Latina

“The surface of the Earth measures 510 million square kilometres and the holiest places for both Christians and Jews, and one of the three holiest sites for Muslims, can all be found in the same square kilometre. That small piece of land is the religious centre for four billion of Earth’s inhabitants, most of them further subdivided into sects, many thinking they have nothing in common with the others. Everyone interprets words in their own way, and so it has been for hundreds, even thousands, of years. Even the Church on Calvary Hill is divided between five or six denominations, and there is a constant tension over territory.”
― Andri Snær Magnason, On Time and Water

“Those who define the world based on money, industry and production capacity have seemingly been spared from acquiring an understanding of biology, geology or ecology. They calculate statistics and feel optimistic. What’s fatal to the Earth and unsustainable for the future is hidden by the words ‘favorable economic outlook’. Increased oil production is positive for the economy; doubling aluminium production is positive. Economic growth doesn’t distinguish sustainability and unsustainability. Imagine making no distinction between strengthening or fattening, or between a child or a tumour growing in the womb. Growth is simply presented as an inherent good; there’s no distinction made between malignant and benign growth.”
― Andri Snær Magnason, On Time and Water

“Be thou the rainbow in the storms of life. The evening bream that smiles the clouds away and tints tomorrow with prophetic ray.”
― Sara Sheridan, The Fair Botanists

“Ocean acidification is one of the largest unique geological events that the Earth has undergone in the last fifty million years. And it introduces another concept to which we connect poorly: time itself. Although time is properly called linear, imagining that the ocean will change more in the next hundred years than it has in the last fifty million years is a challenge. The time since Iceland’s settlement is very short, not more than twelve times my Grandma’s life: eleven hundred years. The history of Iceland is, in a sense, a continuous story of twelve women like my Grandma. Twelve girls who were born and lived lives that each felt like a flash. Twelve women in their nineties stretching out their hands as if they’re doing water aerobics, touching flat palms together. Their eyes gleam because time passes so fast that their eyes don’t realise they’re nearly a hundred years old. Time runs so fast that Jesus was born around twenty-one grandmas ago. They’d all fit in a single city bus, even if you added all their husbands. The earliest written records of humans date back five thousand years, events that happened practically yesterday. Humanity first emerged the day before that, in comparison to the ocean’s fifty-millionyear history.”
― Andri Snær Magnason, On Time and Water