Michael

“Even viewed conservatively, trees are worth far more than they cost to
plant and maintain. The U.S. Forest Service's Center for Urban Forest
Research found a ten-degree difference between the cool of a shaded
park in Tucson and the open Sonoran desert. A tree planted in the
right place, the center estimates, reduces the demand for air
conditioning and can save 100 kilowatt hours in annual electrical use,
about 2 to 8 percent of total use. Strategically planted trees can
also shelter homes from wind, and in cold weather they can reduce
heating fuel costs by 10 to 12 percent. A million strategically
planted trees, the center figures, can save $10 million in energy
costs. And trees increase property values, as much as 1 percent for
each mature tree. These savings are offset somewhat by the cost of
planting and maintaining trees, but on balance, if we had to pay for
the services that trees provide, we couldn't afford them. Because
trees offer their services in silence, and for free, we take them for
granted.”
― Jim Robbins, The Man Who Planted Trees: Lost Groves, Champion Trees, and an Urgent Plan to Save the Planet

“By the time we grow up we become masters at dissimulation, at cultivating a self that the world cannot probe. But we pay a price. After years of turning people away, of protecting our inner self, of cultivating it by living in a different world, of furnishing this world with our fantasies and dreams—lo and behold we find that we are hopelessly separated from everyone else. We have become victims of our own art. We touch people on the outsides of their bodies, and they us, but we cannot get at their insides and cannot reveal our insides to them. This is one of the great tragedies of our interiority—it is utterly personal and unrevealable. Often we want to say something unusually intimate to a spouse, a parent, a friend, communicate something of how we are really feeling about a sunset, who we really feel we are—only to fall strangely and miserably flat. Once in a great while we succeed, sometimes more with one person, less or never with others. But the occasional break-through only proves the rule. You reach out with a disclosure, fail, and fall back bitterly into yourself. We emit huge globs of love to our parents and spouses, and the glob slithers away in exchange of words that are somehow beside the point of what we are trying to say. People seem to keep bumping up against each other with their exteriors and falling away from each other. The cartoonist Jules Feiffer is the modern master of this aspect of the human tragedy. Take even the sexual act—the most intimate merger given to organisms. For most people, even for their entire lives, it is simply a joining of exteriors. The insides melt only in the moment of orgasm, but even this is brief, and a melting is not a communication. It is a physical overcoming of separateness, not a symbolic revelation and justification of one’s interior. many people pursue sex precisely because it is a mystique of the overcoming of the separateness of the inner world, and they go from one partner to another because they can never quite achieve “it." So the endless interrogations: “What are you thinking about right now—me? Do you feel what I feel? Do you love me?”
― Becker Ernest

“The problem is not merely man against man or nation against nation. It is man against war.”
― Dwight D. Eisenhower

“We’ve bought into the idea that education is about training and “success”, defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and to challenge. We should not forget that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.”
― Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle