Quotes: The 'environmental crisis' is a crisis of human self-understanding

"To quote the great farmer-philosopher (and man of Christian faith) Wendell Berry, the entire term environmental crisis is a misnomer, because it is not a crisis of the environment, but rather of ourselves."
Jeremy Benstein. The Way Into Judaism and the Environment. Woodstock, Vt.: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2006. pp. 14-15.

"The land has not been desecrated; human beings desecrate only themselves."
Leslie Marmon Silko. Quoted in footnote 410. Derrick Jensen. Endgame. Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006. p. 415.

"Some people in desperation have turned to witchcraft, magic and occultism, to drugs and madness, anything to rekindle imagination and find a world ensouled. But these reactions are not enough. What is needed is a revisioning, a fundamental shift of perspective out of that soulless predicament we call modern consciousness."
James Hillman (1926-2011), writing in 1976

"To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass — seeing things in such a narrow and darkly narcissistic way that it presents a colo-rectal theology, offering hope to no one."
Anne Lamott. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1994. p 102.

Quotes on ecological adaptability

A few statements I've collected on this topic. These are direct quotes from the authors cited.

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I want to propose another way of thinking, one that regards human cultures not as completely independent forces changing the world, but as strategies that people develop in order to adjust to the natural world and exploit its resources. Instead of making nature a subset of culture, as Russell does, historians might see culture as a subset of nature. We can think of this approach, following the lead of biologists, as redefining culture as a mental response to opportunities or pressures posed by the natural environment. In other words, culture can be defined as a form of “adaptation.”

The word adaptation is as familiar to historians as it is to biologists. Historians often talk of cultures clashing and adapting to one other, mixing and merging through trade, immigration, and mass communications, or they talk about societies adapting to new technologies like the automobile or computer. More rarely, however, do they talk about people adapting to their natural environments. And this is a huge failing: historians have paid insufficient attention to evolutionary adaptation in general and in particular to the role that culture plays in adaptation to environment–adaptation to the capacity of soils to grow crops, the supply of water needed to sustain life, the vicissitudes of climate, the limits to growth and material consumption in a finite landscape.
"Historians and Nature." Donald Worster. The American Scholar. Spring 2010. http://www.theamericanscholar.org/historians-and-nature/ Accessed May 25, 2010.

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The weakening of the energetic connection between humans and trees and birds and earthworms has removed an essential link in the organic processes of planetary life. The breaking of any links among species ultimately leads to the disintegration of social cohesion within the human species. Without sufficient appreciation of the need for mutual support, we have contributed to the shrinking of the life force holding together all creatures large and small.
Paul Von Ward. Gods, Genes, and Consciousness: Nonhuman intervention in human history. Charlottesville, Va.: Hampton Roads Publishing Co., 2004. p. 333.

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Have you ever seen a child take apart a favorite toy? Did you then see the little one cry after realizing he could not put all the pieces back together again? Well, here is a secret that never makes the headlines: We have taken apart the universe and have no idea how to put it back together. After spending trillions of research dollars to disassemble nature in the last century, we are just now acknowledging that we have no clue how to continue — except to take it apart further.
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life. New York: Plume, 2003. p. 6.

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To many environmentalists, any intervention, even in favor of "struggling" species against "aggressive" ones to correct the results of human intervention, can amount to biological fascism. One distinguished environmental historian wonders whether a campaign to eradicate invasive plants in the Everglades might not be Nazi in spirit. The garden writer Michael Pollan and others have noted that Heinrich Himmler supported a movement to promote native German plants and garden designs to the exclusion of foreign organisms and landscape ideas.
Edward Tenner. Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences. New York: Vintage Books, 1997. p. 123.

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To have bears we must kill bears, honoring each death with the electronic tweet of a cash register. So goes the argument. To me it's a tedious paradox, not a liberating insight, and no matter how often I hear it, applied to one or another magnificent species in their various corners of the world, each time I find it tedious afresh. But, beyond quibbling over details of linkage and enforcement, I can't rationally disagree.
David Quammen. Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2004. p 294-95.

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Modern civilization's exploitation of the natural environment is not unlike the way Madoff exploited his investors. It is predicated on the illusion that it will always be possible to make future payments owing to yet more exploitation down the road: more suckers, more growth, more GNP, based — as all Ponzi schemes are — on the fraud of 'more and more,' with no foreseeable reckoning, and thus the promise of no comeuppance, neither legal nor economic nor ecologic.
"We Are All Madoffs." David P. Barash. The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Chronicle Review (Sept. 4, 2009). Reprinted in UTNE Reader (Jan-Feb 2010), p. 48.

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...it is of ultimate significance whether we conceptualize land as a commodity, which we buy, sell, develop, or preserve at our whim, or as a community, to which we realize we belong, or from which we pretend we can remove ourselves.
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Taken alone, each component can easily get out of whack: the economic can become merely utilitarian; the spiritual, overly abstract; and the national risks degenerating into chauvinism. The overarching contemporary environmental perspective provides a unifying synthesis for our time.
Jeremy Benstein. The Way Into Judaism and the Environment. Woodstock, Vt.: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2006. pp. 20, 181.

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Society is evolving beyond stewardship models. White people are not the stewards of black and brown people. Men are not the stewards of women. Marriages are based on legal equality, not the husband having dominion over his wife. The old stewardship models are being rejected for a new understanding of the interdependence of all the unique cultures and qualities that make up society. Similarly, the stewardship model ultimately may be replaced by an ecological model based on interdependence and kinship.
I believe there is a kinship model retrievable from Genesis that is deeper than stewardship; a trace of nature mysticism that forms the biblical basis of the lost gospel of the earth.
Tom Hayden. The Lost Gospel of the Earth: A Call for Renewing Nature, Spirit, and Politics. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996. pp. 98-99.

Quotes: Forgiveness as transforming the past and heading into the future

"No life is beyond repair, and no damage so great as to not be forgiven. This in no way was to belittle your tortuous past, but merely to excuse you from constantly reliving it."
Ralph Minogue. Responsibility To, Responsibility For. Baltimore: AmErica House, 2000. p 224.

"Forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past."
Lily Tomlin, quoted in Atlanta's Creative Loafing, quoted in "Wit and Wisdom" in The Week, Feb. 18, 2011, p. 21.

"[Forgiveness] can never mean as you're t' have your old feelings back again, for that's not possible. He's not the same man to me, and I can't feel the same towards him."
Adam Bede, quoted by George Eliot (Adam Bede, 1859, Chapter 29), quoted by William Ian Miller. Faking It. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. p 92.

"'Motion of the heart' is the right phrase. Forgiveness permits all parties to lay the past at last to rest and to proceed with a new beginning, uncontaminated by the infections of past wrongs, by thoughts of grievance and revenge. The great achievement of forgiveness is not so much that it absolves the one forgiven as that it cleanses the one who forgives."
Lance Morrow. Evil: An Investigation. New York: Basic Books, 2003. p 261.

"Skepticism about apologies is well understood. After all, apologies serve as indicators of moral codes, illuminating what is considered "right" and "wrong" in social behavior and interactions. * * * In this book, I argue that apologies are desired, offered, and given in order to change the terms and meanings of membership in a political community. * * * Grievances are connected to violated expectations of just treatment and respect, if not full inclusion. Yet grievances may be addressed without an apology as such. They may well simmer and even fuel group demands, but this does not mean that groups will ask for an apology. Instead, groups may demand simply that governments attend to their concerns without mention of apology. Governments may pass laws and implement policies but never apologize. What is it, then, that makes apologies desirable? Apologies, I argue, help to bring history into the conversation, providing justification for political and policy changes and reforms. Central to the addressing of contemporary grievances is the focus on the historical injustices that created the grievances. Apologies focus on a neglected past and demand that moral reflection be bought to bear and that some attempt at remedy be undertaken."
Melissa Nobles. The Politics of Official Apologies. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. pp. x-xi.

"Take care of yourself," he said, shaking my hand.
"Do something good." I jingled my keys, and we paused in a friendlier freeze. This kind of time could be organic, too, I realized. Time wasn't created in equal portions; memory elongated certain moments and forgot others. My mind wanted to remember this, and his probably did, too.
"Bye, Roy," I said, finally breaking the spell.
"Hey," he called after me, "write me someday, okay?"
Never, I thought.
"Maybe I will," I said.
He grinned at that, and gave a jolly wave. I watched him recede into the fog, thinking that allowing him this moment was, in all the ways that matter, a kind of forgiveness.
Thomas Page McBee, Man Alive: A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness and Becoming a Man. (2017)

"Even if you can't undo the past, you can improve the future. Forgiveness lies not in fixing what can't be fixed but in the concept Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel called pikuah neshamah: saving a spirit — your own or that of others. It can translate into tikkun olam: repairing the world."
Rabbi Simkha Weintraub, rabbinic director of the National Center for Jewish Healing, quoted by Rahel Musleah, "The Dance of Forgiveness," Jewish Woman, Fall 2002. p 33.

"This person who abused me sexually, instead of sending him to hell forever, I visualized him like a child, and behind him there was a lot of light. So I can send him to the light or send him to hell knowing that if I send him to hell, I'm also going with him. But if I send him to the light, then I’m going to go with him also." — Carlos Santana, 2023, quoted in HuffPost

Quotes on lying

"What I see as white, I will believe to be black if the hierarchical Church thus determines it."
Ignatius of Loyola. Quoted by Tom Beaudoin. Consuming Faith: Integrating Who We Are with What We Buy. Lanham, Md.: Sheed and Ward, 2003. p. 54.

"Men hate those to whom they have to lie."
Victor Hugo, quoted in the Associated Press, quoted in The Week, Sept. 26, 2014, p. 17.

"The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves."
V. S. Naipaul, quoted in The Wall Street Journal, quoted in The Week, May 24, 2013, p. 17.

"What does the specific hypnotic experiment with which we started show? (1) The subject wills something, namely, to read his manuscript, (2) he thinks something, namely, that C has taken it, and (3) he feels something, namely, anger against C. We have seen that all three mental acts—his will impulse, his thought, his feeling — are not his own in the sense of being the result of his own mental activity; that they have not originated in him, but are put into him from the outside and are subjectively felt as if they were his own. He gives expression to a number of thoughts which have not been put into him during the hypnosis, namely, those “rationalizations” by which he “explains” his assumption that C has stolen the manuscript. But nevertheless these thoughts are his own only in a formal sense. Although they appear to explain the suspicion, we know that the suspicion is there first and that the rationalizing thoughts are only invented to make the feeling plausible; they are not really explanatory but come post facto.
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An example of irrational rationalization is brought forward in a well-known joke. A person who had borrowed a glass jar from a neighbor had broken it, and on being asked to return it, answered, "In the first place, I have already returned it to you; in the second place, I never borrowed it from you; and in the third place, it was already broken when you gave it to me.'"
Erich Fromm. Escape from Freedom. New York: Avon, 1941. pp. 212-213, 218.

In his Novum Organum Bacon tried to give a systematic survey of these human prejudices. He has given a list of the different kinds of idols: the idola tribus, the idola specus, the idola fori, and the idola theatri, and he tried to teach how to overcome them in order to clear the way which at last will lead to a true empirical science.
Ernst Cassirer. Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer 1935-1945. Donald Phillip Verene, ed. (1979) New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. p. 264.

“The artist is the most interesting of all phenomena, for he represents creativity, the definition of man. His unconscious is full of monsters and dreams. It provides the pictures to consciousness, which takes them as given and as "world," and rationalizes them. Rationality is only the activity of providing good reasons for what has no reason or is unreasonable.”
Allan Bloom. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. p. 206.

“She [Sissela Bok] points out that Plato, in his Republic, says that because physicians may use falsehood as a form of healing, they enjoy a right to dissemble that laymen do not.” Leah Hager Cohen. I Don't Know: In Praise of Admitting Ignorance (Except When You Shouldn’t). New York: Riverhead Books, 2013. p. 86.

[John] Grambling’s ability to rationalize his behavior is typical of the attitude that psychopaths have toward their victims. ... “In Grambling’s mind, anyone who is stupid enough to trust or believe him deserves the consequences,” said Rosner.
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When caught in a lie or challenged with the truth, they [psychopaths] are seldom perplexed or embarrassed--they simply change their stories or attempt to rework the facts so that they appear to be consistent with the lie. The results are a series of contradictory statements and a thoroughly confused listener. Much of the lying seems to have no motivation other than what psychologist Paul Ekman refers to as a “duping delight.”
Robert D. Hare. Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us. Atria, 1993. (Released by Guilford Press for Kindle, 2011.)

"So often we fight the facts because they do not fit into our preconceived notions of reality, because reality does not conform to what we want or need. We cease to be rational. We begin to rationalize. Rationalization is finding reasons for not being reasonable. It is looking at facts through lenses distorted by desire."
Sherwin T. Wine. Staying Sane in a Crazy World: A Guide to Rational Living. Birmingham, Mich.: The Center for New Thinking, 1995. p. 69

Surely Isaac can tell the difference between Jacob and Esau, yet once he decides to accept the ruse, he cannot resist punishing the boy with fear of discovery. Again and again Isaac asks his son, 'Which one are you?' He goes so far as to bring the boy near to sniff at him. Isaac knows just how corrupt Jacob is as he exclaims, 'Behold, the scent of my son is like the scent of a field blessed by God,' from which we are to understand, perhaps, rich in natural fertilizers.
Burton L. Visotzky. The Genesis of Ethics. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc, 1996. p. 157.

“The first rule of black business everywhere is: never let anyone know what you're thinking. Didier's corollary to the rule was: always know what the other thinks of you.” Gregory David Roberts. Shantaram. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2003. p. 56.

”…[assimilated Catholic] Americans mostly find a way to stay in their faith by adhering to values most important to them and quietly ignoring those they disagree with."
Victor J. Stenger. God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2008. p. 208.

“The first thing the devil does when he wants you back is offer you a few small lies that you can tell yourself as you walk yourself over to his side.”
Larry Beinhart. Salvation Boulevard. New York: Nation Books, 2008. p. 121.

"Five years after the name Bernie Madoff became synonymous with extravagant fraud, the only thing that makes him unique is the size of his swindle, said Al Lewis. In truth, his scheme was 'simple, common, and frankly, quite pedestrian.' We know this because Ponzi schemes continue to happen 'all the time.' Hundreds of perpetrators have been uncovered since Madoff's crime came to light, and those are just 'the ones who got caught.' The fraudsters all rely on the same classic scam: 'Lure investors with promises of solid returns with no risk.' It works like a charm. The only reason you don't hear much about these schemes, some of which net billions of dollars, is that 'Madoff's Ponzi was so large it ensures minimal attention for all the smaller Ponzis to come.' In fact, some schemes involving 'only a few million dollars' aren't even being prosecuted. The government just asks swindlers to stop what they're doing and release their ill-gotten gains. The world will have Ponzis 'as long as people are willing to fall under the spell of a slick-talking salesman, or follow the uninformed advice of their admired friends, without asking questions.' Even after Madoff, plenty of people still can't recognize what's too good to be true."
The Week, December 27, 2013, paraphrasing Al Lewis, "Why we'll always have the Madoffs." MarketWatch.com.

“It is likely that neither on one hand nor the other — not when he declared himself unquestionably Francoist or when he declared himself an incipient democrat — was Suárez telling the truth, but it’s almost certain that, like a transparent being whose deepest secret consists of not having secrets or like a virtuoso actor declaiming his part on a stage, he always believed what he was saying, and that’s why everyone who heard him ended up believing in him.”
Javier Cercas. The Anatomy of a Moment: Thirty-five Minutes in History and Imagination. (2009) Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean. New York: Bloomsbury, 2011. p. 305.

Once I asked him where he had been until two A.M. the night before. I always got answers that did not exactly satisfy, but that worked.
They worked because the explanations you most want to hear are also the easiest to deliver. They require so little evidence. One sentence will suffice, something short and offered up by your spouse with a surfeit of confidence.
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It becomes too much to keep track of unless you plan on scribbling everything down in your infidelity ledger. I would build just enough truth into my excuses that they would be easier for me to remember. I would say where I had been but not precisely whom I had been with. Or I would use the phrase "a whole bunch of people." This Bill came to hate. It was a red flag for him even before he knew why. This is easy to understand. Any spouse who is even half-awake would prick up his ears at such defiant nonspecificity.
Wendy Plump. Vow: A Memoir of Marriage (and Other Affairs). New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.

"The snag is that voters define 'loopholes' as other people's tax breaks. Their own, they rather like."
"How to save Obama's second term," The Economist, May 25, 2013, p. 13.

“What a shitty time we’ve lived to see…We once lived in a totalitarian state that had two main features: totalizing terror and a totalizing lie. I hope that totalizing terror is no longer possible in our country, but we have now entered a new era of a totalizing lie.”
Yuri Samodurov, former Soviet dissident, quoted by Masha Gessen. The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. (2012) New York: Riverhead, 2014.

“He said ‘categorically’ that a White House investigation indicates ‘that no one in the White House staff, no one in this administration, presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident.’ Nixon added, ‘What really hurts is if you try to cover it up.’”
Allan J. Lichtman. The Case for Impeachment. Dey Street Books, April 18, 2017. p. 26.

"When lies are political, they are particularly prone to what is called 'motivated reasoning'..."
Brian Klaas. The Despot's Apprentice: Donald Trump's Attack on Democracy. Hot Books, 2017.

Veteran journalist Carl Bernstein questioned on Sunday [May 27, 2018] if President Trump’s actions are leading the country toward authoritarianism.
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“I think we can look at a big picture now with some real definition, in which the perilous moment for our country right now, and it's a question of whether lies, authoritarianism and the character of the president of the United States are going to take us to an authoritarian place where we have never been in, which he will bury a duly constituted and legal investigation that will determine whether or not the president is above the rule of law,” Bernstein told CNN’s “Reliable Sources.”
Luis Sanchez. “Carl Bernstein questions whether Trump is leading US toward authoritarianism.” The Hill. May 27, 2018.

"Important read. The two truth problem is why mockery can work when correcting lies doesn’t. You are leaving people room to still believe the lies. Jokes say that you are believing a stupid thing. Long standing political truth that it is dangerous when people start laughing at you." — Maximum Mary (Bluesky), talking about this article on Empty Wheel, Sept 15, 2024