Today, April 22, 2008, is Earth Day. Earth Day was started in the 1960's, and some people believe that the modern environmental movement was sparked by this first celebration.
We have giant shoulders to stand on and must solve the most crucial environmental problem of our time in our generation. This is the time to look back at our predecessors and learn from them.
Below you'll find a couple of our favorite quotes from our heroes. Throughout the day I'll be posting more in the comments section of this post. Feel free to post your own as well!
"The Earth is not dying, it is being killed. And the people who are killing it have names and addresses." -Utah Phillips
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
- Margaret Mead
"What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?" -Henry David Thoreau
"Never, no never, did nature say one thing and wisdom say another." - Edmund Burke
“Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do” - Wendell Berry
"We have forgotten how to be good guests, how to walk lightly on the earth as its other creatures do." - Barbara Ward
"It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself."
-Rachel Carson
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2 comments:
Ok, I failed at leaving extra quotes during the day. Instead I spent my Earth Day watching "When the Levees Broke," a Spike Lee documentary about Hurricane Katrina and the effects it had on New Orleans. I highly recommend watching this very moving film!!
Become a CLIMATE HERO by simply speaking out!
A failure of unimaginable proportions is bound up in the willful blindness, hysterical deafness and elective mutism of so many opinion leaders, economic powerbrokers, politicians and business tycoons who do not speak out openly, loudly and clearly about the world we inhabit as bounded and limited in space with finite resources. Their idolatry of the endless expansion of the global political economy is not only selfish, arrogant and unrealistic; they are also perversely choosing to espouse a “primrose path” of unbridled economic globalization to our children, a path to the future that a relatively small planet with the size and make-up of Earth cannot possibly sustain much longer, much less to the year 2050.
At least to me, this failure by my not-so-great generation of leading elders is a “sin of omission” and tantamount to a passive criminal act against the family of humanity, life as we know it and the Earth God blesses us to inhabit...and not ruin, I suppose.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
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