Some Words for Our World

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
—Mary Oliver

T hink about the kind of world you want to live and work in. What do you need to know to help build that world? Demand that your teachers teach you that.
—Paul Goodman

The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But is does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind.  It needs people who live well in their places.  It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world more habitable and humane.  And these qualities have little to do with success as our culture defined it.
—David Orr

All education is environmental education.
—David Orr

We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well-for we will not fight to save what we do not love.
—Stephen Jay Gould

The opposite of love is not hatred but indifference.
—Paul Gruchow

If home is a place in time-then we cannot know where we are now unless we can remember where we have came from.
—Paul Gruchow

Nothing is so terrifying as the demonstration of principle.  Emerson preached Nature; Thoreau embraced nature.  It is Thoreau, of course, who ultimately strikes us as dangerous.
—Paul Gruchow

I never got to India, but in various stages of my free-wheeling youth I tried out living in a tent, in a commune, and in Europe, before eventually determining that I could only ever hope to dent the salacious appetites of my homeland and make us a more perfect union by living inside this amazing beast, poking at its belly from the inside with my one little life and the small, pointed sword of my pen.  So this is where I feed my family and try to live lightly on the land.
—Barbara Kingsolver.

If we are blessed with an abundance of choices about food, we are surely also obliged to consider the responsibility implicit in our choices.
—Barbara Kingsolver

Yet consuming too much isn't inevitable.  If there aren't too many of us and we don't consume too fast, we won't leave any wakes beyond the capacity of the Earth to absorb them.
—John Ryan and Alan Durning

The quest for sustainable development is really the quest for more love in the world-for care of the natural world, of innocent people, and future generations.  Our work is really about giving love back to the world and we can't give what we don't have.
—Betsy Taylor

Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.
—Annie Dillard

Consumption on the North American scale-our own body weight per day-cannot last, and expanding it to all the world's people is a fantasy.
—John Ryan and Alan Durning

What we find beautiful accords with our most profound sense of how things ought to be. Ordinarily, we live in tension between our perceptions and our desires. When we encounter beauty, that tension vanishes, and inward and outward images agree.
—Scott Russell Sanders

The world still is undiscovered, as a matter of fact, until you have found its secrets for yourself, but only children (and some artists) seem to understand this with any conviction. They don't delegate the work of discovery. They boldly assume it for themselves.
—Paul Gruchow

Ecological design requires the ability to comprehend patterns that connect, which means getting beyond the boxes we call disciplines to see things in their ecological context. It requires, in other words, a liberal education.
—David Orr

Whatever its source, Creation is a marvelous feat of generosity, an exuberant outpouring. I see that outpouring in Ruth's face, in the wren pecking for bugs on my windowsill, in the October rain bringing down yellow leaves from the tulip tree in our front yard, in the pumpkin glowing orange in our neighbor's porch. The outpouring never ceases, but only changes form. We honor this continuing gift by our own acts of charity and compassion. We honor the Creator by cherishing every parcel of Creation, especially those living things that share the planet with us, the beetles and bison, the black-footed ferrets and black-eyed Susans. . . . The price of hope, in other words, is responsibility.
—Scott Russell Sanders

Eaters, that is, must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, the way the world is used.
—Wendell Berry

The community and the individual are not mutually exclusive; they are symbiotic. Just as constrictions of form enable creative expression, so the constraints of community stimulate individualism.
—Paul Gruchow

The task of making a home in nature is what Wendell Berry has called "the forever unfinished lifework of our species." "The only thing we have to preserve nature with," he writes, "is culture; the only thing we have to preserve wildness with is domesticity." . . . . If wildness can stop being (just) out there and start being (also) in here, if it can start being as humane as it is natural, then perhaps we can get on with the unending task of struggling to live rightly in the world-not just in the garden, not just in the wilderness, but in the home that encompasses them both.
—William Cronon

We live in stories. What we are is stories. We do things because of what is called character, and our character is formed by the stories we learn to live in. Late in the night we listen to our own breathing in the dark and rework our stories. We do it again the next morning, and all day long, before the looking glass of ourselves, reinventing reasons for our lives. Other than such storytelling there is no reason to things.
—William Kittredge

Environmentalists cannot be politically effective outside the bounds of everyday political discourse. They must find means of relating their ideas to the issues of principle concern to those actively involved in the political world.
—Robert Paehlke

To inhabit a place means literally to have made it a habit, to have made it the custom and ordinary practice of our lives, to have learned how to wear a place like a familiar garment, like the garments of sanctity that nuns once wore.
—Paul Gruchow

Going to Walden is not so easy a thing
As a green visit. It is the slow and difficult
Trick of living, and finding it where you are.
—Mary Oliver

The danger now is that those who are concerned will believe that the solution to the "environmental crisis" can be merely political-that the problems, being large, can be solved by large solutions generated by a few people to whom we will give our proxies to police the economic proxies that we have already given.  The danger, in other words, is that people will think they have made a sufficient change if they have altered their "values," or had a "change of heart," or experienced a "spiritual awakening," and that such a change in passive consumers will cause appropriate changes in the public experts, politicians, and corporate executives to whom they have granted their political and economic proxies . . . . A total economy for all practical purposes is a total government.  The "free trade," which from the standpoint of the corporate economy brings "unprecedented economic growth," from the standpoint of the land and its local populations, and ultimately from the standpoint of the cities, is destruction and slavery.  Without prosperous local economies, the people have no power, and the land no voice.
—Wendell Berry

I want my students to keep asking the difficult, perennial questions. But when they ask if there is hope for the future, I want them to be able to answer Yes, with confidence in their own powers, with complex knowledge of the world, with eagerness for the healing work they may do.
—Scott Russell Sanders

The time and expense of higher education is most often excused on the grounds that it increases lifetime earnings, a crude but useful measure of the amount of carbon the scholar is able to redistribute from the earth's crust to the atmosphere. It is somewhat rarer for education to be extolled on the grounds that it reduces the graduates' impact on the biosphere or because it hones their skills in living simply.
—David Orr, Earth in Mind

A genuinely liberal education will produce whole persons with intellectual breadth, able to think at right angles to their major field, practical persons to act competently; and persons of deep commitment, willing to roll up their sleeves and join the struggle to build a humane and sustainable world.
—David Orr, Earth in Mind

The symptoms of environmental deterioration are in the domain of the natural sciences, but the causes lie in the realm of the social science and humanities.
—David Orr

All through our gliding journey, on this day as on so many others, a little song runs through my mind. I say a song because it passes musically, but it is really just words, a thought that is neither strange nor complex. In fact, how strange it would be not to think it -- not to have such music inside one's head and body, on such an afternoon. What does it mean, say the words, that the earth is so beautiful? And what shall I do about it? What is the gift that I should bring to the world? What is the life that I should live?
—Mary Oliver