The universe is composed of subjects to be communed with, not objects to be exploited. Everything has its own voice. Thunder and lightening and stars and planets, flowers, birds, animals, trees, – all these have voices, and they constitute a community of existence that is profoundly related.
~Thomas Berry
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Image: Artist unknown
“If half of American lawns were replaced with native plants, we would create the equivalent of a 20 million acre national park – nine times bigger than Yellowstone, or 100 times bigger than Shenandoah National Park.”
~Doug Tallamy
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“Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond.”
~Robin Wall Kimmerer,
Braiding Sweetgrass
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NASA Image of Mama Earth
taken by Apollo 11
“What insights about our human psyches appear when we return to Earth, when we remember that we are related to everything that has ever existed, when we reinstall ourselves in a world of spring-summer-fall-winter, volcanoes, storms, surf, bison, mycelium, Moon, falcons, sand dunes, galaxies, and redwood groves?
What do we discover about ourselves when we consent again to being human animals — bipedal, omnivorous mammals with distinctive capacities for self-reflexive consciousness, dexterity, imagination, and speech?
In what ways will we choose to live when we fully remember the naturalness and ecological necessity of death?
Who will we see in the mirror when we face up to the present-day realities of human-caused mass extinction, ecosystem collapse, and climate destabilization?
And what mystery journey will unfold when we answer the alluring and dangerous summons now emanating from the human soul, from the dream of the Earth, and from an intelligent, evolving, ensouled Universe?”
~Bill Plotkin,
Animas Valley Institute
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Photo: High mountain meadow
by Nancy Lankston
“More than ever we are awakening to being an integral part of earth’s ecosystem. As inhabitants of this planet we have some responsibility for the nest we live in and maintaining the nest. The same way we clean up our house, we also have to clean up our environment.
Environmental consciousness seems to be happening too slowly. Some people are motivated to keep it from happening. There are economic costs in that awakening — not in the long run, but in the short run – in ways that cause realignment of economic power. People who have that power have a lot of inertia, they want to hold onto it. A company like General Electric may not be ready for dramatic shifts unless they are forced into it because it may change their stockholder dividend.
And it’s not easy for the rest of us to break old habits and change our lives in the little ways. The big guys aren’t the bad guys, because we’re all part of the web too. But there is an increasing consciousness now about rain forests, about air, about water, and so on.
…You can’t know what the outcome will be. You can’t extrapolate from how it is now to what will be. The great unknown factor is human creative awareness and what happens when that is mobilized.”
~Ram Dass
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