#ironmen

...trying to predict whether global warming will moderate the next ice age is not only impossible but irrelevant. It doesn't help us get through the next few centuries. And one can only imagine our future, shivering, ice age descendants cursing us for leaving them no fossil fuel to create a global warming "greenhouse" effect when one is really needed. ↗

— John Harte

#global-warming #humour #age

I enjoyed entertaining people since I was a little girl. There was nothing better than making people laugh. That, and the need to express myself in a safe environment. ↗

— Amy Weber

#enjoyed #entertaining #entertaining people #environment #express

The angry men know that this golden age (of fossil fuels) has gone; but they cannot find the words for the constraints they hate. Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings. ↗

— George Monbiot

#energy #environment #greed #oil #age

Were we to confront our creaturehood squarely, how would we propose to educate? The answer, I think is implied in the root of the word education, educe, which means "to draw out." What needs to be drawn out is our affinity for life. That affinity needs opportunities to grow and flourish, it needs to be validated, it needs to be instructed and disciplined, and it needs to be harnessed to the goal of building humane and sustainable societies. Education that builds on our affinity for life would lead to a kind of awakening of possibilities and potentials that lie dormant and unused in the industrial-utilitarian mind. Therefore the task of education, as Dave Forman stated, is to help us 'open our souls to love this glorious, luxuriant, animated, planet.' The good news is that our own nature will help us in the process if we let it. ↗

— David Orr

#education #environment #human-nature #nature #beauty

I finally understood that I couldn’t avoid working to provide for myself, but that can also be a wonderful thing, a beautiful thing. ↗

— Andy Couturier

#environmentalism #green #japan #sustainability #beauty

...the hippies of the 1960s did understand something. They were right in fighting the plastic culture, and the church should have been fighting it too... More than this, they were right in the fact that the plastic culture - modern man, the mechanistic worldview in university textbooks and in practice, the total threat of the machine, the establishment technology, the bourgeois upper middle class - is poor in its sensitivity to nature... As a utopian group, the counterculture understands something very real, both as to the culture as a culture, but also as to the poverty of modern man's concept of nature and the way the machine is eating up nature on every side. ↗

— Francis A. Schaeffer

#environment #the-earth #death

Okay, little car, you are protesting roads. They are death traps for animals. They are environmentally unsound impervious surfaces that cause runoff. I understand this. But could we protest in the summer? ↗

— Carrie Jones

#environmentalism #roads #death

Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal? ↗

— Rachel Carson

#inspirational #diet

Above all, it seems to me wrongheaded and dangerous to invoke historical assumptions about environmental practices of native peoples in order to justify treating them fairly. ... By invoking this assumption [i.e., that they were/are better environmental stewards than other peoples or parts of contemporary society] to justify fair treatment of native peoples, we imply that it would be OK to mistreat them if that assumption could be refuted. In fact, the case against mistreating them isn't based on any historical assumption about their environmental practices: it's based on a moral principle, namely, that it is morally wrong for one people to dispossess, subjugate or exterminate another people. ↗

— Jared Diamond

#dispossession #environment #equality #extermination #morality

The earth will not continue to offer its harvest, except with faithful stewardship. We cannot say we love the land and then take steps to destroy it for use by future generations. ↗

— John Paul II

#environment #stewardship #faith