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The Earth holds together, it’s tissues cohere, and it has the look of a structure that really would make comprehensible sense if we only knew enough about it. From a little way off, photographed from, say, a satellite, it seems to be a kind of organism. Moreover, looked at over geologic time, it is plainly in the process of developing like an immense embryo. It is, for all its stupendous size and the numberless units and infinite variety of life forms, coherent. Every tissue is dependent for its existence on other tissues. It is a creature, or if you want a more conventional, but less interesting term, it is a system.
Lewis Thomas
The Person who suppresses the animal side of his nature may become civilized, but he does so at the expense of decreasing the motive power for spontaneity, creativity, strong emotions, and deep insights. He cuts himself off from the wisdom of his instinctual nature, a wisdom that may be more profound than any that learning or culture can provide.
Calvin Hall and Vernon Nordby
The culture that alienates itself from the very ground of its own being – from wilderness outside (that is to say, wild nature, the wild, self-contained, self-informing ecosystems) and from that other wilderness within – is doomed to a very destructive behaviour, ultimately perhaps self-destructive behaviour.
Gary Snyder
Humans have the idea, now centuries old, that we are above natural processes rather than immersed in them. We have thought, and continue to teach our children to think, that we can control nature, at least most of the time, and we have felt validated in this belief by the modest success of some of our inventions.
This is still a popular idea, but perhaps we’re beginning to awaken to all the ways we cannot control nature and to all the damage we cause when we try. To some – an increasing number, I hope – there is a growing attitude that we have no choice but to find our appropriate role amid the infinite webs of natural processes.
Robert Greenaway
[The empty self] … seeks the experience of being continually filled up by consuming goods, calories, experiences, politicians, romantic partners, and empathic therapists in an attempt to combat the growing alienation and fragmentation of it’s era. This response has been implicitly prescribed by a post- World War ‖ economy that is dependent on the continual consumption of nonessential and quickly obsolete items and experiences. In order to thrive, [Western] society requires individuals who experience a strong “need” for consumer products and in fact, demands them.
Philip Cushman
Only population growth rivals consumption as a cause of ecological decline, and at least population growth is now viewed as a problem by many governments and citizens of the world. Consumption, in contrast, is almost universally seen as good – indeed, increasingly it is the primary goal of national economic policy.
Alan Thein Durning
People actually remember few ads. Yet commercials have an effect nonetheless. Even if they fail to sell a particular product, they sell consumerism itself by ceaselessly reiterating the idea that there is a product to solve each of life’s problems, indeed the existence would be satisfying and complete if only we bought the right things. Advertisers thus cultivate needs by hitching their wares to the infinite yearnings of the human soul.
Alan Thein Durning
The frog does not drink up the pond in which he lives.
Native American Proverb
A depressing number of Americans believe that if only they had twice as much, they would inherit the estate of happiness promised them in the Declaration of Independence. The man who earns $15,000 a year is sure that he could relieve his sorrow if he had only $30,000 a year; the man with $1 million a year knows that all would be well if he had $2 million a year…Nobody ever has enough.
Lewis Lapham
[Note the] observation of the patterns that are all around us and the way that energy is harvested through harmonious pattern assemblies. Pattern, the edge between chaos and harmony. The ultimate expression of a natural system is the point where it goes from harmony to chaos. That edge is the ultimate opportunity for creativity and productivity. This is the wow factor of permaculture. This is the glue that puts it all together, that we all inherently understand. It comes from our ancestral knowledge of survival. We all have it, and we can all make links to it. This is the subject that is not taught in any other system, and this is the subject that would probably be excluded by most academics, and yet all people understand pattern in some form, especially children. It is so easy to teach to children, the elderly, and traditional people, who are not drowning in technology, who can respect the patterns of nature. Here is the form, here is the classroom, and here is the teacher. This is the system that has survived for millennia, and will continue to survive. This is the great diversity, nature’s university.
Geoff Lawton, spoken whilst standing amidst a forest.
Cosmology is a human legacy, it`s not a racial legacy. It is a native Dagara perception that once upon a time, the cosmology that was, was a human cosmology. It was not Dagara, it was not European, it was not African, it was not American. That was the sequence of time leading to a breakdown. People have found themselves since the explosion, looking for a home, looking for a place where, the once again enjoyable harmony can be contemplated, embraced and brought back to life again. And so to say that the European came to America and as a result there is a melting pot created is perhaps, to look at it, too narrow. In a broader scale, the greater scheme of things indicate that this mobility, the desire to go somewhere can be seen as motivated by this fundamental thing, the need to make sure that we don’t sit back and pretend to enjoy comfort while we know that home has not been reached yet. It might take the form of a migration across the ocean to a new land, something that looks more like a new world because the old world has become too old and perhaps too distant from itself. But the whole concept of a new world is the same as the concept of a return to the origin. Whether it works or not, the fundamental motivating principle that would lead someone to abandon a place of birth in some kind of new light, new world, you name it, can be traced to this fundamental place, that indeed a person`s purpose involves the commitment to search for and find that lost harmony that was once that holding force that kept village and Earth together.
Malidorma Patrice Some
[There are] strategies for an alternative global nation. The invisible structures. The people systems. This is where we have to work with the formal and the informal economies, where we need to set up an ethical basis of an alternative global nation. This is where village development and land access become important. How do we access land? How do we set up bioregional organisations so that people can extend trade between each other, set up the personalities and identify the personalities of bioregions? What is the fingerprint of your local systems, and your systems where you know the careers and the products and the professions that identify we the people, the extended family? These systems lead us to alternatives to political systems. This is where ethics are the way we invest in natural capitol. We can set up local energy trading systems, `lets` systems, even local currency systems where we trade on our own value, our own value of product within systems. This is where we can create a new united nations, where nations can be defined, not just by their political boundaries or by their national boundaries. Nations are defined by language groups or by cultures but they can also be defined by a nation of people who think the same way. Permaculture is a nation of people, an international nation of people who think the same way; a positive, safe, peaceful, abundant future is possible by design.
Geoff Lawton
Grown men can learn from very little children, for the hearts of the little children are pure. Therefore, the Great Spirit may show them many things which the older people miss.
Black Elk
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