Ecological Small Quotes

If we want better global supply chains, there are lots of other things that have to be made better first. We need to be better with equitably including small businesses into global logistics. We need to be better with upcycling, and feedback loops. We need to be better with implementing Blockchain technology. We need to be better with material ecology and designing products for longevity. And so much more.

Perhaps the most crucial stage is that of ‘intraspecies chaos.’ This is the proving ground, the awkward adolescence when a species either learns to come together on a global scale, or dissolves into squabbling factions doomed to extinction, whether through war or ecological disasters too great to tackle divided.

that if some small but critical mass of people recovered a sense of kinship, economics would become ecology. We’d want different things. We’d find our meaning out there. I

Through nature, through the evolutionary continuum, and ecological relatedness and interdependence of all things, we are as much a part of the wolf as the wolf is a part of us. And as we destroy or demean nature, wolves, or any creature, great or small, we do no less to ourselves.

As I see it, the advances in scientific thought come from a combination of loose and strict thinking, and this combination is the most precious tool of science. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind

Because enchantment, by my definition, has nothing to do with fantasy, or escapism, or magical thinking: it is founded on a vivid sense of belongingness to a rich and many-layered world; a profound and whole-hearted participation in the adventure of life. The enchanted life presented here is one which is intuitive, embraces wonder and fully engages the creative imagination – but it is also deeply embodied, ecological, grounded in place and community. It flourishes on work that has heart and meaning; it respects the instinctive knowledge and playfulness of children. It understands the myths we live by; thrives on poetry, song and dance. It loves the folkloric, the handcrafted, the practice of traditional skills. It respects wild things, recognises the wisdom of the crow, seeks out the medicine of plants. It rummages and roots on the wild edges, but comes home to an enchanted home and garden. It is engaged with the small, the local, the ethical; enchanted living is slow living.

The complex system that is the body is a field of ways of knowing, all of which work together ecologically to provide the necessary information.

The world is rich in small wonders, but so poor in eyes that see them.

A small parish is a fragile ecology.

Fate, he explained, is shaping history when what happens to us was intended by no one and was the summary outcome of innumerable small decisions about other matters by innumerable people.

In the Amazon, the turn to swidden was unfortunate. Slash-and-burn cultivation has become one of the driving forces behind the loss of tropical forest. Although swidden does permit the forest to regrow, it is wildly inefficient and environmentally unsound. The burning sends up in smoke most of the nutrients in the vegetation—almost all of the nitrogen and half the phosphorus and potassium. At the same time, it pours huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the air, a factor in global warming. (Large cattle ranches are the major offenders in the Amazon, but small-scale farmers are responsible for up to a third of the clearing.) Fortunately, it is a relatively new practice, which means it has not yet had much time to cause damage. More important, the very existence of so much healthy forest after twelve thousand years of use by large populations suggests that whatever Indians did before swidden must have been ecologically more sustainable.

On a small island off the coast of Panama lives the pygmy three-toed sloth, which appears to be addicted to a Valium-like substance in its diet of red mangrove leaves and may be going extinct.6 Thus, it seems that an entire species can disappear if it finds an ecological niche where it can satisfy its reward system in a maladaptive way.

All communities require sustainable ways to make a living. Economic sustainability involves: Small-scale business, crafts, and services that create maximum diversity of economic base and a rich ecology of financial, income and job opportunities. Possibilities include cottage industries, local services, education, printing and publishing, trading, small-scale manufacturing, consulting, shops and cooperatives.

They are also difficult to reconcile with archaeological evidence of how cities actually began in many parts of the world: as civic experiments on a grand scale, which frequently lacked the expected features of administrative hierarchy and authoritarian rule. We do not possess an adequate terminology for these early cities. To call them ‘egalitarian’, as we’ve seen, could mean quite a number of different things. It might imply an urban parliament and co-ordinated projects of social housing, as with some pre-Columbian centres in the Americas; or the self-organizing of autonomous households into neighbourhoods and citizens’ assemblies, as with prehistoric mega-sites north of the Black Sea; or, perhaps, the introduction of some explicit notion of equality based on principles of uniformity and sameness, as in Uruk-period Mesopotamia. None of this variability is surprising once we recall what preceded cities in each region. That was not, in fact, rudimentary or isolated groups, but far-flung networks of societies, spanning diverse ecologies, with people, plants, animals, drugs, objects of value, songs and ideas moving between them in endlessly intricate ways. While the individual units were demographically small, especially at certain times of year, they were typically organized into loose coalitions or confederacies. At the very least, these were simply the logical outcome of our first freedom: to move away from one’s home, knowing one will be received and cared for, even valued, in some distant place. At most they were examples of ‘amphictyony’, in which some kind of formal organization was put in charge of the care and maintenance of sacred places. It seems that Marcel Mauss had a point when he argued that we should reserve the term ‘civilization’ for great hospitality zones such as these. Of course, we are used to thinking of ‘civilization’ as something that originates in cities – but, armed with new knowledge, it seems more realistic to put things the other way round and to imagine the first cities as one of those great regional confederacies, compressed into a small space.

For most people who do not live near a glacier, the amount of earth’s water held as ice may seem small compared to all the water in lakes and oceans. In fact, roughly 68 percent of the world’s freshwater is locked in ice caps, glaciers, and permanent snow.46 Due to human-caused climate change, however, ice melting of Antarctica has increased from 40 gigatons per year in the 1980s to 252 gigatons per year over the 2010s. All that ice melting into the ocean has raised global sea levels.47 In some coastal areas, sea level rise is beginning to regularly flood whole towns and low-lying parts of major cities.

What the most advanced researchers and theoreticians in all of science now comprehend is that the Newtonian concept of a universe driven by mass force is out of touch with reality, for it fails to account for both observable phenomena and theoretical conundrums that can be explained only by quantum physics: A quantum view explains the success of small efforts quite differently. Acting locally allows us to be inside the movement and flow of the system, participating in all those complex events occurring simultaneously. We are more likely to be sensitive to the dynamics of this system, and thus more effective. However, changes in small places also affect the global system, not through incrementalism, but because every small system participates in an unbroken wholeness. Activities in one part of the whole create effects that appear in distant places. Because of these unseen connections, there is potential value in working anywhere in the system. We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. In what Wheatley calls “this exquisitely connected world,” the real engine of change is never “critical mass”; dramatic and systemic change always begins with “critical connections.”14 So by now the crux of our preliminary needs should be apparent. We must open our hearts to new beacons of Hope. We must expand our minds to new modes of thought. We must equip our hands with new methods of organizing. And we must build on all of the humanity-stretching movements of the past half century: the Montgomery Bus Boycott; the civil rights movement; the Free Speech movement; the anti–Vietnam War movement; the Asian American, Native American, and Chicano movements; the women’s movement; the gay and lesbian movement; the disability rights/pride movement; and the ecological and environmental justice movements. We must find ourselves amid the fifty million people who as activists or as supporters have engaged in the many-sided struggles to create the new democratic and life-affirming values that are needed to civilize U.S. society.

Whatever we do makes a difference," Eithnie said. "Doesn't matter how small our efforts might seem to us, it'll still make a difference." "But what about all the people who don't do anything, or who don't do anything positive? Won't their actions, or lack of actions, cancel out the good we're trying to do?" "I guess I'm thinking that it's also like dominoes. You know how when you knock one over, more and more fall, one after the other, until they all come down? (Edward) Lorenz's theory assures me that what I do Will make a difference, I can't tell how, I can't predict when or where, but it will effect a change. I just have to concentrate on maintaining that effort so that one day all the dominoes will come down in the right way.

Chimpanzees use between fifteen and twenty-five different tools per community, and the precise tools vary with cultural and ecological circumstances. One savanna community, for example, uses pointed sticks to hunt. This came as a shock, since hunting weapons were thought to be another uniquely human advance. The chimpanzees jab their “spears” into a tree cavity to kill a sleeping bush baby, a small primate that serves as a protein source for female apes unable to run down monkeys the way males do.23 It is also well known that chimpanzee communities in West Africa crack nuts with stones, a behavior unheard of in East African communities. Human novices have trouble cracking the same tough nuts, partly because they do not have the same muscle strength as an adult chimpanzee, but also because they lack the required coordination. It takes years of practice to place one of the hardest nuts in the world on a level surface, find a good-sized hammer stone, and hit the nut with the right speed while keeping one’s fingers out of the way.

The investigation described in the subsequent pages bears close relation to three sciences. It was approached by the author from the standpoint of astronomy and a desire to understand the variations of the sun. It was hoped that these variations could be more accurately studied by correlation with climatic phenomena. But the science of meteorology is still comparatively new and supplies us only with a few decades of records on which to base our conclusions. So botanical aid was sought in order to extend our knowledge of weather changes over hundreds and even thousands of years by making use of the dependence of the annual rings of trees in dry climates on the annual rainfall. If the relationship sought proves to be real, the rings in the trunks of trees give us not only a means of studying climatic changes through long periods of years, but perhaps also of tracing changes in solar activity during the same time. Thus astronomy, meteorology, and botany join in a study to which each contributes essential parts and from which, it is hoped, each may gain a small measure of benefit.

Every living creature exists by a routine of some kind; the small rituals of that routine are the landmarks, the boundaries of security, the reassuring walls that exclude a horror vacui; thus, in our own species, after some tempest of the spirit in which the landmarks seem to have been swept away, a man will reach out tentatively in mental darkness to feel the walls, to assure himself that they still stand where they stood - a necessary gesture, for the walls are of his own building, without universal reality, and what man makes he may destroy. To an animal these landmarks are of greater importance, for once removed from its natural surroundings, its ecological norm, comparatively little of what the senses perceive can be comprehended in function or potentiality, and the true conditions are already established. As among human beings, animal insecurity may manifest itself as aggression or timidity, ill-temper or ill-health, or as excessive affection for a parental figure; unfortunately this last aspect encourages many to cultivate insecurity in their charges, child or animal, as a means to an end.

A SOLAR OASIS Like everywhere else in Puerto Rico, the small mountain city of Adjuntas was plunged into total darkness by Hurricane Maria. When residents left their homes to take stock of the damage, they found themselves not only without power and water, but also totally cut off from the rest of the island. Every single road was blocked, either by mounds of mud washed down from the surrounding peaks, or by fallen trees and branches. Yet amid this devastation, there was one bright spot. Just off the main square, a large, pink colonial-style house had light shining through every window. It glowed like a beacon in the terrifying darkness. The pink house was Casa Pueblo, a community and ecology center with deep roots in this part of the island. Twenty years ago, its founders, a family of scientists and engineers, installed solar panels on the center’s roof, a move that seemed rather hippy-dippy at the time. Somehow, those panels (upgraded over the years) managed to survive Maria’s hurricane-force winds and falling debris. Which meant that in a sea of post-storm darkness, Casa Pueblo had the only sustained power for miles around. And like moths to a flame, people from all over the hills of Adjuntas made their way to the warm and welcoming light.

while anecdotal evidence suggests that lions might still be present in small numbers, a survey undertaken over four months in 2008/09 for the African Journal of Ecology obtained ‘no unequivocal evidence’ of their continued presence.

It is the phenomenon made known by the marine biologist Daniel Pauly as the shifting-baseline syndrome. The world as first seen by the child becomes his lifelong standard of excellence, mindless of the fact he is admiring the ruins of his parents. Generation to generation, the natural world decays, the ratchet of perception tightens. Gradually, imperceptibly, big sharks give way to small sharks, small sharks to baitfish, baitfish to jellyfish to slime. On land, the big cats and wolves become feral house cats and coyotes. The wild standard sinks ever lower and becomes ever heavier to raise. Few notice, few care. Eventually, nobody remembers that wolves not long ago freely roamed the Adirondacks, and hence there is mad howling over the suggestion of returning them to their homeland. Southern Californians panic on learning that a cougar track has been discovered on the fringes of their gated neighborhood - mindless that cougars roamed these hills and canyons long before gated communities drew their lines in the chaparral.

People who for years had not looked for things in booked found new appetites for knowledge when they spoke to him. To someone who came in asking for the latest novel he might sell not only the novel but a biological treatise on the life of ants, an ecological study of ancient man, a philosophical work, and a history of small sailing-craft.

Nordhaus and Shellenberger called this view “nihilistic ecotheology.” That worldview, they said, comprises “apocalyptic fears of ecological collapse, disenchanting notions of living in a fallen world, and the growing conviction that some kind of collective sacrifice is needed to avoid the end of the world.” The eco-nihilists have “nostalgic visions of a transcendent future in which humans might, once again, live in harmony with nature through a return to small-scale agriculture, or even to hunter-gatherer life.

5. But – and this is the final ‘do’ – a successful innovation aims at leadership. It does not aim necessarily at becoming eventually a ‘big business’; in fact, no one can foretell whether a given innovation will end up as a big business or a modest achievement. But if an innovation does not aim at leadership from the beginning, it is unlikely to be innovative enough, and therefore unlikely to be capable of establishing itself. Strategies (to be discussed in Chapters 16 to 19) vary greatly, from those that aim at dominance in an industry or a market to those that aim at finding and occupying a small ‘ecological niche’ in a process or market. But all entrepreneurial strategies, that is, all strategies aimed at exploiting an innovation, must achieve leadership within a given environment. Otherwise they will simply create an opportunity for the competition.

Being responsible front of the other. (part1) We live in a historical period which, without too many difficulties, can be defined as a transition period. In many respects, in fact, the world as it appeared a few decades ago has almost completely disappeared. In its place, however, no paradigm that can be said to be truly new has yet materialized. The era to come, which always seems to be on the verge of a future driven by perhaps too naively acclaimed technological development, is as if it were slowed down by ideas, visions and practices that still belong to the past. Take for example the urgent need to convert industrial production, but also individual consumption, through sustainable, ecological, greener and more aware practices. It is our own planet that requires us to make a change in this sense: climate change is there for all to see, but the political institutions that should deal with the issue are unable to be decided and united to stem the problem. We know that the resources we have are limited but we continue to exploit them even though there are already alternatives, so we squander what nature can offer us in a year well before this year is over because we still believe in the mad and blind race of progress. We also take the incredible technological development that information technology has made possible. We can store an incredible amount of information in devices that we can put in our pockets, we have at our fingertips practically much of all the knowledge that humanity has produced throughout its history, but ignorance continues to spread like a river in full. The areas in which it is possible to recognize that much the current historical period is a period of transition are still many others, from the political one, with the crisis of representative democracies but also with the absence of a real alternative, to the economic one, social, with the giants of the web that increasingly impoverish small businesses, thus contributing to widening the gap, now almost unbridgeable, between the few who have too much and the many who have less and less. Or with the appearance of a new precious commodity: our personal data that is exchanged too lightly, as if they were a traditional market product. In this framework, already quite unstable in itself, the Covid-19 pandemic, directly or indirectly, is also radically changing our sociality. In fact, the spread of the virus has highlighted not only the fragility of the world economic-social system, in which if you break a link in the chain it is the whole chain that breaks, but it has also made clear, by difference, how much the our way of relating to others, even the most banal, even the most everyday. Especially in a country like ours, which has made conviviality its distinctive feature. What seemed natural to us, like hugging and greeting each other with a kiss with an acquaintance or going to a concert piled on top of each other, now that we are discouraged - if not forbidden - takes on even more value. Probably a value that we didn't even know, so obvious and taken for granted, was there before. In other words: we only discover what our social freedom was worth now that it is being restricted to us. And we discover it, precisely, by difference, by comparing what we could have done before with what we must do now. In this regard, I would like to ask a question: why should all of us accept that our way of life, our daily habits and our social freedom are limited? The question is deliberately provocative. His answer, quite obvious. In some cases, however, even the question whose answer seems obvious and obvious must still be formulated. It must be formulated in order to attempt to review the question posed in a clearer and more profound way, that is, to better understand the underlying reasons. Therefore, although the answer is evident as well as common sense, I believe that asking this question can help to better understand some intrinsic reasons.

Poultry workers are paid very little: in the United States, two cents for every dollar spent on a fast-food chicken goes to workers, and some chicken operators use prison labor, paid twenty-five cents per hour. Think of this as Cheap Work. In the US poultry industry, 86 percent of workers who cut wings are in pain because of the repetitive hacking and twisting on the line. Some employers mock their workers for reporting injury, and the denial of injury claims is common. The result for workers is a 15 percent decline in income for the ten years after injury. While recovering, workers will depend on their families and support networks, a factor outside the circuits of production but central to their continued participation in the workforce. Think of this as Cheap Care. The food produced by this industry ends up keeping bellies full and discontent down through low prices at the checkout and drive-through. That's a strategy of Cheap Food....You can't have low-cost chicken without abundant propane: Cheap Energy. There is some risk in the commercial sale of these processed birds, but through franchising and subsidies, everything from easy financial and physical access to the land on which the soy feed for chickens is grown to small business loans, that risk is mitigated through public expense for private profit. This is one aspect of Cheap Money. Finally, persistent and frequent acts of chauvinism against categories of animal and human life -- such as women, the colonized, the poor, people of color, and immigrants -- have made each of these six cheap things possible. Fixing this ecology in place requires a final element -- the rule of Cheap Lives. Yet at every step of this process, humans resist....

If the natural world, however shaped by human use, is too unwieldy in its “raw” form for administrative manipulation, so too are the actual social patterns of human interaction with nature bureaucratically indigestible in their raw form. No administrative system is capable of representing any existing social community except through a heroic and greatly schematized process of abstraction and simplification. It is not simply a question of capacity, although, like a forest, a human community is surely far too complicated and variable to easily yield its secrets to bureaucratic formulae. It is also a question of purpose. State agents have no interest—nor should they—in describing an entire social reality, any more than the scientific forester has an interest in describing the ecology of a forest in detail. Their abstractions and simplifications are disciplined by a small number of objectives, and until the nineteenth century the most prominent of these were typically taxation, political control, and conscription.

With little soil wealth to extract, she said, Amazonian farmers face inherent ecological limitations. The only form of agriculture they can practice for a long time is “slash-and-burn,” or “swidden,” as it is sometimes known. Farmers clear small fields with axes and machetes, burn off the chaff and refuse, and plant their seeds. The ash gives the soil a quick shot of nutrients, giving the crop a chance. As the crops grow, the jungle rapidly returns—weeds first, then fast-growing tropical trees. In the few years before forest recovers the plot, farmers can eke something out of the land.

So small changes in the ambient temperature over relatively short periods of time that are not sufficiently long for adaptive processes to develop can lead to huge ecological and climatological effects. Some of these may be positive, but many will be catastrophic. Regardless, however, of the sign of the effect, significant changes are upon us, and we desperately need to understand their origins and consequences and forge strategies for adaptation and mitigation. The crucial question is not whether these effects are anthropogenic in origin because they almost certainly are, but rather to what extent they can be minimized without leading to rapid discontinuous changes in our physical and economic environment and ultimately to the potential collapse of the global socioeconomic fabric. Hence my bewilderment at those in the general public including political and corporate leaders who reject the cautionary exhortations of scientists, environmentalists, and others, and why I am continually baffled by their lack of action. Yes, we should all delight in and promote the huge successes and fruits of the free market system and of the role of human ingenuity and innovation, but we should also recognize the critical roles of energy and entropy and together act strategically to find

I was inspired by my travels as a westerner through a little understood area of Japan: Okinawa. One small island of the former Ryukyu Kingdom, it is currently host to 33 US military bases. I wanted to explore a possible future based on past and present colonial crimes there and the ecological catastrophe that threatens all tropical islands

In the background, given my commitment to the outer ecology of environmentalism, I replaced all the company cars with diesels, which used less crude oil and lasted longer than gasoline engines. The diesel cars did pay off briefly during the Second Energy Crisis of 1979, but they gave us a lot of trouble in the long run because the diesel-powered Oldsmobile station wagons that General Motors rushed into production had nothing but a beefed-up gasoline engine (internal pressures are much greater in a diesel) and they were in the shop more often than on the road. We aggressively redesigned the stores to conserve energy. To this day, Trader Joe’s stores don’t have very many windows, and all panes of glass are very small, an idea that had an accidental payoff in every subsequent earthquake and riot. As the young lady said back there in the God of Fair Beginnings chapter, I did the right thing for the wrong reasons.

We are continually capable of deepening our acquaintance with an environment, of becoming intimate with more than one place, of being at home where we find ourselves. In an age when the ecological integrity of our planet is threatened on so many levels, anything that strengthens those connections, or makes meaningful our daily arrangement with the world around us, is a form of resistance, a kind of love forged with home that has the potential to be fiercely protective

Whatever we do makes a difference," Eithnie said. "Doesn't matter how small our efforts might seem to us, it'll still make a difference." "But what about all the people who don't do anything, or who don't do anything positive? Won't their actions, or lack of actions, cancel out the good we're trying to do?" "I guess I'm thinking that it's also like dominoes. You know how when you knock one over, more and more fall, one after the other, until they all come down? (Edward) Lorenz's theory assures me that what I do Will make a difference, I can't tell how, I can't predict when or where, but it will effect a change. I just have to concentrate on maintaining that effort so that one day all the dominoes will come down in the right way." "To save the world," Sharleen said.

We might want to consider instead the new opportunities and affinities that are opened up through coming together to fight the environmental crisis. Ecological justice groups like Extinction Rebellion are calling for citizens’ assemblies—innovative institutions that can allow people, communities, even entire countries, to make important decisions in ways that may be more just and fairer than party politics. Similar to jury service, members are randomly selected from across the country. The process is designed to ensure that assemblies reflect the population in regard to characteristics like gender, age, ethnicity, education level, and geography. Assembly members hear from experts and those most affected by an issue. Members then come together in small groups with professional facilitators and together work through their differences and draft and vote on recommendations.69

He could not do everything, he decided, and take all the troubles of the world on his shoulders. Who could? It was not that he was an uninvolved and irresponsible citizen, one of those who do not care about plastic bags. He was as careful as anyone to keep his ecological footprint as small as possible—apart from the Saab, of course, which ran on fossil fuel rather than electricity. If you took the Saab out of the equation, though, Ulf could hold his head high in the company of conservationists,

Our main problem over the past few days and weeks,’ he said, ‘has lain in trying to connect the various phenomena. In fact, there wasn’t any obvious connection until a jelly-like substance started to crop up. Sometimes it appeared in small quantities, sometimes in larger amounts, but always with the distinguishing characteristic that it disintegrated rapidly on contact with air. Unfortunately the discovery of the jelly only added to the mystery, given its presence in crustaceans, mussels and whales - three types of organism that could hardly be more different. Of course, it might have been some kind of fungus, a jellified version of rabies, an infectious disease like BSE or swine fever. But, if so, why would ships be disappearing or crabs transporting killer algae? There was no sign of the jelly on the worms that infested the slope. They were carrying a different kind of cargo - bacteria that break down hydrates and cause methane gas to rise. Hence the landslide and the tsunami. And what about the mutated species that have been emerging all over the world? Even fish have been behaving oddly. None of it adds up. In that respect, Jack Vanderbilt was right to discern an intelligent mind behind the chaos. But he overestimated our ability - no scientist knows anything like enough about marine ecology to be capable of manipulating it to that extent. People are fond of saying that we know more about space than we do about the oceans. It’s perfectly true, but there’s a simple reason why: we can’t see or move as well in the water as we can in outer space. The Hubble telescope peers effortlessly into different galaxies, but the world’s strongest floodlight only illuminates a dozen square metres of seabed. An astronaut in a spacesuit can move with almost total freedom, but even the most sophisticated divesuit won’t stop you being crushed to death beyond a certain depth. AUVs and ROVs are only operational if the conditions are right. We don’t have the physical constitution or the technology to deposit billions of worms on underwater hydrates, let alone the requisite knowledge to engineer them for a habitat that we barely understand. Besides, there are all the other phenomena: deep-sea cables being destroyed at the bottom of the ocean by forces other than the underwater slide; plagues of jellyfish and mussels rising from the abyssal plains. The simplest explanation would be to see these developments as part of a plan, but such a plan could only be the work of a species that knows the ocean as intimately as we do the land - a species that lives in the depths and plays the dominant role in that particular universe.

Suppose that the conventionally measured global economic output, now at about $31 trillion, were to expand at a healthy 3 percent annually. By 2050 it would in theory reach $138 trillion. With only a small leveling adjustment of this income, the entire world population would be prosperous by current standards. Utopia at last, it would seem! What is the flaw in the argument? It is the environment crumbling beneath us. If natural resources, particularly fresh water and arable land, continue to diminish at their present per-capita rate, the economic boom will lose steam, in the course of which—and this worries me even if it doesn’t worry you—the effort to enlarge productive land will wipe out a large part of the world’s fauna and flora. “The appropriation of productive land—the ecological footprint—is already too large for the planet to sustain, and it’s growing larger. A recent study building on this concept estimated that the human population exceeded Earth’s sustainable capacity around the year 1978. By 2000 it had overshot by 1.4 times that capacity. If 12 percent of land were now to be set aside in order to protect the natural environment, as recommended in the 1987 Brundtland Report, Earth’s sustainable capacity will have been exceeded still earlier, around 1972. In short, Earth has lost its ability to regenerate—unless global consumption is reduced, or global production is increased, or both.

In 1970 the Quakers released a slim book entitled “Who Shall Live? Man’s Control over Birth and Death: A Report Prepared for the American Friends Service Committee” which was the result of a decision which the Family Planning Committee of the AFSC reached in December 1966 “to explore the issues involved in abortion.” That meeting in turn flowed from the November 1966 meeting that the AFSC had had with Planned Parenthood, and that meeting resulted from the setback the Quaker and Episcopalian forces for sexual liberation and eugenics in Philadelphia had suffered at the hands of Martin Mullen, when the governor capitulated to his demands and backed away from state-promoted birth control in August of the same year. As a result of their meeting with Planned Parenthood, the Quakers decided to “make a study of the availability of family planning services for medically indigent families in the city and to form an estimate as to the extent of the unmet need for such services. “Who Shall Live” was the fruit of this labor. “Who Shall Live?” is a graphic example of moral theology in the Quaker mode. It begins by announcing that “for 300 years members of the Society of Friends (Quakers) have been seekers after the truth” and concludes by admitting that they have been so far unsuccessful in their efforts. Where once people like Fox and Penn “thought of himself as created only a few thousand years ago,” the enlightened Quakers who wrote birth-control tracts in the 1960s “now know he is part of an evolutionary process that has been going on for billions of years. In that process he has arrived at a stage of knowledge and technology whereby he himself has the power, at least in part, to determine the direction in which he will evolve in the future.” Having decided that their religious forebears were wrong on just about everything because they didn’t understand science, the 1970 Quakers then give some sense of their own grasp of science as it applies to population issues. Looking at the world from outer space in 1968, the Quakers found it “incredible that 3.5 billion people should be living on that small spinning planet.” Taking their cue from Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book “The Population Bomb” the Quakers concluded quite logically that if the planet cannot sustain 3.5 billion people in 1968, then it certainly couldn’t sustain 6 billion people in the year 2000. Unless drastic population-control measures are introduced immediately, dire consequences will follow. “Lamont C. Cole, who is a Professor of Ecology warns that we may one day find ourselves short of breathable air,” the Quakers announced breathlessly.

While not inherently "green" in the current sense of ecology, Zen evidences quite a number of core qualities and values that can be considered ecofriendly and help it serve as a model for new theories that address problems of conservation and pollution control. Traditional Japanese society is characterized by an approach based on healthy, efficient, and convenient living derived from a mental outlook that makes the most of minimal natural resources. Zen particularly endorses the values of simplicity, in that monks enter the Samgha Hall only with robes, bowls, and a few other meager possessions; thrift, by making a commitment to waste nothing; and communal manual labor, such that through a rotation of chores everyone contributes to the upkeep of the temple. The image of dedicated monks sweeping the wood floors of the hallways by rushing along on their hands in a semi-prostrate position is inspiring. Furthermore, the monastic system's use of human and material resources, including natural space, is limited and spare in terms of temple layout, the handling of administrative duties and chores, and the use of stock items. The sparse, spartan, vegetarian Zen cook, who prepares just enough rice gruel for his fellow monks but not a grain too much or too little, demonstrates an inherent—if not necessarily deliberate—conservationist approach. The minimalist aesthetic of rock gardens highlights the less-is-more Zen outlook that influenced the "Buddhist economics" evoked by E. F. Schumacher in Small Is Beautiful.

When it comes to issues of ecological stability and sustainability, those who have valiantly tried to get the message out have largely failed at making it personally relevant. The American public does not necessarily see environmental issues as something that they are likely to experience or be affected by. This is particularly true in the case of global climate change: despite a great deal of sound scientific evidence and great media attention, only a small number of Americans (35%) believe that climate change will harm them or their families, whereas 61% believe it will harm future generations and plant and animal species (Leiserowitz, Maibach, and Roser-Renouf, 2009).

Because trees grown in isolation without competition from other trees for light, water, and nutrients usually grow more massive, achieve a larger crown, and present a grander aesthetic than trees that grow close to other trees, we almost always plant trees as isolated specimens. But this practice invites the very disasters we pray will never happen. In most treed areas of the country, trees grow in forests, not by their lonesome. Yes, each member of the forest is a bit smaller than it would be on its own, but it is also far more stable. Trees that grow at a spacing found in most forests interlock their roots, forming a continuous matrix of large and small roots that is extraordinarily difficult to uproot. When the big winds come, grouped trees may lose a branch or two, or in the extreme winds of a hurricane or tornado, their trunks may even snap off some feet up from the base, but they rarely blow over entirely. With this in mind, an easy way to reduce the risks from treefalls in your yard is to plant trees in twos or threes, maybe on a 6-foot center, creating small groves that the eye will take in as if it were a single tree. Trees planted in this fashion weave that stabilizing web of roots that will hold them upright even in extreme weather. There is a catch, however. You have to plant such trees when they are young. In fact, the smaller the better. This way your trees will have every opportunity to interlock their roots as they grow.

The roots of war are to be sought in politics and history, those of earthquakes in geophysics, of forest fires in patterns of weather and in the natural ecology, and those of market crashes in the principles of finance, economics, and the psychology of human behavior. Beyond the labels “disaster” and “upheaval,” each of these events erupted from the soil of its own peculiar setting. Still, there is an intriguing similarity. In each case, it seems, the organization of the system—the web of international relations, the fabric of the forests or of the Earth’s crust, or the network of linked expectations and trading perspectives of investors—made it possible for a small shock to trigger a response out of all proportion to itself. It is as if these systems had been poised on some knife-edge of instability, merely waiting to be “set off.

Planarium is a small multicellular organism with an amazing capacity to regenerate; if cut into 200 pieces, it will grow 200 planaria. Its capacity is not limitless: if cut into more than about 250 pieces, each piece is smaller than the minimum module of interactions among cells needed to stimulate regeneration. It is likely that species differences in the capacity to regenerate are associated with the frequency and risk of local damage.

So when Paul is saying here that he is not ashamed of the gospel which is the power of God unto salvation, do not think it covers just a small area. It has something to say about every division that has come because of the Fall. From the Christian viewpoint, all the alienations that we find in man have come because of man’s historic, space-time fall. First of all, man is separated from God; second, he is separated from himself (thus the psychological problems of life); third, he is separated from other men (thus the sociological problems of life);fourth, he is separated from nature (thus the problems of living in the world—for example, the ecological problems). All these need healing. No

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But that’s not the whole story. The news is not and never has been, because it doesn’t talk about the small moments. Moments that matter to individuals, whatever they do or do not do in the grand scheme of things. And it is those individual moments that belong to people, that deserve to be faced and remembered as much as every big, world-changing disaster. And nature, because it exists in the details, is so easy to elide, even when trying to talk about it.

Environmentalists think that their political moderation will be rewarded by the powerful, who will allow them to play a small role in shaping the future. Yet the elite and their neoliberal brain trusts have no need to make concessions, when [solar radiation management] is close at hand and the environmental movement is weakened by infighting. The powerful will only concede what is taken from them, and only a broad and radical movement can force such concessions.

On a small island off the coast of Panama lives the pygmy three-toed sloth, which appears to be addicted to a Valium-like substance in its diet of red mangrove leaves and may be going extinct. Thus, it seems that an entire species can disappear if it finds an ecological niche where it can satisfy its reward system in a maladaptive way.

The real jewel of my disease-ridden woodlot is the prothonotary warbler. He nests in an old woodpecker hole, or other small cavity, in a dead snag overhanging water. The flash of his gold-and-blue plumage amid the dank decay of the June woods is in itself proof that dead trees are transmuted into living animals, and vice versa. When you doubt the wisdom of this arrangement, take a look at the prothonotary.

Mangroves are such a small part of the biosphere. They comprise less than half a percent of the world's forests, and occupy only one-thousandth of the land area of the planet. But they matter. They matter to organisms and ecological processes on land and sea, and they matter to millions of people. El manglar es nuestra casa-the mangrove is our home. It is a home worth protecting.

Perhaps the most crucial stage is that of “intraspecies chaos.” This is the proving ground, the awkward adolescence when a species either learns to come together on a global scale, or dissolves into squabbling factions doomed to extinction, whether through war or ecological disasters too great to tackle divided.

Our scientists and technologists have learned to compound substances unknown to nature. Against many of them, nature is virtually defenceless. There are no natural agents to attack and break them down. It is as if aborigines were suddenly attacked with machine-gun fire: their own bows and arrows are of no avail. These substances, unknown to nature, owe their almost magical effectiveness precisely to nature’s defencelessness – and that accounts also for their dangerous ecological impact. It is only in the last twenty years or so that they have made their appearance in bulk. Because they have no natural enemies, they tend to accumulate, and the long-term consequences of this accumulation are in many cases known to be extremely dangerous,