Canary In The Coal Mine Quotes

An intersectional approach to feminism requires understanding that too often mainstream feminism ignores that Black women and other women of color are the proverbial canaries in the coal mine of hate.

There are times when the heart, like the canary in the coal mine, breathes in the world's toxicity and begins to die.

The way we view fiction is a reflection of how we define ourselves as a nation. Works of the imagination are canaries in the coal mine, the measure by which we can evaluate the health of the rest of society.

Women have always been the canaries in the coal mines, quietly singing.

know I’m living outside my values when I am…drum roll…this is a huge issue for me…resentful. Resentment is my barometer and my early warning system. It’s the canary in the coal mine. It shows up when I stay quiet in order not to piss off someone. It shows up when I put work before my well-being, and it blows the doors off the hinges when I’m not setting good boundaries.

In time, the cockatoo would become the Greene’s canary in a coal mine.

He was just thinking aloud, ruling out possibilities by releasing them into the air, like canaries in the coal mine of his mind.

Likewise, civilizations have throughout history marched blindly toward disaster, because humans are wired to believe that tomorrow will be much like today — it is unnatural for us to think that this way of life, this present moment, this order of things is not stable and permanent. Across the world today, our actions testify to our belief that we can go on like this forever, burning oil, poisoning the seas, killing off other species, pumping carbon into the air, ignoring the ominous silence of our coal mine canaries in favor of the unending robotic tweets of our new digital imaginarium. Yet the reality of global climate change is going to keep intruding on our fantasies of perpetual growth, permanent innovation and endless energy, just as the reality of mortality shocks our casual faith in permanence.

Women have always been the canaries in the coal mines, quietly singing. But we are so used to seeing them die at men’s hands, so used to justifying and excusing it as normal or “understandable,” that it wouldn’t occur to us to consider this enough of an aberration to raise alarm.

I had suddenly become aware of my hands, which meant only one thing: It was time to say my farewells and make a graceful—or at least dignified—exit. Dogger had once told me, 'Your hands know when it's time to go.' And he had been right. The hands are the canaries in one's own personal coal mine: They need to be watched carefully and obeyed. A fidget demands attention, and a full-blown not-knowing-what-to-do-with-them means 'Vamoose!

If you’re a manager, remember that one third to one half of your workforce is probably introverted, whether they appear that way or not. Think twice about how you design your organization’s office space. Don’t expect introverts to get jazzed up about open office plans or, for that matter, lunchtime birthday parties or team-building retreats. Make the most of introverts’ strengths—these are the people who can help you think deeply, strategize, solve complex problems, and spot canaries in your coal mine. Also, remember the dangers of the New Groupthink. If it’s creativity you’re after, ask your employees to solve problems alone before sharing their ideas. If you want the wisdom of the crowd, gather it electronically, or in writing, and make sure people can’t see each other’s ideas until everyone’s had a chance to contribute. Face-to-face contact is important because it builds trust, but group dynamics contain unavoidable impediments to creative thinking. Arrange for people to interact one-on-one and in small, casual groups. Don’t mistake assertiveness or eloquence for good ideas. If you have a proactive work force (and I hope you do), remember that they may perform better under an introverted leader than under an extroverted or charismatic one.

Like many nurses, the thing I’m always worried about is doing either too much or too little. If I sound an alarm and the patient is OK, then I over-reacted and have untrustworthy clinical judgment. If I don’t call in the cavalry when it’s needed, then I’m negligent and unsafe for patients. You don’t always know because what goes on inside human bodies can be hidden and subtle. This job would be easier if there weren’t such a narrow divide between being the canary in the coal mine and Chicken Little.

In Marin County, north of San Francisco, the search for a safe haven resulted in a new apartment complex - the first, and only, such government-sponsored project aimed at MCS.

p. 369 An attack on books, on rationality, on knowledge isn't a tempest in a teacup, but rather a canary dead in a coal mine.

President Donald Trump is the canary in a coal mine. A babbling asshat from a galaxy far, far away.

In a world where no creatures are truly isolated and diseases spread around as fast as jets can fly, we are all canaries and the entire planet is our coal mine. Any species can be a sentinel of danger—-but only if the widest array of health--care professionals is paying attention.

When a child got sick, it was assumed that she was broken. We didn’t yet understand that many sick children are canaries in coal mines, passively inhaling toxins in the air of their families or cultures or both. So I was separated, sent away to therapists and doctors who tried to fix me instead of trying to fix the toxins I was breathing.

Receptionists were the canaries down the coal mine of the modern office; there was nothing worth knowing that they wouldn’t know first.

[Boredom] is a canary in the coal mine of everyday existence, signaling whether we want and are able to cognitively engage with our current activity—and impelling us to action when we do not or cannot. How we respond to boredom matters: blindly stifling every flicker of boredom with enjoyable but empty distractions precludes deeper engagement with the messages boredom sends us about meaning, values, and goals.

I was perplexed as to what the usefulness of any of the arts might be, with the possible exception of interior decoration. The most positive notion I could come up with was what I call the canary-in-the-coal-mine theory of the arts. This theory argues that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are supersensitive. They keel over like canaries in coal mines filled with poison gas, long before more robust types realize that any danger is there.

If you’re a manager, remember that one third to one half of your workforce is probably introverted, whether they appear that way or not. Think twice about how you design your organization’s office space. Don’t expect introverts to get jazzed up about open office plans or, for that matter, lunchtime birthday parties or team-building retreats. Make the most of introverts’ strengths—these are the people who can help you think deeply, strategize, solve complex problems, and spot canaries in your coal mine.

maybe bees are sensitive, unusually sensitive, to all the negativity in the human world. Maybe they are connected to us in come essential way that we haven't figured out yet, and their death is a warning of some sort to us, like the canaries in a coal mine, sensitive to an emergency that will soon be apparent to dull, slow human beings.

Back then, the mental health world treated eating disorders differently than it does now. When a child got sick, it was assumed that she was broken. We didn’t yet understand that many sick children are canaries in coal mines, passively inhaling toxins in the air of their families or cultures or both. So I was separated, sent away to therapists and doctors who tried to fix me instead of trying to fix the toxins I was breathing.

If you’re a teacher, enjoy your gregarious and participatory students. But don’t forget to cultivate the shy, the gentle, the autonomous, the ones with single-minded enthusiasms for chemistry sets or parrot taxonomy or nineteenth-century art. They are the artists, engineers, and thinkers of tomorrow. If you’re a manager, remember that one third to one half of your workforce is probably introverted, whether they appear that way or not. Think twice about how you design your organization’s office space. Don’t expect introverts to get jazzed up about open office plans or, for that matter, lunchtime birthday parties or team-building retreats. Make the most of introverts’ strengths—these are the people who can help you think deeply, strategize, solve complex problems, and spot canaries in your coal mine.

Tests are the canary in the coal mine; when the design is bad, testing is hard.

I knew Steve was starting to cope when he proposed one of his most ambitious documentaries with John. They would journey literally to the end of the earth, to Antarctica, and document conditions for wildlife there. Steve knew that Antarctica functioned as a canary in a coal mine--an early-warning mechanism for environmental problems with the earth as a whole. It was summer in the Southern Hemisphere, and that’s the only practical time to go to Antarctica, but the continent was still no place for small children. I felt torn about being separated at such a tumultuous time, but the doco Icebreaker had been planned for a long time. Steve went south with John Stainton and a camera crew. I went to Florida and Disney World with the rest of my family: Robert and Bindi. As he had with the fauna of the Galapagos Islands, Steve discovered that the Antarctic wildlife had little fear of humans. There were no hunting parties out terrorizing the wildlife, so they didn’t perceive people as a threat. The penguins were among the friendliest. In fact, he found if he mimicked their actions, they would often repeat them in response. Steve slid on his belly down the slopes of ice, and the penguins did the same.

Let's imagine... if you glimpsed the future, you were frightened by what you saw, what would you do with that information? You would go to... the politicians, captains of industry? And how would you convince them? Data? Facts? Good luck! The only facts they won't challenge are the ones that keep the wheels greased and the dollars rolling in. But what if... what if there was a way of skipping the middle man and putting the critical news directly into everyone's head? The probability of wide-spread annihilation kept going up. The only way to stop it was to show it. To scare people straight. Because, what reasonable human being wouldn't be galvanized by the potential destruction of everything they've ever known or loved? To save civilization, I would show its collapse. But, how do you think this vision was received? How do you think people responded to the prospect of imminent doom? They gobbled it up like a chocolate eclair! They didn't fear their demise, they re-packaged it. It could be enjoyed as video-games, as TV shows, books, movies, the entire world wholeheartedly embraced the apocalypse and sprinted towards it with gleeful abandon. Meanwhile, your Earth was crumbling all around you. You've got simultaneous epidemics of obesity and starvation. Explain that one! Bees and butterflies start to disappear, the glaciers melt, algae blooms. All around you the coal mine canaries are dropping dead and you won't take the hint! In every moment there's the possibility of a better future, but you people won't believe it. And because you won't believe it you won't do what is necessary to make it a reality. So, you dwell on this terrible future. You resign yourselves to it for one reason, because *that* future does not ask anything of you today. So yes, we saw the iceberg and warned the Titanic. But you all just steered for it anyway, full steam ahead. Why? Because you want to sink! You gave up!

an attack on books, on rationality, on knowledge isn’t a tempest in a teacup, but rather a canary dead in a coal mine.

Sometimes, distractions can actually serve a purpose. Like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, they warn us—when we feel ourselves regularly succumbing to them—that our work is not well defined, or our tasks are menial, or the whole project we’re engaged in is fundamentally pointless.

African Americans continue to be the canaries in our coal-mine—the citizens whose unequal opportunities and unequal rights reveal a deeper truth about the fundamental sins of our nation.

Rather than see the significant numbers of students who are dropping out of schools as the problem, we should realize that they are actually highlighting a solution: these students are, in fact, the canary in the education coal mine.

It is not only the canary in the coal mine—it is also a crucial part of the mine.

The Poet {Couplet} The poet's a court jester, permitted to lament our blatant inconsistencies, bullshit and discontent. He's a canary coal mine tester, descending into the unknown, dying in the darkness, all yellow and alone.

Rats, the only creatures that seemed to flourish in the trenches, were quite brave and were often a foot long (not including the tail), the size of a small cat. They grew fat on the corpses in No Man’s Land and were known to bite sleeping soldiers’ faces and gather around the eating areas. The French left the rats alone. Like a canary in a coal mine, the rats were a warning that gas shells had been fired. At the slightest whiff of gas, the large rats flipped feet up, dead. The Americans hated them too much to leave them alone. They bludgeoned the rats with shovels and rifle butts or shot them with their side arms.

What took place here is not just an interesting geological study of something that happened in the past. It's a canary in a coal mine.

The Thermometer and the Thermostat A thermostat is far more valuable than a thermometer. The thermometer reveals that something is broken. The thermometer is an indicator, our canary in the coal mine. Thermometers tell us when we’re spending too much or gaining market share or not answering the phone quickly enough. Organizations are filled with human thermometers. They can criticize or point out or just whine. The thermostat, on the other hand, manages to change the environment in sync with the outside world. Every organization needs at least one thermostat. These are leaders who can create change in response to the outside world, and do it consistently over time.

According to famed Silicon Valley investor Paul Graham, we haven’t had time to develop societal “antibodies to addictive new things.”[cxvii] Graham places responsibility on the user: “Unless we want to be canaries in the coal mine of each new addiction — the people whose sad example becomes a lesson to future generations — we’ll have to figure out for ourselves what to avoid and how.

Sadly, Krause’s recordings revealed another truth: even if a landscape looks identical to the way it did a decade ago, acoustic analysis often reveals that a critter that once filled a specific part of the audio spectrum might now be missing. It’s as if a color in the visible spectrum has been erased from the landscape. Most of the time, no surprise, this is due to the intrusion or intervention of humans—traffic, farms, houses, global warming. What’s interesting is that it’s the missing sound—not some visual evidence—that makes this tragic change clear. Acoustic analysis is the canary in the coal mine.

When you look in a teenager’s eyes who complains of a headache, and see their retinas are detaching due to increased intracranial pressure from severe metabolic syndrome, you know kids are the canaries in the coal mine. For Medicare and Social Security to work, young, healthy working taxpayers have to pay into the system, from which they’ll benefit in their later years. But those healthy taxpayers are getting sicker, are on disability, and, instead of paying in, they’re mostly taking out. The Social Security gap must be bridged by debt—leaving a poison-pill inheritance for subsequent generations, our children and grandchildren. Currently, the Office of Management and Budget predicts a complete Social Security collapse by 2035.

an attack on books, on rationality, on knowledge isn’t a tempest in a teacup, but rather a canary dead in a coal mine. “There are moments in life when you have to put what is right over what party you vote for. And if you can’t recognize those moments when the stakes are low—let me assure you, you won’t recognize them when the stakes are high. Thank you.

anyway. A year later, Barack Obama, then the Democratic party nominee, would be branded a foreigner, a Muslim, and an Arab—with all the fever-pitch insinuations those associations conjured. Perhaps I should have seen it as a canary in the coal mine, but the then Republican nominee, John McCain, repudiated the attacks,

The pedestrian is an extremely fragile species, the canary in the coal mine of urban livability. Under the right conditions, this creature thrives and multiplies. But creating those conditions requires attention to a broad range of criteria, some more easily satisfied than others.

Women in tech are the canary in the coal mine. Normally when the canary in the coal mine starts dying you know the environment is toxic and you should get the hell out. Instead, the tech industry is looking at the canary, wondering why it can’t breathe, saying “Lean in, canary. Lean in!

Sometimes, distractions can actually serve a purpose. Like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, they warn us—when we feel ourselves regularly succumbing to them—that our work is not well defined, or our tasks are menial, or the whole project we’re engaged in is fundamentally pointless.

attack on books, on rationality, on knowledge isn’t a tempest in a teacup, but rather a canary dead in a coal mine.

People with allergic conditions are the canaries in the environmental change coal mine.

an attack on books, on rationality, on knowledge isn’t a tempest in a teacup, but rather a canary dead in a coal mine. “There are moments in life when you have to put what is right over what party you vote for. And if you can’t recognize those moments when the stakes are low—let me assure you, you won’t recognize them when the stakes are high. Thank you.” “Jeez

There are bigger things in this world than politics,” Althea continued. “There are bigger things in this world than scoring a win for your side just to score a win for your side. This might seem like a melodramatic overreaction for some of you, maybe you scoff at the notion that there should be so much brouhaha over books. There were plenty of people who felt that way in May 1933, as well. And I promise you, if I’ve learned anything from my time in Berlin, it’s this: an attack on books, on rationality, on knowledge isn’t a tempest in a teacup, but rather a canary dead in a coal mine. “There are moments in life when you have to put what is right over what party you vote for. And if you can’t recognize those moments when the stakes are low—let me assure you, you won’t recognize them when the stakes are high.

I watch the ratio of triglycerides to HDL cholesterol (it should be less than 2:1 or better yet, less than 1:1), as well as levels of VLDL, a lipoprotein that carries triglycerides—all of which may show up many years before a patient would meet the textbook definition of metabolic syndrome. These biomarkers help give us a clearer picture of a patient’s overall metabolic health than HbA1c, which is not very specific by itself. But the first thing I look for, the canary in the coal mine of metabolic disorder, is elevated insulin. As we’ve seen, the body’s first response to incipient insulin resistance is to produce more insulin.

Comments serve as a canary in the coal mine of complexity. If a method or variable requires a long comment, it is a red flag that you don’t have a good abstraction.

Returning to our canary-in-the-coal-mine analogy, the plight of iGen provides a strong warning about the danger of solitude deprivation. When an entire cohort unintentionally eliminated time alone with their thoughts from their lives, their mental health suffered dramatically. On reflection, this makes sense. These teenagers have lost the ability to process and make sense of their emotions, or to reflect on who they are and what really matters, or to build strong relationships, or even to just allow their brains time to power down their critical social circuits, which are not meant to be used constantly, and to redirect that energy to other important cognitive housekeeping tasks. We shouldn’t be surprised that these absences lead to malfunctions.

Indicator species are the canaries in the coal mine—they remind us of the bigger picture.

My multifaceted canary in the coal mine signaling the impulse to control is my belly tightening, my posture changing slightly to lean forward, tension increasing in my upper arms. It feels as though I am preparing to thrust myself into the middle of the problem with everything I know. It comes from a good-hearted place of wanting to relieve suffering and also diminishes interpersonal safety as my system enters mild to medium sympathetic arousal. If we take a step back, we might become curious about how the neuroception of danger arose in the first place, because that is what initiates this chain of events. If we were to explore this, many answers might come: We have been trained to intervene; we don't have any experience that tells us our patient's systems are trustworthy guides to healing; the upset in our patient is severe enough that we fear for her safety; if we can't heal this person, there's something wrong with us; strong emotions are uncomfortable for us and we need to regulate them before they overwhelm us. The list is endless, individual and likely changes with each new circumstance. It is always a most valuable inquiry, especially if we can begin it with compassionate curiousity, which makes it less likely that we will feel shamed by the answer that presents itself. When we remember that neuroception is an automatic adaptive process, it may take character condemnation out of the equation when we invite awareness of what frightens us. If our fear feels heard and acknowledged, there is some likelihood that our bodies will be able to find their way back toward receptivity. As we feel our own openness returning, we can be certain that this embodied change is also influencing our patient and the quality of the connection.

or the lack thereof—also serves as a warning, the canary in the coal mine. If despite all your efforts, the other party won’t say “No,” you’re dealing with people who are indecisive or confused or who have a hidden agenda. In cases like that you have to end the negotiation and walk away. Think of it like this: No “No” means no go.

No”—or the lack thereof—also serves as a warning, the canary in the coal mine. If despite all your efforts, the other party won’t say “No,” you’re dealing with people who are indecisive or confused or who have a hidden agenda. In cases like that you have to end the negotiation and walk away.

Back then, the mental health world treated eating disorders differently than it does now. When a child got sick, it was assumed that she was broken. We didn’t yet understand that many sick children are canaries in coal mines, passively inhaling toxins in the air of their families or cultures or both.

I sometimes wondered what the use of any of the arts was. The best thing I could come up with was what I call the canary in the coal mine theory of the arts. This theory says that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are super-sensitive. They keel over like canaries in poison coal mines long before more robust types realize that there is any danger whatsoever.

We didn’t yet understand that many sick children are canaries in coal mines, passively inhaling toxins in the air of their families or cultures or both. So

distractions can actually serve a purpose. Like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, they warn us—when we feel ourselves regularly succumbing to them—that our work is not well defined, or our tasks are menial, or the whole project we’re engaged in is fundamentally pointless.

I see self-publishers as the canary in the coal mine. Thousands of us, all around the world, are trying new things all the time and sharing the results. We are mostly one-person operations, so we can make and implement decisions on the fly. As such, we’re always a step or two ahead of large publishers.