John Michael Roccamo

“Speaking of which, I’ve just walked past the chapel in one of our nearest towns. It’s a glorious day, and four of its devotees are out tending to its garden. When I say 'tending’ what I mean is that they are spraying herbicide on its manicured lawn. The man who is doing the actual spraying is walking along the bank of a river, and I notice that some of the herbicide is being sprayed into the river directly (more will inevitably find its way in on the next heavy rain). As he turns around to spray the stretch of grass that runs parallel to the church footpath, two of the other men - who, up to now, had been spectators - suddenly spring into action and walk alongside him, holding up a large PVC board to prevent the spray leaving an ugly film on the tarmac which leads the congregation into their chapel. I ask them, in a friendly manner, if they could at least not spray next to the river. One of them tells me to 'leave us in peace'. I assume to love and serve the Lord. The Lord must prefer tarmac to rivers.”
― Mark Boyle, The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology

“At a time when the UN is declaring that the internet a basic human right, the most basic right of all—to build a simple shelter where you can feed yourself and your family—seems to be drifting further out of reach...”
― Mark Boyle, The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology

“In America, men widely divided from the majority by their opinions are helpless to oppose its power; all others hope to win it over.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville

“Now, the biblical tradition is a socially oriented mythology. Nature is condemned. In the nineteenth century, scholars thought of mythology and ritual as an attempt to control nature. But that is magic, not mythology or religion. Nature religions are not attempts to control nature but to help you put yourself in accord with it. But when nature is thought of as evil, you don’t put yourself in accord with it, you control it, or try to, and hence the tension, the anxiety, the cutting down of forests, the annihilation of native people. And the accent here separates us from nature.

MOYERS: Is this why we so easily dominate or subjugate nature—because we have contempt for it, because we see it only as something to serve us?

CAMPBELL: Yes. I will never forget the experience I had when I was in Japan, a place that never heard of the Fall and the Garden of Eden. One of the Shinto texts says that the processes of nature cannot be evil. Every natural impulse is not to be corrected but to be sublimated, to be beautified. There is a glorious interest in the beauty of nature and cooperation with nature, so that in some of those gardens you don’t know where nature begins and art ends—this was a tremendous experience.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth