Quotes about Planet

The green economy should not just be about reclaiming throw-away stuff. It should be about reclaiming thrown-away communities. It should not just be about recycling things to give them a second life. We should also be gathering up people and giving them a second chance.

The human drama is reaching its denouement. The great unveiling is approaching, a time when the power structures of the world begin to crumble and people of the heart sing out a new truth. Many voices are joining the chorus, many feet are walking the path, many minds are dreaming possibilities for a magnificent future. For beneath the crises that are looming at every level of civilization, the global heart is awakening, beating out the rhythm of a new and glorious dance, calling us to a better way of living.

God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools.

The earth community, the Life Community, is not the property of any one religion or group or part of the world; it is the Commons that embraces us all, our planetary home.  And it needs us as never before.  It calls to us to become, not heroes but community builders, builders of home, gatherers and embracers, bearers of hospitality, keepers of the shared space that nurtures us all.  It calls us not to go forth and come back laden with honors but to honor where we are, who we are, and from that place to reach out to connect to and honor each other in the community of life.

From a large planet of overwhelming magnitude, unlimited resources and endless mystery, the Earth has suddenly become a small planet, thoroughly explored, limited in resources, and reduced in mystery.

We come here because we too feel a responsibility for the human community. To preserve and develop a human quality of life is the common responsibility of us all. It is not fitting that those concerned with the various aspects of the human be alienated from each other. Both you and ourselves represent forces too profound and aim at objectives too significant for either of us to succeed completely without the assistance of the other. The urgency of our work impels us to get on with our common task lest a new period of disaster erupt over the Earth.

The Universe story is the quintessence of reality. We perceive the story. We put it in our language, the birds put it in theirs, and the trees put it in theirs. We can read the story of the Universe in the trees. Everything tells the story of the Universe. The winds tell the story, literally, not just imaginatively. The story has its imprint everywhere, and that is why it is so important to know the story. If you do not know the story, in a sense you do not know yourself; you do not know anything.

For peoples, generally, their story of the universe and the human role within the universe is their primary source of intelligibility and value. Only through this story of how the Universe came to be in the beginning and how it came to be as it is does a person come to appreciate the meaning of life or to derive the psychic energy needed to deal effectively with those crisis moments that occur in the life of the individual and in the life of the society. Such a story communicates the most sacred of mysteries. Our story not only interprets the past, it also guides and inspires our shaping of the future.

In reality, there is a single integral community of the Earth that includes all its component members whether human or other than human. In this community every being has its own role to fulfill, its own dignity, its own inner spontaneity. Every being has its own voice. Every being declares itself to the entire universe. Every being enters into communion with other beings.

In every phase of our imaginative, aesthetic, and emotional lives we are profoundly dependent on this larger context of the surrounding world.

The Great Work, now as we move into a new millennium, is to carry out the transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner.

The deepest cause of the present devastation is found in a mode of consciousness that has established a radical discontinuity between the human and other modes of being and the bestowal of all rights on the humans.

All human activities, professions, programs, and institutions must henceforth be judged primarily by the extent to which they inhibit, ignore, or foster a mutually enhancing human/Earth relationship.

Our present urgency is to recover a sense of the primacy of the Universe as our fundamental context, and the primacy of the Earth as the matrix from which life has emerged and on which life depends. Recovering this sense is essential to establishing the framework for mutually enhancing human-Earth relations for the flourishing of life on the planet.

Our difficulty is that we have become autistic. We no longer listen to what the Earth, its landscape, its atmospheric phenomena and all its living forms, its mountains and valleys, the rain, the wind, and all the flora and fauna of the planet are telling us.

This world has seen a great many civilizations.  And many of them have survived for longer periods than ours up to the present.  They were all as sure as we are today of having founded the first eternal civilization.  We today differ from them in having our western civilization spread to embrace the entire planet, leaving no room on any continent for any other culture to take over if we fail.

We cannot cheat on DNA. We cannot get round photosynthesis. We cannot say, "I am not going to give a damn about phytoplankton." All these tiny mechanisms provide the pre-conditions of our planetary life. To say we do not care is to say in the most literal sense that "we choose death."

Pick a Product, Plant a Tree

Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not. Both ideas are overwhelming.

The Self (me, myself, I) is a ghost, a phantom creation which is allsmoke and mirrors.
The unfortunate part is that we identify and fight with it, react and respond to it and treat it as if it
is a living breathing entity.

None of that changes the fact that it is all smoke and mirrors.

The planet is like a mad house with no nurses and far too much medication.

In planetary terms, we're all downstream.

When seen from outer space, our beautiful blue planet has no national boundaries.

ODE TO AN ENDANGERED SPECIES

Will you not leave us here too long
We have not paid attention
To squander the best of the world
A pity we do not understand
Ourselves
No more you fly in the wind
No more the buoyant ripples on a pristine pool
The splash of color in a worn-tore land
No more
The survivor's sad lament
Yet no weeping will there be when
Your perfect, singular form
Vanishes
The muted salting of a wounded Earth
And all that is and all that ever was will
In some way be
Diminished
For the loss, though unnoticed
Will be recognized
In the stillness of eternal night.

The best investment on earth is earth.

When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race.

What is the use of a house, if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?

Call forth the sacredness of the earth now, the holiness of the living, breathing planet and breathe with the earth, blessing and being blessed as the light of the earth flows to you and as the light of your own heart flows to the beloved earth. There is a partnership, a communion between you and the land, between the land and you. This runs deep beneath the streets, deep beneath the buildings, deep throughout and beneath the seas. The earth is sacred. The earth is our mother; we must take care of her.

 "We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.  When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect."

There is no business to be done on a dead planet.

Past the Milky Way. Past the stars and moons, the suns and shadows. Past the universe. Past it all. Past the light and into the darkness. Past the created and into the creation, into the deep space of creators, of gods and immortals. Into the creative cosmos. Into the within. Into it. There lies a place with a white planet, a bright dot in the static blackness, a solitary island in the expanse of imaginative nothingness.

This lone planet lies still in its isolation, staring at the darkness with two penetrating eyes that protrude from its spherical whiteness…

"I just want you to know that revenge is not an idea we promote on my planet.....
but we're not on my planet.....are we!"
~Buzz Lightyear

Howard Lyman

A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral.

And we are beginning to hear the groaning from our tortured planet. We are at a point when we must realize that if we want to continue to call this planet our home, we need to change - not the planet, but ourselves.