Assorted quotes that I've stumbled upon in the past.
There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot.
Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher 'standard of living' is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech.
These wild things, I admit, had little human value until mechanization assured us of a good breakfast, and until science disclosed the drama of where they come from and how they live. The whole conflict thus boils down to question of degree. We of the minority see a law of diminishing returns in progress, our opponents do not.
I want it all, the whole far-flung earth and everything in it. I want streams and hills, rivers and seas, mountains and pastures. I want a whole, happy, earth. And when I'm not being overly ambitious about my environmental desires, I also want a garden with a little bit of everything in it. These two desires are not unconnected: my happy earth will, in part (and no small part), be achieved by my ability to grow a large percentage of my food in my garden, in a way that does not devour resources.
Certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks.
Ian Hamilton Finlay, via Paul Kingsnorth
Do you take one step forward or do you make a 180 degree turn and take... one step forward? Which way are you going? Which is progress?
180 Degrees South: Conquerors of the Useless
"When you go to Europe or America for the first time," she says, "you arrive in a city where you don’t see any mud, and everything looks really nice, all the cars and the steel and the glass. But I look at a car and I think, 'somehow this came from earth and water and forest'. How? I don’t know. But you need to know – you need to know what the connection is; who paid the price of what. If you at least know that, there’ll be some balance." She smiles slightly, as if the point was almost too obvious to be worth making. "There has to be some balance."
From this article by Paul Kingsnorth
If people seem slightly stupid, they're probably just stupid. But if they seem colossally and inexplicably stupid, you probably differ in some kind of basic assumption so fundamental that you didn't realize you were assuming it, and should poke at the issue until you figure it out.
Slate Star Codex
via Tom Chivers at Unherd
A good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving. - Lao Tzu
There is no authority but yourself - Penny Rimbaud.
Words are not enough - Land Matters
Resist. Revolt. Re-wild. - Mark Boyle
You can't fight the wind - Kris de decker (https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/06/low-tech-magazine-the-comic/)
Perhaps we cannot raise the winds. But each of us can put up the sail, so that when the wind comes we can catch it. - E.F. Schumacher
The machine appeared In the distance, singing to itself Of money. Its song was the web They were caught in, men and women Together. The villages were as flies To be sucked empty. God secreted A tear. Enough, enough, He commanded, but the machine Looked at him and went on singing.