ChrisR

“The Lebanese flag has a cedar tree on it because much of what is now desert was thickly forested before the harbingers of civilization--i.e., woodcutters, farmers, and goats--saw to it that large stands of cedar will never grace the Holy Land again. The stark and sere limestone hills that we think of as typical Greek and Italian landscape were once all but invisible beneath a layer of long-gone topsoil held in place by forests of cedar and oak.”
― John Vaillant, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed

“With me, you know it's like this: when I sober up, I get wise and stupid, and when I'm drunk, I get stupid and wise.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“What industry calls innovation, in other words, looks more like the final suicidal throes of addiction. We are blasting the bedrock of our continents, pumping our water with toxins, lopping off mountaintops, scraping off boreal forests, endangering the deep ocean, and scrambling to exploit the melting Arctic—all to get at the last drops and the final rocks. Yes, some very advanced technology is making this possible, but it’s not innovation, it’s madness.”
― Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

“Every civilizing step in history has been ridiculed as 'sentimental', 'impractical', or 'womanish', etc., by those whose fun, profit or convenience was at stake”
― Joan Gilbert