet nursery logic!
Fool! thrice fool!
do I hanker after that too? Fancy me
infallible nursery saint, live code of law!
me preaching! teaching innocence to be good!
a mother!
Yet the baby thing that woke
and wailed an hour or two, and then was dead,
was mine, and had he lived ...... why then my name
would have been mother. But 'twas well he died:
I could have been no mother, I, lost then
beyond his saving. Had he come before
and lived, come to me in the doubtful days
when shame and boldness had not grown one sense,
for his sake, with the courage come of him,
I might have struggled back.
But how? But how?
His father would not then have let me go:
his time had not yet come to make an end
of my 'for ever' with a hireling's fee
and civil light dismissal. None but him
to claim a bit of bread of if I went,
child or no child: would he have given it me?
He! no; he had not done with me. No help,
no help, no help. Some ways can be trodden back,
but never our way, we who one wild day
have given goodbye to what in our deep hearts
the lowest woman still holds best in life,
good name -- good name though given by the world
that mouths and garbles with its decent prate,
and wraps it in respectable grave shams,
and patches conscience partly by the rule
14
of what one's neighbour thinks but something more
by what his eyes are sharp enough to see.
How I could scorn it with its Pharisees,
if it could not scorn me: but yet, but yet -oh God, if I could look it in the face!
Oh I am wild, am ill, I think, to night:
will no one come and laugh with me? No feast,
no merriment to-night. So long alone!
Will no one come?
At least there's a new dress
to try, and grumble at -- they never fit
to one's ideal. Yes, a new rich dress,
with lace like this too, that's a soothing balm
for any fretting woman, cannot fail,
I've heard men say it ... and they know so well
what's in all women's hearts, especially
women like me.
No help! no help! no help!
How could it be? It was too late long since -even at the first too late. Whose blame is that?
there are some kindly people in the world,
but what can they do? If one hurls oneself
into a quicksand, what can be the end,
but that one sinks and sinks? Cry out for help?
Ah yes, and, if it came, who is so strong
to strain from the firm ground and lift one out?
And how, so firmly clutching the stretched hand,
as death's pursuing terror bids, even so,
how can one reach firm land, having to foot
the treacherous crumbling soil that slides and gives
and sucks one in again? Impossible path!
No, why waste struggles, I or any one?
what is must be. What then? I, where I am,
sinking and sinking; let the wise pass by
and keep their wisdom for an apter use,
let me sink merrily as I best may.
Only, I think, my brother -- I forgot
he stopped his brotherhood some years ago --
15
but if he had been just so much less good
as to remember mercy. Did he think
how once I was his sister, prizing him
as sisters do, content to learn for him
the lesson girls with brothers all must learn,
to do without?
I have heard girls lament
that doing so without all things one would,
but I saw never aught to murmur at,
for men must be made ready for their work,
and women all have more or less their chance
of husbands to work for them, keep them safe
like summer roses in soft greenhouse air
that never guess 'tis winter out of doors:
no, I saw never aught to murmur at,
content with stinted fare and shabby clothes
and cloistered silent life to save expense,
teaching myself out of my borrowed books,
while he for some one pastime, (needful true
to keep him of his rank, 'twas not his fault),
spent in a month what could have given me
my teachers for a year.
'Twas no one's fault:
for could he be launched forth on the rude sea
of this contentious world and left to find
oars and the boatman's skill by some good chance?
'Twas no one's fault: yet still he might have thought
of our so different youths, and owned at least
'tis pitiful when a mere nerveless girl,
untutored, must put forth upon that sea,
not in the woman's true place, the wife's place,
to trust a husband and be borne along,
but impotent blind pilot to herself.
Merciless, merciless -- like the prudent world
that will not have the flawed soul prank itself
with a hoped second virtue, will not have
the woman fallen once lift up herself ......
lest she should fall again. Oh how his taunts,
his loathing fierce reproaches, scarred and seared,
16
like branding iron hissing in a wound!
And it was true -- that killed me: and I felt
a hideous hopeless shame kill out my heart,
and knew myself for ever that he said,
that which I was -- Oh it was true, true, true.
No, not true then. I was not all that then.
Oh, I have drifted on before mad winds
6 and made ignoble shipwreck, not to-day
could any breeze of heaven prosper me
into the track again, nor any hand
snatch me out of the whirlpool I have reached;
but then?
Nay he judged very well: he knew
repentance was too dear a luxury
for a beggar's buying, knew it earns no bread -and knew me a too base and nerveless thing
to bear my first fault's sequel and just die.
And how could he have helped me? Held my hand,
owned me for his, fronted the angry world
clothed with my ignominy? Or maybe
taken me to his home to damn him worse?
What did I look for? for what less would serve
that he could do, a man without a purse?
He meant me well, he sent me that five pounds,
much to him then; and, if he bade me work
and never vex him more with news of me,
we both knew him too poor for pensioners.
I see he did his best; I could wish now
sending it back I had professed some thanks.
But there! I was too wretched to be meek:
it seemed to me as if he, every one,
the whole great world, were guilty of my guilt,
abettors and avengers: in my heart
I gibed them back their gibings; I was wild.
I see clear now and know one has one's life
in hand at first to spend or spare or give
like any other coin; spend it or give
or drop it in the mire, can the world see
17
you get your value for it, or bar back
the hurrying of its marts to grope it up
and give it back to you for better use?
And if you spend or give that is your choice;
and if you let it slip that's your choice too,
you should have held it firmer. Yours the blame,
and not another's, not the indifferent world's
which goes on steadily, statistically,
and count by censuses not separate souls -and if it somehow needs to its worst use
so many lives of women, useless else,
it buys us of ourselves, we could hold back,
free all of us to starve, and some of us,
(those who have done no ill and are in luck),
to slave their lives out and have food and clothes
until they grow unserviceably old.
Oh I blame no one -- scarcely even myself.
It was to be: the very good in me
has always turned to hurt; all I thought right
at the hot moment, judged of afterwards,
shows reckless.
Why, look at it, had I taken
the pay my dead child's father offered me
for having been its mother, I could then
have kept life in me, (many have to do it,
that swarm in the back alleys, on no more,
cold sometimes, mostly hungry, but they live);
I could have gained a respite trying it,
and maybe found at last some humble work
to eke the pittance out. Not I, forsooth,
I must have spirit, must have womanly pride,
must dash back his contemptuous wages, I,
who had not scorned to earn them, dash them back
the fiercer that he dared to count our boy
in my appraising: and yet now I think
I might have taken it for my dead boy's sake;
it would have been his gift.
But I went forth
with my fine scorn, and whither did it lead?
18
Money's the root of evil do they say?
money is virtue, strength: money to me
would then have been repentance: could I live
upon my idiot's pride?
Well, it fell soon.
I had prayed Edward might believe me dead,
and yet I begged of him -- That's like me too,
beg of him and then send him back his alms!
What if he gave as to a whining wretch
that holds her hand and lies? I am less to him
than such a one; her rags do him no wrong,
but I, I, wrong him merely that I live,
being his sister. Could I not at least
have still let him forget me? But 'tis past:
and naturally he may hope I am long dead.
Good God! to think that we were what we were
one to the other ... and now!
He has done well;
married a sort of heiress, I have heard,
a dapper little madam, dimple cheeked
and dimple brained, who makes him a good wife -No doubt she'd never own but just to him,
and in a whisper, she can even suspect
that we exist, we other women things:
what would she say if she could learn one day
she has a sister-in-law! So he and I
must stand apart till doomsday.
But the jest,
to think how she would look! -- Her fright, poor thing!
The notion! -- I could laugh outright ...... or else,
for I feel near it, roll on the ground and sob.
Well, after all, there's not much difference
between the two sometimes.
Was that the bell?
Some one at last, thank goodness. There's a voice,
and that's a pleasure. Whose though? Ah I know.
19
Why did she come alone, the cackling goose?
why not have brought her sister? -- she tells more
and titters less. No matter; half a loaf
is better than no bread.
Oh, is it you?
Most welcome, dear: one gets so moped alone.
~ Augusta Davies Webster,

*** WISDOM TROVE ***

*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***

WORDNET

* WISDOM TROVE *

* NEWFULLDB 2.4M *