Good Pollution Quotes

Death and Famine and War and Pollution continued biking towards Tadfield. And Grievous Bodily Harm, Cruelty To Animals, Things Not Working Properly Even After You've Given Them A Good Thumping but secretly No Alcohol Lager, and Really Cool People travelled with them.

Pollution removed his helmet and shook out his long white hair. He had taken over when Pestilence, muttering about penicillin, had retired in 1936.

We have to grasp, as Marx and Adam Smith did, that corporations are not concerned with the common good. They exploit, pollute, impoverish, repress, kill, and lie to make money. They throw poor people out of homes, let the uninsured die, wage useless wars for profit, poison and pollute the ecosystem, slash social assistance programs, gut public education, trash the global economy, plunder the U.S. Treasury and crush all popular movements that seek justice for working men and women. They worship money and power.

You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There's been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land. Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away -- all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years. Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in Arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would survive our folly, only we would not. If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet radiation sears the earth, so what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It's powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation. Many others will die out. Do you think this is the first time that's happened? Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive glass, like fluorine. When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas. Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless, life on earth took care of itself. In the thinking of the human being a hundred years is a long time. A hundred years ago we didn't have cars, airplanes, computers or vaccines. It was a whole different world, but to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.

Heavenly Father, we come before you today to ask your forgiveness and to seek your direction and guidance. We know Your Word says, 'Woe to those who call evil good,' but that is exactly what we have done. We have lost our spiritual equilibrium and reversed our values. We have exploited the poor and called it the lottery. We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare. We have killed our unborn and called it choice. We have shot abortionists and called it justifiable. We have neglected to discipline our children and called it building self esteem. We have abused power and called it politics. We have coveted our neighbor's possessions and called it ambition. We have polluted the air with profanity and pornography and called it freedom of expression. We have ridiculed the time-honored values of our forefathers and called it enlightenment. Search us, Oh God, and know our hearts today; cleanse us from every sin and set us free. Amen!

There's one thing you can say for air pollution, you get utterly amazing sunrises.

Besides being blind to lots of good things, the GDP also benefits from all manner of human suffering. Gridlock, drug abuse, adultery? Goldmines for gas stations, rehab centers, and divorce attorneys. If you were the GDP, your ideal citizen would be a compulsive gambler with cancer who’s going through a drawn-out divorce that he copes with by popping fistfuls of Prozac and going berserk on Black Friday. Environmental pollution even does double duty: One company makes a mint by cutting corners while another is paid to clean up the mess. By contrast, a centuries-old tree doesn’t count until you chop it down and sell it as lumber.

No one paid any attention to them. Perhaps they saw nothing at all. Perhaps they saw what their minds were instructed to see, because the human brain is not equipped to see War, Famine, Pollution, and Death when they don't want to be seen, and has got so good at it that it often manages not to see them even when they abound on every side.

Talking is fantastically overrated. Too many people do too much of it. It stuns the hell out of me how so many people like to talk. Sharkey, for example. If talking is so good for you, what the hell is Sharkey doing here? The guy tears me up. Talking does not heal you. Talking just adds to the noise pollution in the world. If we were really serious about going green, then maybe we’d all just be quiet.

The only type of men Julia's mother had warned her about were wealthy industrialist who polluted the environment and took advantage of third-world countries. And Republilicans.

Let's say that the consensus is that our species, being the higher primates, Homo Sapiens, has been on the planet for at least 100,000 years, maybe more. Francis Collins says maybe 100,000. Richard Dawkins thinks maybe a quarter-of-a-million. I'll take 100,000. In order to be a Christian, you have to believe that for 98,000 years, our species suffered and died, most of its children dying in childbirth, most other people having a life expectancy of about 25 years, dying of their teeth. Famine, struggle, bitterness, war, suffering, misery, all of that for 98,000 years. Heaven watches this with complete indifference. And then 2000 years ago, thinks 'That's enough of that. It's time to intervene,' and the best way to do this would be by condemning someone to a human sacrifice somewhere in the less literate parts of the Middle East. Don't lets appeal to the Chinese, for example, where people can read and study evidence and have a civilization. Let's go to the desert and have another revelation there. This is nonsense. It can't be believed by a thinking person. Why am I glad this is the case? To get to the point of the wrongness of Christianity, because I think the teachings of Christianity are immoral. The central one is the most immoral of all, and that is the one of vicarious redemption. You can throw your sins onto somebody else, vulgarly known as scapegoating. In fact, originating as scapegoating in the same area, the same desert. I can pay your debt if I love you. I can serve your term in prison if I love you very much. I can volunteer to do that. I can't take your sins away, because I can't abolish your responsibility, and I shouldn't offer to do so. Your responsibility has to stay with you. There's no vicarious redemption. There very probably, in fact, is no redemption at all. It's just a part of wish-thinking, and I don't think wish-thinking is good for people either. It even manages to pollute the central question, the word I just employed, the most important word of all: the word love, by making love compulsory, by saying you MUST love. You must love your neighbour as yourself, something you can't actually do. You'll always fall short, so you can always be found guilty. By saying you must love someone who you also must fear. That's to say a supreme being, an eternal father, someone of whom you must be afraid, but you must love him, too. If you fail in this duty, you're again a wretched sinner. This is not mentally or morally or intellectually healthy. And that brings me to the final objection - I'll condense it, Dr. Orlafsky - which is, this is a totalitarian system. If there was a God who could do these things and demand these things of us, and he was eternal and unchanging, we'd be living under a dictatorship from which there is no appeal, and one that can never change and one that knows our thoughts and can convict us of thought crime, and condemn us to eternal punishment for actions that we are condemned in advance to be taking. All this in the round, and I could say more, it's an excellent thing that we have absolutely no reason to believe any of it to be true.

...no good writing flows from a polluted well - you can write about monsters, but you can't be one...

What is there to see if I go outside? Don't tell me. I know. I can see other people. I don't want to see other people. They look awful. The men look like slobs and the women look like men. The men have mush faces framed by long hair and the women have big noses, big jaws, big heads, and stick-like bodies. That depresses me. Its no fun to people-watch anymore because there's so little variety in types. You say it's good to get a change of scenery. What scenery? New buildings? New cars? New freeways? New shopping malls? Go to the woods or a park? I saw a tree once. The new ones look the same, which is fine. I even remember what the old ones look like. My memory isn't that short. But it's not worth going to see a squirrel grab a nut, or fish swimming around in a big tank if I must put up with the ugly contemporary human pollution that accompanies each excursion. The squirrel may enliven me and remind me of better vistas but the price in social interaction isn't worth it. If, on my way to visit the squirrel, I encounter a single person who gains stimulation by seeing me, I feel like I have given more than I've received and I get sore. If every time I go somewhere to see a fish swimming, I become someone else's stimulation, I feel shortchanged. I'll buy my own fish and watch it swim. Then, I can watch the fish, the fish can watch me, we can be friends, and nobody else interferes with the interaction, like trying to hear what the fish and I are talking about. I won't have to get dressed a certain way to visit the fish. I needn't dress the way my pride dictates, because who's going to see me? I needn't wear any pants. The fish doesn't care. He doesn't read the tabloids. But, if I go out to see a fish other than my own, I'm right back where I started: entertaining others, which is more depleting than visiting the new fish is entertaining. Maybe I should go to a coffee house. I find no stimulation in watching ordinary people trying to put the make on other uninteresting people. I can fix my own cup of coffee and not have to look at or talk to other people. No matter where I go, I stimulate others, and have been doing so all my life. It used to be I'd sometimes get stimulated back.

Say what you like. Plutonium may give you grief for thousands of years, but arsenic is forever.

It is a well-known established fact throughout the many-dimensional worlds of the multiverse that most really great discoveries are owed to one brief moment of inspiration. There's a lot of spadework first, of course, but what clinches the whole thing is the sight of, say, a falling apple or a boiling kettle or the water slipping over the edge of the bath. Something goes click inside the observer's head and then everything falls into place. The shape of DNA, it is popularly said, owes its discovery to the chance sight of a spiral staircase when the scientist‘s mind was just at the right receptive temperature. Had he used the elevator, the whole science of genetics might have been a good deal different. This is thought of as somehow wonderful. It isn't. It is tragic. Little particles of inspiration sleet through the universe all the time traveling through the densest matter in the same way that a neutrino passes through a candyfloss haystack, and most of them miss. Even worse, most of the ones that hit the exact cerebral target, hit the wrong one. For example, the weird dream about a lead doughnut on a mile-high gantry, which in the right mind would have been the catalyst for the invention of repressed-gravitational electricity generation (a cheap and inexhaustible and totally non-polluting form of power which the world in question had been seeking for centuries, and for the lack of which it was plunged into a terrible and pointless war) was in fact had by a small and bewildered duck. By another stroke of bad luck, the sight of a herd of wild horses galloping through a field of wild hyacinths would have led a struggling composer to write the famous Flying God Suite, bringing succor and balm to the souls of millions, had he not been at home in bed with shingles. The inspiration thereby fell to a nearby frog, who was not in much of a position to make a startling contributing to the field of tone poetry. Many civilizations have recognized this shocking waste and tried various methods to prevent it, most of them involving enjoyable but illegal attempts to tune the mind into the right wavelength by the use of exotic herbage or yeast products. It never works properly.

If this understanding of the good news of Jesus prevailed among Christians, the belief that Jesus’s message is about how to get somewhere else, you could possibly end up with a world in which millions of people were starving, thirsty, and poor; the earth was being exploited and polluted; disease and despair were everywhere; and Christians weren’t known for doing much about it. If it got bad enough, you might even have people rejecting Jesus because of how his followers lived. That would be tragic.

When the great ship containing the hopes and aspirations of the world, when the great ship freighted with mankind goes down in the night of death, chaos and disaster, I am willing to go down with the ship. I will not be guilty of the ineffable meanness of paddling away in some orthodox canoe. I will go down with the ship, with those who love me, and with those whom I have loved. If there is a God who will damn his children forever, I would rather go to hell than to go to heaven and keep the society of such an infamous tyrant. I make my choice now. I despise that doctrine. It has covered the cheeks of this world with tears. It has polluted the hearts of children, and poisoned the imaginations of men. It has been a constant pain, a perpetual terror to every good man and woman and child. It has filled the good with horror and with fear; but it has had no effect upon the infamous and base. It has wrung the hearts of the tender; it has furrowed the cheeks of the good. This doctrine never should be preached again. What right have you, sir, Mr. clergyman, you, minister of the gospel, to stand at the portals of the tomb, at the vestibule of eternity, and fill the future with horror and with fear? I do not believe this doctrine: neither do you. If you did, you could not sleep one moment. Any man who believes it, and has within his breast a decent, throbbing heart, will go insane. A man who believes that doctrine and does not go insane has the heart of a snake and the conscience of a hyena.

Death and Famine and War and Pollution continued biking toward Tadfield. And Grievous Bodily Harm, Cruelty to Animals, Things Not Working Properly Even After You’ve Given Them A Good Thumping But Secretly No Alcohol Lager, and Really Cool People traveled with them.

...we're a people who pollute the very air we breathe. And our rivers. We're destroying the great lakes; Erie is already gone, and now we've begun on the oceans. We filled our atmosphere with radioactive fallout that put poison into our children's bones, and we knew it. We've made bombs that can wipe out humanity in minutes, and they are aimed and ready to fire. We ended polio, and then the United States Army bred new strains of germs that can cause fatal, incurable disease. We had a chance to do justice to our Negroes, and when they asked it, we refused. In Asia we burned people alive, we really did. We allow children to grow up malnourished in the United States. We allow people to make money by using our television channels to pursued our own children to smoke, knowing what it is going to do to them. This is a time when it becomes harder and harder to continue telling yourself that we are still good people. We hate each other. And we're used to it.

She was one of those exceptional children who do still spend time outside, in solitude. In her case nature represented beauty - and refuge. "It's so peaceful out there and the air smells so good. I mean, it's polluted, but not as much as the city air. For me, it's completely different there," she said. "It's like you're free when you go out there. It's your own time. Sometimes I go there when I'm mad - and then, just with the peacefulness, I'm better. I can come back home happy, and my mom doesn't even know why."      The she described her special part of the woods.      "I had a place. There was a big waterfall and a creek on one side of it. I'd dug a big hole there, and sometimes I'd take a tent back there, or a blanket, and just lie down in the hole, and look up at the trees and sky. Sometimes I'd fall asleep back there. I just felt free; it was like my place, and I could do what I wanted, with nobody to stop me. I used to go down there almost every day."      The young poet's face flushed. Her voice thickened.      "And then they just cut the woods down. It was like they cut down part of me.

Sometimes life feels a certain way that we call “absurd”: nothing matters, all efforts are for naught, everything seems random and perverse, positive intention is perpetually thwarted. This stance communicates darkness and edginess, which can feel like wisdom. But we don’t live as if life is absurd; we live as if it has meaning and makes sense. We live (or try to) by kindness, loyalty, friendship, aspiration to improvement, believing the best of other people. We assume causality and continuity of logic. And we find, through living, that our actions do matter, very much. We can be a good parent or a bad parent, we can drive safely or like a maniac. Our minds can feel clean and positive and clear or polluted and negative. To have an ambition and pursue it feels healthy. A life without earnest striving is a nightmare. (When desire vanishes from a normal life, that is called depression.)

Hopefully, when your actions and deeds - and therefore other people - boast for you, you're made tired of hearing it, too, from your own mouth because if not, all could lose sight of those actions and deeds behind the gong of your boasting.

The solution to pollution is dilution. It is very logical that if a chemical is bothering you, you should increase the flow of good air to dilute the level of the chemical.

The family which takes its mauve an cerise, air-conditioned, power-steered and power-braked automobile out for a tour passes through cities that are badly paved, made hideous by litter, lighted buildings, billboards and posts for wires that should long since have been put underground. They pass on into countryside that has been rendered largely invisible by commercial art. (The goods which the latter advertise have an absolute priority in our value system. Such aesthetic considerations as a view of the countryside accordingly come second. On such matters we are consistent.) They picnic on exquisitely packaged food from a portable icebox by a polluted stream and go on to spend the night at a park which is a menace to public health and morals. Just before dozing off on an air mattress, beneath a nylon tent, amid the stench of decaying refuse, they may reflect vaguely on the curious unevenness of their blessings. Is this, indeed, the American genius?

We are all bilingual. We speak the language of indoctrination, but our native tongue is the language of imagination. When we use the language of indoctrination—with its should and shouldn’t, right and wrong, good and bad—we are activating our minds. That’s not what we’re going for here. Because our minds are polluted by our training. In order to get beyond our training, we need to activate our imaginations. Our minds are excuse makers; our imaginations are storytellers. So instead of asking ourselves what’s right or wrong, we must ask ourselves: What is true and beautiful?

Is it necessary that Heaven should borrow its light from the glare of Hell? Infinite punishment is infinite cruelty, endless injustice, immortal meanness. To worship an eternal gaoler hardens, debases, and pollutes even the vilest soul. While there is one sad and breaking heart in the universe, no good being can be perfectly happy.

Everyone has a good heart. It's our mind which gets polluted by so much negativity from the external world.

It's like the control insects at the Laboratory. Di d I ever tell you about them? Well, we keep a lot of insect colonies in big glass jars out there. Some of them have been breeding for twenty-five years. That's a thousand generations. All they know about life is what goes on inside their Jar. They haven't been exposed to pesticides or pollution, so they haven't developed immunities or evolved in any way. They stay the same, generation after generation. If we released them into the outside world, they'd die. I think something like that happens after seven generations in Savannah. Savannah gets to be the only place you can live. We're like bugs in a jar.

The sad part is that a place’s popularity can actually destroy the elements that contribute to happiness. The more we flock to high-status cities for the good life—money, opportunity, novelty—the more crowded, expensive, polluted, and congested those places become. The result? Surveys show that rich, high-status states in the United States are among the least happy in the country.

Some people would always rather be somewhere else. Their “here” is never good enough. Through self-observation, find out if that is the case in your life. Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences. No excuses. No negativity. No psychic pollution. Keep your inner space clear.

I Have Walked Down Many Roads by Antonio Machado translated from the Spanish by Don Share I have walked down many roads and cleared many paths; I have navigated a hundred oceans and anchored off a hundred shores. All over, I have seen caravans of sadness, pompous and melancholy men drunk with black shadows, and defrocked pedants who stare, keep quiet, and think they know, because they don’t drink wine in the neighborhood bars. Bad people who go around polluting the earth . . . And all over, I have seen people who dance or play, when they can, and work their four handfuls of land. If they turn up someplace, they never ask where they are. When they travel, they ride on the backs of old mules, and don’t know how to hurry, not even on holidays. When there’s wine, they drink wine; when there’s no wine, they drink cool water. These are good people, who live, work, get by, and dream; and on a day like all the others they lie down under the earth.

Since human needs are finite, but human greed is not, economic growth can usually be maintained through artificial creation of needs by means of advertising. The goods that are produced and sold in this way are often unneeded, and thus are essentially waste. The pollution and depletion of natural resources generated by this enormous waste of unnecessary goods is exacerbated by the waste of energy and materials in inefficient production processes. Indeed, as we discuss in Chapter 17, the

Now Jews were buying homes on Beech Street, making plans to build a bigger Jewish synagogue, and what’s more, they were polluting the town’s good white Christian teenagers with Negro music—jazz—brought to town by none other than Chona’s husband, yet another Jew who owned not one but two theaters. Where was America in all this? Pottstown was for Americans. God had predestined it. The Constitution guaranteed it. The Bible had said it. Jesus! Where was Jesus in all this? Doc felt his world was falling apart.

the human brain is not equipped to see War, Famine, Pollution, and Death when they don’t want to be seen, and has got so good at not seeing that it often manages not to see them even when they abound on every side.

Beauty! Wasn't that what mattered? Beauty was hardly a popular ideal at that jumpy moment in history. The masses had been desensitized to it, the intelligentsia regarded it with suspicion. To most of her peers, 'beauty' smacked of the rarefied, the indulgent, the superfluous, the effete. How could persons of good conscience pursue the beautiful when there was so much suffering and injustice in the world? Ellen Cherry's answer was that if one didn't cultivate beauty, soon he or she wouldn't be able to recognize ugliness. The prevalence of social ugliness made commitment to physical beauty all the more essential. And the very presence in life of double-wide mobile homes, Magic Marker graffiti, and orange shag carpeting had the effect of making ills such as poverty, crime, repression, pollution, and child abuse seem tolerable. In a sense, beauty was the ultimate protest, and, in that it generally lasted longer than an orgasm, the ultimate refuge. The Venus de Milo screamed 'No!' at evil, whereas the Spandex stretch pant, the macrame plant holder were compliant with it. Ugly bedrooms bred ugly habits. Of course, it wasn't required of beauty that it perform a social function. That was what was valuable about it.

It may be argued that, at least so far as work is concerned, what I call my addictions have benefited other people. Even if that were true, it still wouldn’t explain or justify addiction. The contributions I have made in a number of areas that I am passionate about could have been achieved without the addictive zeal that often drove me. There is no such thing as a good addiction. Everything a person can do is better done if there is no addictive attachment that pollutes it. For every addiction—no matter how benign or even laudable it seems from the outside—someone pays a price.

Each day we wake up and make myriad choices that affect others. We clothe ourselves with shirts, pants, and shoes that may have been sewn together by women working in factories fourteen-plus hours a day for a nonliving wage; we buy products manufactured in ways the destroy forests, pollute waterways, and poison the air; we wash our hair with shampoos that may have been squeezed into the eyes of conscious rabbits or force-fed to them in quantities that kill; and on and on. As Derrick Jensen has written in his book "The Culture of Make Believe", "It is possible to destroy a culture without being aware of its existence. It is possible to commit genocide or ecocide from the comfort of one's living room

Is it necessary that Heaven should borrow its light from the glare of Hell? Infinite punishment is infinite cruelty, endless injustice, immortal meanness. To worship an eternal gaoler hardens, debases, and pollutes even the vilest soul. While there is one sad and breaking heart in the universe, no good being can be perfectly happy. Against the heartlessness of the Christian religion every grand and tender soul should enter solemn protest. The God of Hell should be held in loathing, contempt and scorn. A God who threatens eternal pain should be hated, not loved – cursed, not worshiped. A heaven presided over by such a God must be below the lowest hell. I want no part in any heaven in which the saved, the ransomed and redeemed will drown with shouts of joy the cries and sobs of hell – in which happiness will forget misery, where the tears of the lost only increase laughter and double bliss. The idea of hell was born of ignorance, brutality, fear cowardice, and revenge. This idea testifies that our remote ancestors were the lowest beasts. Only from dens, lairs, and caves, only from mouths filled with cruel fangs, only from hearts of fear and hatred, only from the conscience of hunger and lust, only from the lowest and most debased could come this cruel, heartless and bestial of all dogmas.

If ever a society could be said to meet all the mythological criteria of the next lost civilization – a society that ticks all the boxes – is it not obvious that it is our own? Our pollution and neglect of the majestic garden of the earth, our rape of its resources, our abuse of the oceans and the rainforests, our fear, hatred and suspicion of one another multiplied by a hundred bitter regional and sectarian conflicts, our consistent track record of standing by and doing nothing while millions suffer, our ignorant, narrow-minded racism, our exclusivist religions, our forgetfulness that we are all brothers and sisters, our bellicose chauvinism, the dreadful cruelties that we indulge in, in the name of nation, or faith, or simple greed, our obsessive, competitive, ego-driven production and consumption of material goods and the growing conviction of many, fuelled by the triumphs of materialist science, that matter is all there is – that there is no such thing as spirit, that we are just accidents of chemistry and biology – all these things, and many more, in mythological terms at least, do not look good for us.

Sometimes it has seemed to me that man's main accomplishment has been to tear down, rob pollute, kill. First, his earth, Then his fellow-men. In recent years has come our final, triumphal achievement: a nuclear contraption and a guided missile to carry it, works of such incredible complexity that only our handful of geniuses could create them, works that can blow up our planet in a jiffy, snuffing out life for good. Can, and probably will, given the folly of those who rule us and who have the power to decide.

Instructions for Dad. I don't want to go into a fridge at an undertaker's. I want you to keep me at home until the funeral. Please can someone sit with me in case I got lonely? I promise not to scare you. I want to be buried in my butterfly dress, my lilac bra and knicker set and my black zip boots (all still in the suitcase that I packed for Sicily). I also want to wear the bracelet Adam gave me. Don't put make-up on me. It looks stupid on dead people. I do NOT want to be cremated. Cremations pollute the atmosphere with dioxins,k hydrochloric acid, hydrofluoric acid, sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide. They also have those spooky curtains in crematoriums. I want a biodegradable willow coffin and a woodland burial. The people at the Natural Death Centre helped me pick a site not for from where we live, and they'll help you with all the arrangements. I want a native tree planted on or near my grave. I'd like an oak, but I don't mind a sweet chestnut or even a willow. I want a wooden plaque with my name on. I want wild plants and flowers growing on my grave. I want the service to be simple. Tell Zoey to bring Lauren (if she's born by then). Invite Philippa and her husband Andy (if he wants to come), also James from the hospital (though he might be busy). I don't want anyone who doesn't know my saying anything about me. THe Natural Death Centre people will stay with you, but should also stay out of it. I want the people I love to get up and speak about me, and even if you cry it'll be OK. I want you to say honest things. Say I was a monster if you like, say how I made you all run around after me. If you can think of anything good, say that too! Write it down first, because apparently people often forget what they mean to say at funerals. Don't under any circumstances read that poem by Auden. It's been done to death (ha, ha) and it's too sad. Get someone to read Sonnet 12 by Shakespeare. Music- "Blackbird" by the Beatles. "Plainsong" by The Cure. "Live Like You Were Dying" by Tim McGraw. "All the Trees of the Field Will Clap Their Hands" by Sufian Stevens. There may not be time for all of them, but make sure you play the last one. Zoey helped me choose them and she's got them all on her iPod (it's got speakers if you need to borrow it). Afterwards, go to a pub for lunch. I've got £260 in my savings account and I really want you to use it for that. Really, I mean it-lunch is on me. Make sure you have pudding-sticky toffee, chocolate fudge cake, ice-cream sundae, something really bad for you. Get drunk too if you like (but don't scare Cal). Spend all the money. And after that, when days have gone by, keep an eye out for me. I might write on the steam in the mirror when you're having a bath, or play with the leaves on the apple tree when you're out in the garden. I might slip into a dream. Visit my grave when you can, but don't kick yourself if you can't, or if you move house and it's suddenly too far away. It looks pretty there in the summer (check out the website). You could bring a picnic and sit with me. I'd like that. OK. That's it. I love you. Tessa xxx

For every person who died in the westward migration prior to the Civil War from Native Americans attacking, the stuff of American legends, thousands, maybe tens of thousands died from water holes polluted by cholera and typhoid . . . but that doesn’t make for a good movie.

Perhaps they saw what their minds were instructed to see, because the human brain is not equipped to see War, Famine, Pollution, and Death when they don’t want to be seen, and has got so good at not seeing that it often manages not to see them even when they abound on every side.

God is the ultimate recycler. We have a good planet here. It has its troubles, yes. We have overpopulation, we have pollution, we have global warming, we have the Thursday night television lineup,” more laughter, “and, of course, we have the infected. We have a lot of problems on Earth, and it might seem like a great idea to hold the Rapture now—why wait? Let’s move on to Heaven, and leave the trials and tribulations of our earthly existence behind us. Let’s get while the getting’s good, and beat the rush. “It might seem like a great idea, but I don’t think it is, for the same reason I don’t think it’s a great idea for a first grader to stand up and say that he’s learned enough, he’s done with school, thanks a lot but he’s got it from here. Compared to God, we’re barely out of kindergarten, and like any good teacher, I don’t believe He intends to let us out of class just because we’re finding the lessons a little difficult. I don’t know whether I believe in the Rapture or not. I believe that if God wants to do it, He will… but I don’t believe that it’s coming in our lifetime. We have too much work left to do right here.

Confronted with capital’s intense semiotic pollution, its encrustation of the urban environment with idiotic sigils and imbecilic slogans no-one – neither the people who wrote them nor those at whom they are aimed – believes, you often wonder: what if all the effort that went into this flashy trash were devoted to a public good?

How do you think preaching the gospel to ourselves every day— reminding ourselves of the amazing grace God extended to us when we were hostile to him—could impact our approach to social justice? How might excluding the good news of God’s forgiveness from our daily thought lives and emotions pollute our passion for social justice?

I have detected," he said, "disturbances in the wash." ... Arthur asked him to repeat what he had just said because he hadn't quite understood his meaning. Ford repeated it. "The wash?" said Arthur. "The space time wash," said Ford. Arthur nodded, and then cleared his throat. "Are we talking about," he asked cautiously, "some sort of Vogon laundromat, or what are we talking about?" "Eddies," said Ford, "in the space-time continuum." "Ah," nodded Arthur, "is he. Is he." ... "What?" said Ford. "Er, who," said Arthur, "is Eddy, then, exactly, then?" Ford looked angrily at him. "Will you listen?" he snapped. "I have been listening," said Arthur, "but I'm not sure it's helped." Ford grasped him by the lapels of his dressing gown and spoke to him as slowly and distinctly and patiently as if he were somebody from the telephone company accounts department. "There seems..." he said, "to be some pools..." he said, "of instability," he said, "in the fabric..." he said. Arthur looked foolishly at the cloth of his dressing gown where Ford was holding it. Ford swept on before Arthur could turn the foolish look into a foolish remark. "...in the fabric of space-time," he said. "Ah, that," said Arthur. "Yes, that," confirmed Ford. They stood there alone on a hill on prehistoric Earth and stared each other resolutely in the face. "And it's done what?" said Arthur. "It," said Ford, "has developed pools of instability." "Has it," said Arthur, his eyes not wavering for a moment "It has," said Ford, with the similar degree of ocular immobility. "Good," said Arthur. "See?" said Ford. "No," said Arthur. There was a quiet pause. ... "Arthur," said Ford. "Hello? Yes?" said Arthur. "Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very, very simple." "Ah, well, I'm not sure I believe that." They sat down and composed their thoughts. Ford got out his Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic. It was making vague humming noises and a tiny light on it was flickering faintly. "Flat battery?" said Arthur. "No," said Ford, "there is a moving disturbance in the fabric of space-time, an eddy, a pool of instability, and it's somewhere in our vicinity." ... "There!" said Ford, shooting out his arm; "there, behind that sofa!" Arthur looked. Much to his surprise, there was a velvet paisley-covered Chesterfield sofa in the field in front of them. He boggled intelligently at it. Shrewd questions sprang into his mind. "Why," he said, "is there a sofa in that field?" "I told you!" shouted Ford, leaping to his feet. "Eddies in the space-time continuum!" "And this is his sofa, is it?" ... 12 chapters pass ... "All will become clear," said Slartibartfast. "When?" "In a minute. Listen. The time streams are now very polluted. There's a lot of muck floating about in them, flotsam and jetsam, and more and more of it is now being regurgitated into the physical world. Eddies in the space-time continuum, you see." "So I hear," said Arthur.

He had a point. The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large. Then Trout made a good point, too. 'Well,' he said, 'I used to be a conservationist. I used to weep and wail about people shooting bald eagles with automatic shotguns from helicopters and all that, but I gave it up. There's a river in Cleveland which is so polluted that it catches fire about once a year. That used to make me sick, but I laugh about it now. When some tanker accidentally dumps its load in the ocean, and kills millions of birds and billions of fish, I say, 'More power to Standard Oil,' or whoever it was that dumped it.' Trout raised his arms in celebration. 'Up your ass with Mobil gas,' he said.

Why do we need so many people on Earth? I ask you. What are they good for? They live out ludicrous lives of pointless desperation. Ninety-nine percent of the human population is so much wasted resources. Stubborn vermin, we humans are. Granted, in the past, the unwashed masses were necessary. We needed them to till our fields and fight our wars. We needed them to labor in our factories making consumer crap that we flipped back at them at a handsome profit. Alas, those days are gone. We live in a boutique economy now. Energy is abundant and cheap. Mentars and robotic labor make and manage everything. So who needs people? People are so much dead white. They eat up our profits. They produce nothing but pollution and social unrest. They drive us crazy with their pissing and moaning. I think we can all agree that Corporation Earth is in need of a serious downsizing. ... The boutique economy has no need of the masses, so let's get rid of them. But how, you ask? Not with wars, surely, or disease, famine, or mass murder. Despots have tried all these methods through the millennia, and they're never a permanent solution. No, all we need to do is buy up the ground from under their feet -- and evict them. We're buying up the planet, Bishop, fair and square. We're turning it into the most exclusive gated community in history. Now, the question is, in two hundred years, will you be a member of the landowners club, or will you be living in some tin can in outer space drinking recycled piss?

[I]t's necessary to exert very great foresight every time you go to blame or praise a man, so that you won't speak incorrectly. . . . For you shouldn't suppose that, while stones are sacred and pieces of wood, and birds, and snakes, human beings are not. Rather of all these things, the most sacred is the good human being, while the most polluted is the wicked." Speech attributed to Socrates in Plato, Minos 319a, trans. Thomas L. Pangle, in The Roots of Political Philosophy: Ten Forgotten Socratic Dialogues, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 63.

(As a "grandchild of a capitalist household":) At school, I was forbidden to take singing and dancing lessons with the other girls because I was not to "pollute" the arena of the revolution. Even though I was short-sighted, I was not allowed to sit in the front row in class because the best places were reserved for the children born to peasants, workers or soldiers; they were deemed to have 'straight roots and red shoots'. Similarly, I was forbidden to stand in the front row during PE lessons, though I was the smallest in the class, because the place nearest the teacher were for the 'next generation of the revolution'.

Poor children face staggering challenges: increased risk of low birth weight, negative impacts on early cognitive development, higher incidents of childhood illnesses such as asthma and obesity, and greatly reduced chances of attending college (only about nine out of every one hundred kids born in poverty will earn a college degree). On top of this, poor children deal with greater degrees of environmental hazards from pollution, noise, and traffic, as well as other stressors harmful to their well-being. In a competitive and global knowledge-based economy, a nation's most valuable resource is its children. And yet we are reckless with this treasure.

because the human brain is not equipped to see War, Famine, Pollution, and Death when they don’t want to be seen, and has got so good at not seeing that it often manages not to see them even when they abound on every side.

Sometimes I think Earth has got to be the insane asylum of the universe. . . and I'm here by computer error. At sixty-eight, I hope I've gained some wisdom in the past fourteen lustrums and it’s obligatory to speak plain and true about the conclusions I've come to; now that I have been educated to believe by such mentors as Wells, Stapledon, Heinlein, van Vogt, Clarke, Pohl, (S. Fowler) Wright, Orwell, Taine, Temple, Gernsback, Campbell and other seminal influences in scientifiction, I regret the lack of any female writers but only Radclyffe Hall opened my eyes outside sci-fi. I was a secular humanist before I knew the term. I have not believed in God since childhood's end. I believe a belief in any deity is adolescent, shameful and dangerous. How would you feel, surrounded by billions of human beings taking Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy and the stork seriously, and capable of shaming, maiming or murdering in their name? I am embarrassed to live in a world retaining any faith in church, prayer or a celestial creator. I do not believe in Heaven, Hell or a Hereafter; in angels, demons, ghosts, goblins, the Devil, vampires, ghouls, zombies, witches, warlocks, UFOs or other delusions; and in very few mundane individuals--politicians, lawyers, judges, priests, militarists, censors and just plain people. I respect the individual's right to abortion, suicide and euthanasia. I support birth control. I wish to Good that society were rid of smoking, drinking and drugs. My hope for humanity - and I think sensible science fiction has a beneficial influence in this direction - is that one day everyone born will be whole in body and brain, will live a long life free from physical and emotional pain, will participate in a fulfilling way in their contribution to existence, will enjoy true love and friendship, will pity us 20th century barbarians who lived and died in an atrocious, anachronistic atmosphere of arson, rape, robbery, kidnapping, child abuse, insanity, murder, terrorism, war, smog, pollution, starvation and the other negative “norms” of our current civilization. I have devoted my life to amassing over a quarter million pieces of sf and fantasy as a present to posterity and I hope to be remembered as an altruist who would have been an accepted citizen of Utopia.

When the water in a tank is polluted, all taps will only give polluted water. Your heart is the tank. When it is filled with good thoughts and feelings, all that comes out of the senses - your speech, your vision, your actions - will be pure.

The gospel brings tidings, glad tidings indeed, To mourners in Zion, who want to be freed, From sin and Satan, and Mount Sinai’s flame, Good news of salvation, through Jesus the Lamb. What sweet invitations, the gospel contains, To men heavy laden, with bondage and chains; It welcomes the weary, to come and be blessed, With ease from their burdens, in Jesus to rest. For every poor mourner, who thirsts for the Lord, A fountain is opened, in Jesus the Word; Their poor parched conscience, to cool and to wash, From guilt and pollution, from dead works and dross. A robe is provided, their shame now to hide, In which none are clothed, but Jesus' bride; Though it be costly, yet is the robe free, And all Zion’s mourners, shall decked with it be.

The man who wields the blood-clotted cowskin during the week fills the pulpit on Sunday, and claims to be a minister of the meek and lowly Jesus. The man who robs me of my earnings at the end of each week meets me as a class- leader on Sunday morning, to show me the way of life, and the path of salvation. He who sells my sister, for purposes of prostitution, stands forth as the pious advocate of purity. He who proclaims it a religious duty to read the Bible denies me the right of learning to read the name of the God who made me. He who is the religious advocate of marriage robs whole millions of its sacred influence, and leaves them to the ravages of wholesale pollution. The warm defender of the sacredness of the family relation is the same that scatters whole families,— sundering husbands and wives, parents and children, sisters and brothers,—leaving the hut vacant, and the hearth desolate. We see the thief preaching against theft, and the adulterer against adultery. We have men sold to build churches, women sold to support the gospel, and babes sold to purchase Bibles for the poor heathen! all for the glory of God and the good of souls! The slave auctioneer’s bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master. Revivals of religion and revivals in the slave-trade go hand in hand together. The slave prison and the church stand near each other. The clanking of fetters and the rattling of chains in the prison, and the pious psalm and solemn prayer in the church, may be heard at the same time. The dealers in the bodies and souls of men erect their stand in the presence of the pulpit, and they mutually help each other. The dealer gives his blood-stained gold to support the pulpit, and the pulpit, in return, covers his infernal business with the garb of Christianity. Here we have religion and robbery the allies of each other—devils dressed in angels’ robes, and hell presenting the semblance of paradise.

An industrial map in the mid-twentieth century colored New York’s Hudson River black. The mapmakers considered a black river a good thing—full of industry! The more factory outputs, the more progress. When that map was made, “nature” was widely seen as a resource to be exploited. Few people considered the consequences of careless disposal of industrial waste. The culture has shifted dramatically over the last fifty years. When I share this story today, most people shudder and ask how anyone could think of a polluted river as good.   But today we are doing the same thing with the river of culture. Think of the arts and other cultural enterprises as rivers that water the soil of culture. We are painting this cultural river black—full of industry, dominated by commercial interests, careless of toxic byproducts—and there are still cultural mapmakers who claim that this is a good thing. The pollution makes it difficult to for us to breathe, difficult for artists to create, difficult for any of us to see beauty through the murk.

No one is completely bad and even if they do bad things, there is still some vestige of goodness in them which can be brought out. But if you leave it too late, it gets so polluted that it feels like it's too much of an effort. That is what makes them remain where they are.

In the secular world, women are also credited with having a sense of good that is intrinsically female, a sense of good that men do not have. This is a frequent feature of contemporary environmentalist or antimilitarist movements. Women are seen to have an inborn commitment to both clean air and peace, a moral nature that abhors pollution and murder. Being good or moral is viewed as a particular biological capacity of women and as a result women are the natural guardians of morality: a moral vanguard as it were. Organizers use this appeal to women all the time. Motherhood is especially invoked as biological proof that women have a special relationship to life, a special sensitivity to its meaning, a special, intuitive knowledge of what is right. Any political group can appropriate the special moral sensibility of women to its own ends: most groups do, usually in place of offering substantive relief to women with respect to sexism in the group itself. Women all along the male-defined political spectrum give special credence to this view of a female biological nature that is morally good.

I gave a magic wand to Amanda Rinderle of Tuckerman & Co., maker of probably the world's most sustainable dress shirts. If she could use it, I asked, to change one thing in order to help create an economy of better but less, what would that one thing be?...she would make prices tell the whole truth. Right now, prices reflect demand for goods and services and the costs of producing them: materials, energy, manufacturing, shipping. Mostly excluded are the consequences of production and consumption, from pollution to soil erosion to carbon emissions to habitat loss and onward to the human health effects of all these, the incredible destruction wrought by wildfires, floods and storms in the age of climate chaos, the burden of two billion tonnes of garbage each year, and the incalculable moral injury of driving million-year-old species into extinction.

What she does not see behind her is the disturbance her nuns have left in the forest, the families of squirrels, of dormice, of voles, of badgers, of stoats who have been chased in confusion from their homes, the trees felled that held green woodpeckers, the pine martens, the mistle thrushes and the long-tailed tits, the woodcocks and capercaillies chased from their nests, the willow warbler vanished in panic from these lands for the time being; it will take a half century to lure these tiny birds back. She sees only the human stamp upon the place. She considers it good.

When an artist submerges a crucifix in a jar of his own urine, or smears elephant dung on an image of the Virgin Mary, do these works belong in art museums?21 Can the artist simply tell religious Christians, “If you don’t want to see it, don’t go to the museum”? Or does the mere existence of such works make the world dirtier, more profane, and more degraded? If you can’t see anything wrong here, try reversing the politics. Imagine that a conservative artist had created these works using images of Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela instead of Jesus and Mary. Imagine that his intent was to mock the quasi-deification by the left of so many black leaders. Could such works be displayed in museums in New York or Paris without triggering angry demonstrations? Might some on the left feel that the museum itself had been polluted by racism, even after the paintings were removed?

If all the new industries pollute the atmosphere and the oceans causing global warming and mass extinctions, then we should build for ourselves virtual worlds and hi-tech sanctuaries that will provide us with all the good things in life even if the planet becomes as hot, dreary and polluted as hell.

The sky above us seems huge, vast. It’s clear and crisp and visibility is so good that, when I look up, I feel like I'm staring at an inverted, endless ocean. I'm sure the blue is the colour of water above sand and the tiny, wispy clouds look like waves breaking over distant swells. I envy the birds I see overhead, zipping joyfully from left to right and so far above the death and decay that pollute the lower levels. A day like this should be enjoyed completely. I should be able to forget what dwells in the towns around us, I should find it in myself to dismiss what happened at that crossing, I should.

In his play Antigone, Sophocles summed it up: Wonders are many and none more wonderful than man . . . In the meshes of his woven nets, cunning of mind, ingenious man . . . He snares the lighthearted birds and the tribes of savage beasts, and the creatures of the deep seas . . . He puts the halter round the horse’s neck And rings the nostrils of the angry bull. He has devised himself a shelter against the rigours of frost and the pelting rains. Speech and science he has taught himself, and artfully formed laws for harmonious civic life . . . Only against death he fights in vain. But clear intelligence—a force beyond measure— moves to work both good and ill . . . When he obeys the laws and honors justice, the city stands proud . . . But man swerves from side to side, and when the laws are broken, and set at naught, he is like a person without a city, beyond human boundary, a horror, a pollution to be avoided.29 The

Finally, is it fair that the pollution caused, in China for example, by the production of goods exported to the United States and Europe be counted as Chinese pollution, and be covered by the system of permits to which all countries, including China, would be subject? The answer is that Chinese firms that emit GHGs when they produce exported goods will pass the price of carbon through to American and European importers so that rich country consumers will pay for the pollution their consumption induces. International trade does not alter the principle that payment should be collected where emissions are produced.

Every now and then I am impressed with the thinking of the non-Indian. I was in Cleveland last year and got to talking with a non-Indian about American history. He said that he was really sorry about what had happened to Indians, but that there was a good reason for it. The continent had to be developed and he felt that Indians had stood in the way, and thus had had to be removed. “After all,” he remarked, “what did you do with the land when you had it?” I didn’t understand him until later when I discovered that the Cuyahoga River running through Cleveland is inflammable. So many combustible pollutants are dumped into the river that the inhabitants have to take special precautions during the summer to avoid setting it on fire. After reviewing the argument of my non-Indian friend I decided that he was probably correct. Whites had made better use of the land. How many Indians could have thought of creating an inflammable river?

I won’t let you stay here. Julia, we’re a people who pollute the very air we breathe. And our rivers. We’re destroying the Great Lakes; Erie is already gone, and now we’ve begun on the oceans. We filled our atmosphere with radio-active fallout that put poison into our children’s bones, and we knew it. We’ve made bombs that can wipe out humanity in minutes, and they are aimed and ready to fire. We ended polio, and then the United States Army bred new strains of germs that can cause fatal, incurable disease. We had a chance to do justice to our Negroes, and when they asked it, we refused. In Asia we burned people alive, we really did. We allow children to grow up malnourished in the United States. We allow people to make money by using our television channels to persuade our own children to smoke, knowing what it is going to do to them. This is a time when it becomes harder and harder to continue telling yourself that we are still good people. We hate each other. And we’re used to it.

I beg your pardon, Mrs. Graham - but you get on too fast. I have not yet said that a boy should be taught to rush into the snares of life, - or even wilfully to seek temptation for the sake of exercising his virtue by overcoming it; - I only say that it is better to arm and strengthen your hero, than to disarm and enfeeble the foe; - and if you were to rear an oak sapling in a hothouse, tending it carefully night and day, and shielding it from every breath of wind, you could not expect it to become a hardy tree, like that which has grown up on the mountain-side, exposed to all the action of the elements, and not even sheltered from the shock of the tempest.' 'Granted; - but would you use the same argument with regard to a girl?' 'Certainly not.' 'No; you would have her to be tenderly and delicately nurtured, like a hot-house plant - taught to cling to others for direction and support, and guarded, as much as possible, from the very knowledge of evil. But will you be so good as to inform me why you make this distinction? Is it that you think she has no virtue?' 'Assuredly not.' 'Well, but you affirm that virtue is only elicited by temptation; - and you think that a woman cannot be too little exposed to temptation, or too little acquainted with vice, or anything connected therewith. It must be either that you think she is essentially so vicious, or so feeble-minded, that she cannot withstand temptation, - and though she may be pure and innocent as long as she is kept in ignorance and restraint, yet, being destitute of real virtue, to teach her how to sin is at once to make her a sinner, and the greater her knowledge, the wider her liberty, the deeper will be her depravity, - whereas, in the nobler sex, there is a natural tendency to goodness, guarded by a superior fortitude, which, the more it is exercised by trials and dangers, is only the further developed - ' 'Heaven forbid that I should think so!' I interrupted her at last." 'Well, then, it must be that you think they are both weak and prone to err, and the slightest error, the merest shadow of pollution, will ruin the one, while the character of the other will be strengthened and embellished - his education properly finished by a little practical acquaintance with forbidden things. Such experience, to him (to use a trite simile), will be like the storm to the oak, which, though it may scatter the leaves, and snap the smaller branches, serves but to rivet the roots, and to harden and condense the fibres of the tree. You would have us encourage our sons to prove all things by their own experience, while our daughters must not even profit by the experience of others. Now I would have both so to benefit by the experience of others, and the precepts of a higher authority, that they should know beforehand to refuse the evil and choose the good, and require no experimental proofs to teach them the evil of transgression. I would not send a poor girl into the world, unarmed against her foes, and ignorant of the snares that beset her path; nor would I watch and guard her, till, deprived of self-respect and self-reliance, she lost the power or the will to watch and guard herself; - and as for my son - if I thought he would grow up to be what you call a man of the world - one that has "seen life," and glories in his experience, even though he should so far profit by it as to sober down, at length, into a useful and respected member of society - I would rather that he died to-morrow! - rather a thousand times!' she earnestly repeated, pressing her darling to her side and kissing his forehead with intense affection. He had already left his new companion, and been standing for some time beside his mother's knee, looking up into her face, and listening in silent wonder to her incomprehensible discourse. Anne Bronte, "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" (24,25)

As for the belief that humanity is mostly good, Secular humanism, when in that alignment, always presumes the existence of a higher power, or some god-like influence on man. Because it then becomes the belief that people are generally good and should be protected from the wiles of religion, as though this dark, vague and ignorant force once fell from the heavens, latched onto the purer hearts and minds of men and women, and, in all its forms, controlled and polluted the whole of human history. He says, 'When we defeat religion, humanity will be free.' But, if he were duly consistent, if he were really at all as secular as he claims, he might as well admit to what is actually an underlying brand of nihilistic cynicism: 'When we defeat humans, humanity will be free.

The air, soil and water cumulatively degrade; the climates and oceans destabilize; species become extinct at a spasm rate across continents; pollution cycles and volumes increase to endanger life-systems at all levels in cascade effects; a rising half of the world is destitute as inequality multiplies; the global food system produces more and more disabling and contaminated junk food without nutritional value; non-contagious diseases multiply to the world’s biggest killer with only symptom cures; the vocational future of the next generation collapses across the world while their bank debts rise; the global financial system has ceased to function for productive investment in life-goods; collective-interest agencies of governments and unions are stripped while for-profit state subsidies multiply; police state laws and methods advance while belligerent wars for corporate resources increase; the media are corporate ad vehicles and the academy is increasingly reduced to corporate functions; public sectors and services are non-stop defunded and privatized as tax evasion and transnational corporate funding and service by governments rise at the same time at every level.

He had a point. The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large. Then Trout made a good point, too. 'Well,' he said, 'I used to be a conservationist. I used to weep and wail about people shooting bald eagles with automatic shotguns from helicopters and all that, but I gave it up. There's a river in Cleveland which is so polluted that it catches fire about once a year. That used to make me sick, but I laugh about it now. When some tanker accidentally dumps its load in the ocean and kills millions of birds and billions of fish, I say, 'More power to Standard Oil' or whoever it was that dumped it.' Trout raised his arms in celebration. 'Up your ass with Mobil gas,' he said... 'I realized,' said Trout, 'that God wasn't any conservationist, so for anybody else to be one was sacrilegious and a waste of time. You ever see one of His volcanoes or tornadoes or tidal waves? Anybody ever tell you about the Ice Ages he arranges for every half-million years? How about Dutch Elm disease? There's a nice conservation measure for you. That's God, not man. Just about the time we got our rivers cleaned up, he'd probably have the whole galaxy go up like a celluloid collar...

In this world, as in our own, nearly all the chief means of production, nearly all the land, mines, factories, railways, ships, were controlled for private profit by a small minority of the population. These privileged individuals were able to force the masses to work for them on pain of starvation. The tragic farce inherent in such a system was already approaching. The owners directed the energy of the workers increasingly towards the production of more means of production rather than to the fulfilment of the needs of individual life. For machinery might bring profit to the owners; bread would not. With the increasing competition of machine with machine, profits declined, and therefore wages, and therefore effective demand for goods. Marketless products were destroyed, though bellies were unfed and backs unclad. Unemployment, disorder, and stern repression increased as the economic system disintegrated. A familiar story! As conditions deteriorated, and the movements of charity and state-charity became less and less able to cope with the increasing mass of unemployment and destitution, the new pariah-race became more and more psychologically useful to the hate-needs of the sacred, but still powerful, prosperous. The theory was spread that these wretched beings were the result of secret systematic race-pollution by riff-raff immigrants, and that they deserved no consideration whatever. They were therefore allowed only the basest forms of employment and the harshest conditions of work. When unemployment had become a serious social problem, practically the whole pariah stock was workless and destitute. It was of course easily believed that unemployment, far from being due to the decline of capitalism, was due to the worthlessness of the pariahs.

Such was the bridal-hour of Genius and Humanity. Who shall rehearse the tale of their after-union? Who shall depict its bliss and bale? Who shall tell how He, between whom and the Woman God put enmity, forged deadly plots to break the bond or defile its purity? Who shall record the long strife between Serpent and Seraph? How still the Father of Lies insinuated evil into good - pride into wisdom - grossness into glory - pain into bliss - poison into passion? How the 'dreadless Angel' defied, resisted, and repelled? How, again and again, he refined the polluted cup, exalted the debased emotion, rectified the perverted impulse, detected the lurking venom, baffled the frontless temptation - purified, justified, watched, and withstood? How, by his patience, by his strength, by that unutterable excellence he held from God - his Origin - this faithful Seraph fought for Humanity a good fight through time; and, when Time's course closed, and Death was encountered at the end, barring with fleshless arms the portals of Eternity, how Genius still held close his dying bride, sustained her through the agony of the passage, bore her triumphant into his own home - Heaven; restored her, redeemed, to Jehovah - her Maker; and at last, before Angel and Archangel, crowned her with the crown of Immortality. Who shall, of these things, write the chronicle?

The gross domestic product (GDP) was created in the 1930s to measure the value of the sum total of economic goods and services generated over a single year. The problem with the index is that it counts negative as well as positive economic activity. If a country invests large sums of money in armaments, builds prisons, expands police security, and has to clean up polluted environments and the like, it’s included in the GDP. Simon Kuznets, an American who invented the GDP measurement tool, pointed out early on that “[t]he welfare of a nation can . . . scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income.”28 Later in life, Kuznets became even more emphatic about the drawbacks of relying on the GDP as a gauge of economic prosperity. He warned that “[d]istinctions must be kept in mind between quantity and quality of growth . . . . Goals for ‘more’ growth should specify more growth of what and for what.”29

We have no obligation to endure or enable certain types of certain toxic relationships. The Christian ethic muddies these waters because we attach the concept of long-suffering to these damaging connections. We prioritize proximity over health, neglecting good boundaries and adopting a Savior role for which we are ill-equipped. Who else we'll deal with her?, we say. Meanwhile, neither of you moves towards spiritual growth. She continues toxic patterns and you spiral in frustration, resentment and fatigue. Come near, dear one, and listen. You are not responsible for the spiritual health of everyone around you. Nor must you weather the recalcitrant behavior of others. It is neither kind nor gracious to enable. We do no favors for an unhealthy friend by silently enduring forever. Watching someone create chaos without accountability is not noble. You won't answer for the destructive habits of an unsafe person. You have a limited amount of time and energy and must steward it well. There is a time to stay the course and a time to walk away. There's a tipping point when the effort becomes useless, exhausting beyond measure. You can't pour antidote into poison forever and expect it to transform into something safe, something healthy. In some cases, poison is poison and the only sane response is to quit drinking it. This requires honest self evaluation, wise counselors, the close leadership of the Holy Spirit, and a sober assessment of reality. Ask, is the juice worth the squeeze here. And, sometimes, it is. You might discover signs of possibility through the efforts, or there may be necessary work left and it's too soon to assess. But when an endless amount of blood, sweat and tears leaves a relationship unhealthy, when there is virtually no redemption, when red flags are frantically waved for too long, sometimes the healthiest response is to walk away. When we are locked in a toxic relationship, spiritual pollution can murder everything tender and Christ-like in us. And a watching world doesn't always witness those private kill shots. Unhealthy relationships can destroy our hope, optimism, gentleness. We can lose our heart and lose our way while pouring endless energy into an abyss that has no bottom. There is a time to put redemption in the hands of God and walk away before destroying your spirit with futile diligence.

One common thread ran through the comments: everybody loathes Ticketmaster, for assorted reasons, with the wonderful diversity that makes our country so vibrant. If James Bond movies and other international thrillers weary of their casts of modern stock villains—drug dealers, terrorists, polluting corporations—Ticketmaster is waiting in the wings, universally despised. And if such a movie proved incredibly popular and were then transmuted into a hit Broadway musical, Ticketmaster itself could scalp—sorry, resell—tickets to it.

About 74 percent of U.S. adults are overweight or obese, and 93.2 percent have metabolic dysfunction. These numbers sound high until you realize how many levers of modern society are stacked against our mitochondria and metabolism: too much sugar, too much stress, too much sitting, too much pollution, too many pills, too many pesticides, too many screens, too little sleep, and too little micronutrients. These trends—with trillions of dollars behind them—are causing epidemic levels of mitochondrial dysfunction and underpowered, sick, inflamed bodies.

In this age of consumer activism, pinpoint marketing, and unlimited and immediate information, we want the impossible: products and producers that will assure us that we are fashionable, and that don’t pollute, harm animals, or contain weird chemicals, that run on alternative energy, pay their workers good salaries, recycle their scraps, use natural ingredients, buy from local suppliers, donate generously to charity, donate in particular to their neighborhoods, and don’t throw their weight around by lobbying. (Or maybe they should lobby for the right causes?)

The real nemesis of the modern economy is ecological collapse. Both scientific progress and economic growth take place within a brittle biosphere, and as they gather steam, so the shock waves destabilise the ecology. In order to provide every person in the world with the same standard of living as affluent Americans, we would need a few more planets – but we only have this one. If progress and growth do end up destroying the ecosystem, the cost will be dear not merely to vampires, foxes and rabbits, but also to Sapiens. An ecological meltdown will cause economic ruin, political turmoil, a fall in human standards of living, and it might threaten the very existence of human civilisation. We could lessen the danger by slowing down the pace of progress and growth. If this year investors expect to get a 6 per cent return on their portfolios, in ten years they will be satisfied with a 3 per cent return, in twenty years only 1 per cent, and in thirty years the economy will stop growing and we’ll be happy with what we’ve already got. Yet the creed of growth firmly objects to such a heretical idea. Instead, it suggests we should run even faster. If our discoveries destabilise the ecosystem and threaten humanity, then we should discover something to protect ourselves. If the ozone layer dwindles and exposes us to skin cancer, we should invent better sunscreen and better cancer treatments, thereby also promoting the growth of new sunscreen factories and cancer centres. If all the new industries pollute the atmosphere and the oceans, causing global warming and mass extinctions, then we should build for ourselves virtual worlds and hi-tech sanctuaries that will provide us with all the good things in life even if the planet is as hot, dreary and polluted as hell.

That hundreds of millions of people believe that a man named Noah built an ark and put all of the world's species onto it two-by-two, that those species included dinosaurs—even though dinosaurs and man are separated by millions of years—that these people want this taught as science, that they want to get onto every school board and into every legislature to ensure that their view prevails, and that the mainstream media of a modern society continues to take this seriously, may only mildly annoy one smart person, perhaps one who grew up in religion and is tempted to give religion a pass. But it will seriously outrage—and almost derange—another smart person who is convinced that these views always come with an authoritarian edge and a coercive public agenda. It will likewise strike a smart person as a ludicrous claim that the collectivist farms in her country are working beautifully when there is no food to be found on the shelves of any grocery store anywhere or to claim that a certain corporation is a mighty source for good and innovation when it is paying its employees peanuts and freely polluting. Misrepresentations of this sort affect our brain and our nervous system. They are an assault on our senses as well as our sense of right and wrong, and they bring pain and distress.

We have always called ourselves a tax-exempt 501c3 antiprofit organization. We wrestle to free ourselves from macrocharity and distant acts of charity that serve to legitimize apathetic lifestyles of good intentions but rob us of the gift of community. We visit rich people and have them visit us. We preach, prophesy, and dream together about how to awaken the church from her violent slumber. Sometimes we speak to change the world; other times we speak to keep the world from changing us. We are about ending poverty, not simply managing it. We give people fish. We teach them to fish. We tear down the walls that have been built up around the fish pond. And we figure out who polluted it. We fight terrorism—the terrorism within each of us, the terrorism of corporate greed, of American consumerism, of war. We are not pacifist hippies but passionate lovers who abhor passivity and violence. We spend our lives actively resisting everything that destroys life, whether that be terrorism or the war on terrorism. We try to make the world safe, knowing that the world will never be safe as long as millions live in poverty so the few can live as they wish. We believe in another way of life—the kingdom of God—which stands in opposition to the principalities, powers, and rulers of this dark world (Eph. 6:12).3

Compared to cotton, synthetic fibers require a lot less water to produce, but that’s not necessarily a good enough argument for using them, since they have other significant impacts: they are still made of oil, and their production can require a lot of energy. MIT calculated that the global impact of producing polyester alone was somewhere between 706 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, or about what 185 coal-fired power plants emit in a year.2 Samit Chevli, the principal investigator for biomaterials at DuPont, the giant chemical company, has said that it will be hundreds of years before regular polyester degrades.3 Plus, while the chemicals used in production typically aren’t released to the environment, if factories don’t have treatment systems in the last phase of production, they can release antimony, an element that can be harmful to human health, as well as other toxins and heavy metals. Despite having just written a good amount about the impacts associated with the production of synthetic fibers, that’s actually not why I wanted to call attention to your yoga pants and dry-fit sweat-wicking T-shirts, which we wear out to dinner. It is hard for me to leave my fashion critique at the door, but what I actually want to say about synthetic fibers is that they are everywhere—not just in all of our clothes, but literally everywhere: rivers, lakes, oceans, agricultural fields, mountaintops, glaciers. Everywhere. Synthetic fibers, actually, may be one of the most abundant, widespread, and stubborn forms of pollution that we have inadvertently created.

And sometimes it is possible to rouse them from a seemingly meaningless life with a really good story,' Jane said, 'one that will reach their hearts and wake them up.' 'Can you give me an example?' 'One of my very favorites is fictitious but seems so appropriate now. It is Lord of the Rings.' 'What makes it such an appropriate story for the hopeless?' I asked. 'Because the might the heroes were up against seemed utterly invincible-the might of Mordor, the orcs, and the Black Riders on horses and then on those huge flying beasts. And Samwise and Frodo, two little hobbits, traveling into the heart of danger on their own..... I think it provides us with a blueprint of how we survive and turn around climate change and loos of biodiversity, poverty, racism, discrimination, greed, and corruption. The Dark Lord of Mordor and the Black Riders symbolize all the wickedness we have to fight. The fellowship of the Ring includes all those who are fighting the good fight-we have to work so hard to grow the fellowship around the world.' Jane pointed out that the land of Middle-earth was polluted by the destructive industry of that world in the same way that our environment is devastated today. And she reminded me that Lady Galadriel had given Sam a little box of earth from her orchard. 'Do you remember how he used that gift when he surveyed the devastated landscape after the Dark Lord was finally defeated? He started sprinkling little pinches of the earth all around the country-and everywhere nature sprang back to life. Well, that earth represents all the projects people are doing to restore habitats on planet Earth.

Ordinary unconsciousness is always linked in some way with denial of the Now. The Now, of course, also implies the here. Are you resisting your here and now? Some people would always rather be somewhere else. Their “here” is never good enough. Through self-observation, find out if that is the case in your life. Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences. No excuses. No negativity. No psychic pollution. Keep your inner space clear. If you take any action — leaving or changing your situation — drop the negativity first, if at all possible. Action arising out of insight into what is required is more effective than action arising out of negativity. Any action is often better than no action, especially if you have been stuck in an unhappy situation for a long time. If it is a mistake, at least you learn something, in which case it’s no longer a mistake. If you remain stuck, you learn nothing. Is fear preventing you from taking action? Acknowledge the fear, watch it, take your attention into it, be fully present with it. Doing so cuts the link between the fear and your thinking. Don’t let the fear rise up into your mind. Use the power of the Now. Fear cannot prevail against it. If there is truly nothing that you can do to change your here and now, and you can’t remove yourself from the situation, then accept your here and now totally by dropping all inner resistance. The false, unhappy self that loves feeling miserable, resentful, or sorry for itself can then no longer survive. This is called surrender. Surrender is not weakness. There is great strength in it. Only a surrendered person has spiritual power. Through surrender, you will be free internally of the situation. You may then find that the situation changes without any effort on your part. In any case, you are free. Or is there something that you “should” be doing but are not doing it? Get up and do it now. Alternatively, completely accept your inactivity, laziness, or passivity at this moment, if that is your choice. Go into it fully. Enjoy it. Be as lazy or inactive as you can. If you go into it fully and consciously, you will soon come out of it. Or maybe you won’t. Either way, there is no inner conflict, no resistance, no negativity.

by raising what appears before you. If you can’t even serve what is put in front of you, how are you going to change the world? If you are getting so upset about conditions in the world that you’re edgy with everyone around you, you’re not helping anyone. If you can’t create harmony in your own household, what right do you have to complain that countries are shooting missiles at each other? You have to live a life that, if everyone lived it, there would be peace. If you can’t do that, you are part of the problem, not the solution. It’s all about letting go of yourself. The world is going to come in, and it’s going to hit what’s left of your samskaras. What you feel going on inside when that happens is reactive energy. Don’t ever act based on that. You will just be polluting the environment with your inner blockages. No good can come from that.

Let’s say we had a bad one, and all the plants and animals died, and the earth was clicking hot for a hundred thousand years. Life would survive somewhere—under the soil, or perhaps frozen in Arctic ice. And after all those years, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would again spread over the planet. The evolutionary process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. And of course it would be very different from what it is now. But the earth would survive our folly. Life would survive our folly. Only we,” Malcolm said, “think it wouldn’t.” Hammond said, “Well, if the ozone layer gets thinner—” “There will be more ultraviolet radiation reaching the surface. So what?” “Well. It’ll cause skin cancer.” Malcolm shook his head. “Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It’s powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation.” “And many others will die out,” Hammond said. Malcolm sighed. “You think this is the first time such a thing has happened? Don’t you know about oxygen?” “I know it’s necessary for life.” “It is now,” Malcolm said. “But oxygen is actually a metabolic poison. It’s a corrosive gas, like fluorine, which is used to etch glass. And when oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells—say, around three billion years ago—it created a crisis for all other life on our planet. Those plant cells were polluting the environment with a deadly poison. They were exhaling a lethal gas, and building up its concentration. A planet like Venus has less than one percent oxygen. On earth, the concentration of oxygen was going up rapidly—five, ten, eventually twenty-one percent! Earth had an atmosphere of pure poison! Incompatible with life!

A sincere man who sits down at night and pens that which his soul believes to be right, that which his soul tells him will be good for humanity, is exercising a power over the world that is beneficial. We should hail that expression of greatness, of goodness, with thanksgiving. But the insincere man, the man who will sit down at night and distort facts, who will wilfully misrepresent truth, who is a traitor to the divine within him which is calling, nay longing for truth, what shall we say of that man? He is publishing falsehoods to the world, giving poison to young, innocent souls who are longing for truth. Oh, there is no condemnation too strong for the hypocrite, for the betrayer of Christ. We will not condemn him, but God will, in His justice; He must. Too much time is taken up by our young people, and by our older ones, too, in reading useless pamphlets, useless books; "It is worse than useless," says Farrar, in that excellent little work on "Great Books:". . . . Men in Israel, it is time that we take a stand against vile literature. It is poisonous to the soul. It is the duty of a parent to put the poison, that is in the house, on the highest shelf, away from that innocent little child who knows not the danger of it. It is the duty of the parent also to keep the boy's mind from becoming polluted with the vile trash that is sometimes scattered--nay, that is daily distributed among us. There is inconsistency in a man's kneeling down with his family in prayer, and asking God to bless the leader of our Church, and then put into the hands of the boy, who was kneeling there, a paper that calls the leader a hypocrite. It ought not to be done; it is poison to the soul. How can we tell? May be those are the great men who are writing the scurrilous articles, and these whom they attack are not the great men? Some may say: Give the children an opportunity to hear both sides. Yes, that is all well and good; but if a man were to come into your home and say to you that your mother is not a good woman, you would know he lied; wouldn't you? And you wouldn't let your children hear him. If a man came and told you that your brother was dishonest, and you had been with him all your life and knew him to be honest, you would know the man lied. So when they come and tell you the Gospel is a hypocritical doctrine, taught by this organization, when they tell you the men at the head are insincere, you know they lie; and you can take the same firm stand on that, being sincere yourself as you could in regard to your mother and brother. Teach your children, your boys and girls everywhere, to keep away from every bad book and all bad literature, especially that which savors of hatred, or envy, or malice, that which bears upon it the marks of hypocrisy, insincerity, edited by men who have lost their manhood.

The thing that separates two people the most is a difference in their sense and degree of cleanliness. All the good behavior, mutual utility, and goodwill in the world will not help: what matters, in the end, is that they “can’t stand the smell of each other!” The highest instinct of cleanliness puts someone afflicted with it into the strangest and most dangerous solitude, in the form of a holy saint: because this is what holiness is – the highest spiritualization of this instinct. Some sort of shared knowledge of an indescribable abundance of joy in bathing, some sort of lust and craving constantly drives the soul out of the night and into the morning, out of dullness and gloom into light, radiance, profundity, finesse. However much a tendency like this characterizes somebody (it is a noble tendency), it separates him out as well. The pity of the saint is a pity for the filth of the human, all-too-human. And there are degrees and heights where he feels even pity as a form of pollution, as filth.

The ethic of autonomy is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, autonomous individuals with wants, needs, and preferences. People should be free to satisfy these wants, needs, and preferences as they see fit, and so societies develop moral concepts such as rights, liberty, and justice, which allow people to coexist peacefully without interfering too much in each other’s projects. This is the dominant ethic in individualistic societies. You find it in the writings of utilitarians such as John Stuart Mill and Peter Singer11 (who value justice and rights only to the extent that they increase human welfare), and you find it in the writings of deontologists such as Kant and Kohlberg (who prize justice and rights even in cases where doing so may reduce overall welfare). But as soon as you step outside of Western secular society, you hear people talking in two additional moral languages. The ethic of community is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, members of larger entities such as families, teams, armies, companies, tribes, and nations. These larger entities are more than the sum of the people who compose them; they are real, they matter, and they must be protected. People have an obligation to play their assigned roles in these entities. Many societies therefore develop moral concepts such as duty, hierarchy, respect, reputation, and patriotism. In such societies, the Western insistence that people should design their own lives and pursue their own goals seems selfish and dangerous—a sure way to weaken the social fabric and destroy the institutions and collective entities upon which everyone depends. The ethic of divinity is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, temporary vessels within which a divine soul has been implanted.12 People are not just animals with an extra serving of consciousness; they are children of God and should behave accordingly. The body is a temple, not a playground. Even if it does no harm and violates nobody’s rights when a man has sex with a chicken carcass, he still shouldn’t do it because it degrades him, dishonors his creator, and violates the sacred order of the universe. Many societies therefore develop moral concepts such as sanctity and sin, purity and pollution, elevation and degradation. In such societies, the personal liberty of secular Western nations looks like libertinism, hedonism, and a celebration of humanity’s baser instincts.13

Well, Mr Markham, you that maintain that a boy should not be shielded from evil, but sent out to battle against it, alone and unassisted - not taught to avoid the snares of life, but boldly to rush into them, or over them, as he may - to seek danger rather than shun it, and feed his virtue by temptation - would you-' 'I beg your pardon, Mrs Graham - but you get on too fast. I have not yet said that a boy should be taught to rush into the snares of life - or even wilfully to seek temptation for the sake of exercising his virtue by overcoming it - I only say that it is better to arm and strengthen your hero, than to disarm and enfeeble the foe; and if you were to rear an oak sapling in a hot-house, tending it carefully night and day, and shielding it from every breath of wind, you could not expect it to become a hardy tree, like that which has grown up on the mountain-side, exposed to all the action of the elements, and not even sheltered form the shock of the tempest.' 'Granted; but would you use the same arguments with regard to a girl?' 'Certainly not.' 'No; you would have her to be tenderly and delicately nurtured, like a hot-house plant - taught to cling to others for direction and support, and guarded, as much as possible, from the very knowledge of evil. But will you be so good as to inform me why you make this distinction? Is it that you think she has no virtue?' 'Assuredly not.' 'Well, but you affirm that virtue is only elicited by temptation; and you think that a woman cannot be too little exposed to temptation, or too little acquainted with vice, or anything connected therewith. It must be, either, that you think she is essentially so vicious, or so feeble-minded that she cannot withstand temptation - and though she may be pure and innocent as long as she is kept in ignorance and restraint, yet, being destitute of real virtue, to teach her how to sin, is at once to make her a sinner, and the greater her knowledge, the wider her liberty, the deeper will be her depravity - whereas, in the nobler sex, there is a natural tendency to goodness, guarded by a superior fortitude, which, the more it is exercised by trials and dangers, it is only further developed-' 'Heaven forbid that I should think so!' I interrupted her at last. 'Well then, it must be that you think they are both weak and prone to err, and the slightest error, the nearest shadow of pollution, will ruin the one, while the character of the other will be strengthened and embellished - his education properly finished by a little practical acquaintance with forbidden things. Such experience, to him (to use a trite simile), will be like the storm to the oak, which, though it may scatter the leaves, and snap the smaller branches, serves but to rivet the roots, and to harden and condense the fibres of the tree. You would have us encourage our sons to prove all things by their own experience, while our daughters must not even profit by the experience of others.

Evolution is largely a temporal phenomenon, Merrill. The environment changes, and populations in that environment change in turn, or they languish. Individual organisms don't evolve; populations do. Nature doesn't give a damn about individuals. The only role we play in evolution is surviving long enough to give birth to offspring who are slightly different from us. Some of our offspring will prosper in a changing environment, and some of them will not. As for us individuals, once we've reproduced, nature has no more use for us. We perish along with our ill-adapted young. Death has always been an essential factor in species survival. Now consider the human race. We are a partial exception to the rule. Unlike other species, we have developed culture. Instead of adapting to a changing environment biologically, we can sometimes adapt to it culturally. If an Ice Age comes along, we don't need to grow fur on our bodies if we invent the fur coat. Culture allows us to adapt to almost any environment, including the harshest, like space. In fact, our cultural adaptation is so robust that it all but obviates the need to evolve biologically. We are so good at adapting to changing conditions with our knowledge and technology that we may deceive ourselves into believing that we are above nature. But only a fools believes that. Nature always has the last word. A star in our neighborhood could go supernova and wipe out all life in our solar system, and no amount of culture could save us from that. That, I believe, is the main reason you want to seed humanity throughout the galaxy. So as not to have all our eggs in one basket... The chief difference between biological and cultural adaptation is that while biological evolution doesn't care about individuals, cultural evolution does, often at the expense of the species. Look at how many times we've nearly wiped ourselves out through cultural means: the nuclear bomb, pollution, climate change, the Outrage. We can't seem to help ourselves. Look at what we've done: we've made individuals all but immortal, even when it means we can have no more children. In one stroke, we've eliminated the two key ingredients of evolution: offspring and death. From a biological perspective, we're skating on mighty thin ice. ... ...as long as the individual reigns supreme, there's a finite limit to our survival. ... We need a means for the individual, not just the species, to participate in biological evolution, and that's what my project is all about. We need to be able to let our biological bodies die, to have offspring that are molded by the changing needs of the environments we find ourselves in, and yet to serially inhabit these bodies as the same individual. That means we need to be able to move our minds from one body to the next. ... Mine is a singularity in which the obsolete individual is invited to cross over to the new, not simply to die out. The existing person need not die to make room for the newcomer. Anyone can play.

among the young, a portent of the world’s future. Hate crimes, violence against women, and the victimization of children are all in long-term decline, as is the exploitation of children for their labor. As people are getting healthier, richer, safer, and freer, they are also becoming more literate, knowledgeable, and smarter. Early in the 19th century, 12 percent of the world could read and write; today 83 percent can. Literacy and the education it enables will soon be universal, for girls as well as boys. The schooling, together with health and wealth, are literally making us smarter—by thirty IQ points, or two standard deviations above our ancestors. People are putting their longer, healthier, safer, freer, richer, and wiser lives to good use. Americans work 22 fewer hours a week than they used to, have three weeks of paid vacation, lose 43 fewer hours to housework, and spend just a third of their paycheck on necessities rather than five-eighths. They are using their leisure and disposable income to travel, spend time with their children, connect with loved ones, and sample the world’s cuisine, knowledge, and culture. As a result of these gifts, people worldwide have become happier. Even Americans, who take their good fortune for granted, are “pretty happy” or happier, and the younger generations are becoming less unhappy, lonely, depressed, drug-addicted, and suicidal. As societies have become healthier, wealthier, freer, happier, and better educated, they have set their sights on the most pressing global challenges. They have emitted fewer pollutants, cleared fewer forests, spilled less oil,

How I Got That Name Marilyn Chin an essay on assimilation I am Marilyn Mei Ling Chin Oh, how I love the resoluteness of that first person singular followed by that stalwart indicative of “be," without the uncertain i-n-g of “becoming.” Of course, the name had been changed somewhere between Angel Island and the sea, when my father the paperson in the late 1950s obsessed with a bombshell blond transliterated “Mei Ling” to “Marilyn.” And nobody dared question his initial impulse—for we all know lust drove men to greatness, not goodness, not decency. And there I was, a wayward pink baby, named after some tragic white woman swollen with gin and Nembutal. My mother couldn’t pronounce the “r.” She dubbed me “Numba one female offshoot” for brevity: henceforth, she will live and die in sublime ignorance, flanked by loving children and the “kitchen deity.” While my father dithers, a tomcat in Hong Kong trash— a gambler, a petty thug, who bought a chain of chopsuey joints in Piss River, Oregon, with bootlegged Gucci cash. Nobody dared question his integrity given his nice, devout daughters and his bright, industrious sons as if filial piety were the standard by which all earthly men are measured. * Oh, how trustworthy our daughters, how thrifty our sons! How we’ve managed to fool the experts in education, statistic and demography— We’re not very creative but not adverse to rote-learning. Indeed, they can use us. But the “Model Minority” is a tease. We know you are watching now, so we refuse to give you any! Oh, bamboo shoots, bamboo shoots! The further west we go, we’ll hit east; the deeper down we dig, we’ll find China. History has turned its stomach on a black polluted beach— where life doesn’t hinge on that red, red wheelbarrow, but whether or not our new lover in the final episode of “Santa Barbara” will lean over a scented candle and call us a “bitch.” Oh God, where have we gone wrong? We have no inner resources! * Then, one redolent spring morning the Great Patriarch Chin peered down from his kiosk in heaven and saw that his descendants were ugly. One had a squarish head and a nose without a bridge Another’s profile—long and knobbed as a gourd. A third, the sad, brutish one may never, never marry. And I, his least favorite— “not quite boiled, not quite cooked," a plump pomfret simmering in my juices— too listless to fight for my people’s destiny. “To kill without resistance is not slaughter” says the proverb. So, I wait for imminent death. The fact that this death is also metaphorical is testament to my lethargy. * So here lies Marilyn Mei Ling Chin, married once, twice to so-and-so, a Lee and a Wong, granddaughter of Jack “the patriarch” and the brooding Suilin Fong, daughter of the virtuous Yuet Kuen Wong and G.G. Chin the infamous, sister of a dozen, cousin of a million, survived by everbody and forgotten by all. She was neither black nor white, neither cherished nor vanquished, just another squatter in her own bamboo grove minding her poetry— when one day heaven was unmerciful, and a chasm opened where she stood. Like the jowls of a mighty white whale, or the jaws of a metaphysical Godzilla, it swallowed her whole. She did not flinch nor writhe, nor fret about the afterlife, but stayed! Solid as wood, happily a little gnawed, tattered, mesmerized by all that was lavished upon her and all that was taken away!

ethanol may actually make some kinds of air pollution worse. It evaporates faster than pure gasoline, contributing to ozone problems in hot temperatures. A 2006 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that ethanol does reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 12 percent relative to gasoline, but it calculated that devoting the entire U.S. corn crop to make ethanol would replace only a small fraction of American gasoline consumption. Corn farming also contributes to environmental degradation due to runoff from fertilizer and pesticides. But to dwell on the science is to miss the point. As the New York Times noted in the throes of the 2000 presidential race, ―Regardless of whether ethanol is a great fuel for cars, it certainly works wonders in Iowa campaigns. The ethanol tax subsidy increases the demand for corn, which puts money in farmers‘ pockets. Just before the Iowa caucuses, corn farmer Marvin Flier told the Times, ―Sometimes I think [the candidates] just come out and pander to us, he said. Then he added, ―Of course, that may not be the worst thing. The National Corn Growers Association figures that the ethanol program increases the demand for corn, which adds 30 cents to the price of every bushel sold. Bill Bradley opposed the ethanol subsidy during his three terms as a senator from New Jersey (not a big corn-growing state). Indeed, some of his most important accomplishments as a senator involved purging the tax code of subsidies and loopholes that collectively do more harm than good. But when Bill Bradley arrived in Iowa as a Democratic presidential candidate back in 1992, he ―spoke to some farmers‖ and suddenly found it in his heart to support tax breaks for ethanol. In short, he realized that ethanol is crucial to Iowa voters, and Iowa is crucial to the presidential race.

Fuel your body. Think about your environment as an ecosystem. If there’s pollution, you’ll feel the toxic side effects; if you’re in the fresh air of the mountains, you’ll feel alive. You’d be surprised at how many of the foods that we eat actually sap our body of fuel. Just look at three quick examples: soda, potato chips, and hamburgers. I’m not a hard-liner who says that you should never consume these things, but this kind of steady diet will make it harder for your body to help you. Instead, look at the foods that are going to give you energy. Choose food that’s water soluble and easier for your body to break down, which gives you maximum nutrition with minimal effort. Look at a cucumber: it’s practically water and it takes no energy to consume, but it’s packed with nutrients. Green for me is the key. We overeat and undernourish ourselves way too much. When you eat bad food, your body will feel bad and then you will feel bad. It’s all connected. I drink green juice every day and eat huge salads. I am also a big believer in lean protein to feed and fuel the muscles--I might even have a chicken breast for breakfast. Growing up, because I danced every single day, I would basically eat anything I wanted and I wouldn’t gain any weight. I would eat anything and everything trying to put on a few pounds, but it never worked--and my skin was terrible as a result of it. We’d blame it on the sweat from the dancing, but I never connected it to what I ate. As I got older, I started to educate myself more about food. I learned that I need to alkalize my body. It’s never about how I look. Instead, I go by how I feel. I notice immediately how good, clean food boosts my energy while junk makes me feel lethargic. I’m also a huge believer in hydrating. Forget about eight glasses of water a day; I drink eight glasses before noon!

Environmental pollution is a regressive phenomenon, since the rich can find ways of insulating themselves from bad air, dirty water, loss of green spaces and so on. Moreover, much pollution results from production and activities that benefit the more affluent – air transport, car ownership, air conditioning, consumer goods of all kinds, to take some obvious examples. A basic income could be construed, in part, as partial compensation for pollution costs imposed on us, as a matter of social justice. Conversely, a basic income could be seen as compensation for those adversely affected by environmental protection measures. A basic income would make it easier for governments to impose taxes on polluting activities that might affect livelihoods or have a regressive impact by raising prices for goods bought by low-income households. For instance, hefty carbon taxes would deter fossil fuel use and thus reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate climate change as well as reduce air pollution. Introducing a carbon tax would surely be easier politically if the tax take went towards providing a basic income that would compensate those on low incomes, miners and others who would lose income-earning opportunities. The basic income case is especially strong in relation to the removal of fossil fuel subsidies. Across the world, in rich countries and in poor, governments have long used subsidies as a way of reducing poverty, by keeping down the price of fuel. This has encouraged more consumption, and more wasteful use, of fossil fuels. Moreover, fuel subsidies are regressive, since the rich consume more and thus gain more from the subsidies. But governments have been reluctant to reduce or eliminate the subsidies for fear of alienating voters. Indeed, a number of countries that have tried to reduce fuel subsidies have backed down in the face of angry popular demonstrations.

The real improvements then must come, to a considerable extent, from the local communities themselves. We need local revision of our methods of land use and production. We need to study and work together to reduce scale, reduce overhead, reduce industrial dependencies; we need to market and process local products locally; we need to bring local economies into harmony with local ecosystems so that we can live and work with pleasure in the same places indefinitely; we need to substitute ourselves, our neighborhoods, our local resources, for expensive imported goods and services; we need to increase cooperation among all local economic entities: households, farms, factories, banks, consumers, and suppliers. If. we are serious about reducing government and the burdens of government, then we need to do so by returning economic self-determination to the people. And we must not do this by inviting destructive industries to provide "jobs" to the community; we must do it by fostering economic democracy. For example, as much as possible the food that is consumed locally ought to be locally produced on small farms, and then processed in small, non- polluting plants that are locally owned. We must do everything possible to provide to ordinary citizens the opportunity to own a small, usable share of the country. In that way, we will put local capital to work locally, not to exploit and destroy the land but to use it well. This is not work just for the privileged, the well-positioned, the wealthy, and the powerful. It is work for everybody. I acknowledge that to advocate such reforms is to advocate a kind of secession-not a secession of armed violence but a quiet secession by which people find the practical means and the strength of spirit to remove themselves from an economy that is exploiting and destroying their homeland. The great, greedy, indifferent national and international economy is killing rural America, just as it is killing America's cities--it is killing our country. Experience has shown that there is no use in appealing to this economy for mercy toward the earth or toward any human community. All true patriots must find ways of opposing it. --1991

Beauty Junkies is the title of a recent book by New York Times writer Alex Kuczynski, “a self-confessed recovering addict of cosmetic surgery.” And, withour technological prowess, we succeed in creating fresh addictions. Some psychologists now describe a new clinical pathology — Internet sex addiction disorder. Physicians and psychologists may not be all that effective in treating addictions, but we’re expert at coming up with fresh names and categories. A recent study at Stanford University School of Medicine found that about 5.5 per cent of men and 6 per cent of women appear to be addicted shoppers. The lead researcher, Dr. Lorrin Koran, suggested that compulsive buying be recognized as a unique illness listed under its own heading in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the official psychiatric catalogue. Sufferers of this “new” disorder are afflicted by “an irresistible, intrusive and senseless impulse” to purchase objects they do not need. I don’t scoff at the harm done by shopping addiction — I’m in no position to do that — and I agree that Dr. Koran accurately describes the potential consequences of compulsive buying: “serious psychological, financial and family problems, including depression, overwhelming debt and the breakup of relationships.” But it’s clearly not a distinct entity — only another manifestation of addiction tendencies that run through our culture, and of the fundamental addiction process that varies only in its targets, not its basic characteristics. In his 2006 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush identified another item of addiction. “Here we have a serious problem,” he said. “America is addicted to oil.” Coming from a man who throughout his financial and political career has had the closest possible ties to the oil industry. The long-term ill effects of our society’s addiction, if not to oil then to the amenities and luxuries that oil makes possible, are obvious. They range from environmental destruction, climate change and the toxic effects of pollution on human health to the many wars that the need for oil, or the attachment to oil wealth, has triggered. Consider how much greater a price has been exacted by this socially sanctioned addiction than by the drug addiction for which Ralph and his peers have been declared outcasts. And oil is only one example among many: consider soul-, body-or Nature-destroying addictions to consumer goods, fast food, sugar cereals, television programs and glossy publications devoted to celebrity gossip—only a few examples of what American writer Kevin Baker calls “the growth industries that have grown out of gambling and hedonism.