Friday, April 22, 2011

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote: Earth Day Edition


photo taken from the International Space Station by astronaut Ron Garan

"All around us, aspects of the modern world - diet, exercise, medicine, art, work, family, philosophy, economics, ecology, psychology - have begun a long circle back toward their former coherence. Whether they can arrive before the natural world is damaged beyond repair and madness destroys humanity, we cannot tell."

Paul Shepard, The Others (1996)


"If nature is not a prison and earth a shoddy way-station, we must find the faith and force to affirm its metabolism as our own---or rather, our own as part of it. To do so means nothing less than a shift in our whole frame of reference and our attitude toward life itself, a wider perception of the landscape as a creative, harmonious being where relationships of things are as real as the things. Without losing our sense of a great human destiny and without intellectual surrender, we must affirm that the world is a being, a part of our own body."

Paul Shepard, "Ecology and Man-A Viewpoint" in The Subversive Science (1969)--a foundation document of the first Earth Day in 1970.

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