"The most serious form of environmental pollution is always mind pollution. Environmental reform most fundamentally depends on changing the way we think. Scientists may have answers to environmental problems, but the answers are not solutions unless they change behavior. Enough technology! It's time to listen to the humanists again." --Roderick Nash (2001) From: Noel, T. J., & Fielder, J. (2001). Colorado, 1870-2000, revisited: the history behind the images. Big Earth Publishing.
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General Oliver O. Howard to Chief Joseph (Hinmatoowyalahtq'it) and Nez Perce (Nimiipuu) in Montana (1877) "The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it. You might as well expect all rivers to run backward as that any man who was born a free man should be contented penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases" --Chief Joseph (Hinmatoowyalahtq'it) in Washington D.C. in 1879
"State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules."
--Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) "neither science nor philosophy is needed to know what one has to do in order to be honest and good, and indeed wise and virtuous."; "judgment...can be confused and deflected from the right direction by a lot of inappropriate and irrelevant considerations." --Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) "Socrates could never get tenure in a philosophy department today. That Socrates could never get tenure today is an indictment of the system--a reductio ad absurdum--not an indictment of Socrates"
"my hearers always imagine that I myself possess the wisdom which I find wanting in others: but the truth is...the wisdom of men is little or nothing" --Socrates (-470 -- -399) "Heidegger has always been the essential philosopher."
—Michael Foucault (1926-1984) "The most thought-provoking thing about this thought-provoking time is that we’re still not thinking." —Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) "Thinking is a lonely business." —Heidegger to Hannah Arendt in Hannah Arendt (2012) "The overpowering rise of machinery pains and frightens me; it is rolling along like a thunderstorm, slowly, slowly; but it has taken its direction, it will come and strike."
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) as Susanne in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre “Possibly, in our intuitive perceptions, which may be truer than our science and less impeded by words than our philosophies, we realize the indivisibility of the earth—its soil, mountains, rivers, forests, climate, plants, and animals, and respect it collectively not only as a useful servant but as a living being, vastly less alive than ourselves in degree, but vastly greater than ourselves in time and space...” --Aldo Leopold (1887-1948)
“Why does this strange man go into the wet woods and up the mountain on stormy nights? Why does he walk along on barren peaks or on dangerous mountains?”
--Toyatte (Chilkat) “It has always seemed to me that while trying to speak to traders and those seeking gold mines that it was like speaking to a person across a broad stream that was running over fast stones and making so loud a noise that scarce a single word could be heard. But now, for the first time, the Indian and the white man are on the same side of the river.” --Chilkat chief Dan-na-wuk "I am, alas, destined for a career that distracts me terribly from my studies.”
--Alexander Von Humboldt (1769-1859) Alexander longed to live "far away from the so-called intellectuals." “There was still an instinctive wariness of his brother’s more analytical way of thinking, and ‘the knack that logical reasoning has to kill off the spirit and the imagination’.” “While [Alexander's brother] was in the process of arranging his life down to the colour of his teapot, Alexander seemed to recoil instinctively against everything conventional and regimented.” Guru Nanak (1469-1539)
I randomly discovered this quote. I don't know what exactly the founder of Sikhism meant by it, but it's interesting in 3 ways: 1) philosophical and religious debates and arguments about meat consumption are clearly very old, 2) science and technology have blurred the line between animals and plants. Here are 2 obvious examples: A) Lab grown meat: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lab-grown-meat/ B) Plant pain response: https://www.pri.org/…/new-research-plant-intelligence-may-f… 3) And we may never know the right answer to some of these questions and a healthy dose of skepticism about the limits of our metaphysical and ethical understanding is a good thing. Finally, it reminds me of the Nirvana lyric: "it's ok to eat fish because they don't have any feelings" -- a position close to that found in the work of philosopher Peter Singer, which seems to me a bit arbitrary and potentially unknowable (https://www.wbur.org/…/why-its-ok-for-vegans-to-eat-oysters…). "An eclectic is someone who, trampling underfoot prejudice, tradition, consensus, antiquity, authority — in a word, everything that governs the mind of the common herd — dares to think for himself."
-Denis Diderot (1713-1784) "Rousseau claimed to be incapable of thinking properly, of composing, creating or finding inspiration except when walking. The mere sight of a desk and chair was enough to make him feel sick and drain him of all courage.”
“Later still he became a sort of outlaw, driven out wherever he went, a leading undesirable, condemned in Paris, in Geneva. His books were publicly burned and he was threatened with jail. People threw stones at him in Moutier.” From: A Philosophy of Walking - Frederic Gros "the warmth of sun on our skin, the stroke of wind, the sound of thunder and rain, the push of rivers and swell of seas, the smell of thawing dirt, the sight of leaves and blossoms unfurling, the pinpricks of light from stars, the intake of breath and thump of heart. These sensations have yielded humankind's perennial images for the ultimate nature of things, imagery that runs through scriptures, folktales, petroglyphs, poems, paintings, and other symbolic expressions the world over" - Scott Russell Sanders
"At this moment I can picture Ekok, somewhere out in the wilderness of the North...The wind blows fiercely into her face, and sharp pains tingle in her nose as the frost nips it. It is bitter traveling, and maybe as she stops a moment to get her breath she wonders what all her hardships are for, what good comes from all the suffering and futility and misery of life. But if so it can only be for an instant. Reasons are only for children who have time to dodge actuality with philosophical diversion. Here is snow and wind and freezing in the storm-filled sky. Here is life and the Arctic and the great, instinctive surge to live. She bends her head a little lower and pushes forward once more into the blizzard."
-Bob Marshall, Arctic Village |
Chris Dunn, PhD
Researcher, writer, explorer*, photographer, thinker. Wrestling with nature, culture, technology. Archives
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*When I use the term "exploration", I mean it in a personal sense (discovery for myself, or at a unique moment in time [everywhere after all--even crowded cities--endlessly await rediscovery--by new eyes and in new moments]), not in an absolute sense. With few exceptions (notably Antarctica), almost everywhere on earth has had other people around for a long time (though to varying degrees - high mountain tops or places like the interior of the Greenland Ice Sheet for instance were far less visited and populated, and undoubtedly at least some pockets of the earth were never visited or populated). It is an enlightening experience though when on an isolated ridge in what feels like the middle of nowhere to wonder if anyone has set foot there but never knowing for sure. What is significant is that the landscape itself is left in such a condition that it isn't evident. Some places ought to be kept that way.
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