Winona LaDuke: “Whether they have fins or feet or wings or roots, we have a responsibility to them.”

-from her speech at the Dream Reborn on April 5, 2008

Michael Pollan: “(It) helped me begin to appreciate that forgetting is vastly underrated as a mental operation–indeed, that it is a mental operation, rather than, as I’d always assumed, strictly the breakdown of one. Yes, forgetting can be a curse, especially as we age. But forgetting is also one of the more important things healthy brains do, almost as important as remembering. Think how quickly the sheer volume and multiplicity of sensory information we receive every waking minute would overwhelm our consciousness if we couldn’t quickly forget a great deal more of it than we remember….It is the relentless moment-by-moment forgetting, this draining of the pool of sense impression almost as quickly as it fills, that gives the experience of consciousness under marijuana its particular texture. It helps account for the sharpening of sensory perceptions, for the aura of profundity in which cannabis bathes the most ordinary insights, and, perhaps most important of all , for the sense that time has slowed or even stopped. For it is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment, so elusive in ordinary hours. And the wonder of that experience, perhaps more than any other, seems to be at the very heart of the human desire to change consciousness, whether by means of drugs or any other technique.”
-from The Botany of Desire

Paul Hawken: “Any ecological model of commerce must mimic nature in recognizing that waste equals food, running off solar income, and protecting diversity.”
-from the Ecology of Commerce

Paul Hawken: “The whole key to redesigning the economy is to shift incrementally if not all of the taxes presently derived from ‘goods’ to ‘bads,’ from income and payroll taxes to taxes on pollution, environmental degradation and nonrenewable energy consumption. Because green taxes are incorporated into the price a company or customer pays for a resource, product, or service, they create powerful incentives to revise and constantly improve methods of production, distribution, and consumption, as well as a means to reconsider our wants and needs.”
-from the Ecology of Commerce

Thom Hartmann: “We may be living in an ‘information age’ with ‘information overload,’ in some sense. But when it comes to what actually gets into people’s heads, we’re living in an age of ‘knowledge scarcity.” People no longer know information that’s vital to sustain life such as how to grow their own food; how to find drinkable water; what’s in their food; how to build a fire and keep warm; how to survive in the natural environment; how to read the sky; when the growing seasons begin and end; what plants in the forest and fields are edible; how to track, kill, dress, eat, and store game; how to farm without (or even with) chemicals and tractors; how to treat broken bones and other common medical emeregencies; or how to deliver a baby….This works to the tremendous advantage of anyone who’d benefit from our being dependent on their systems, information, fuel, and food. We’ve become easy to manage and easy to control.”
-from The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight

Thom Hartmann: “Most people’s major life regrets are not about the things they’ve done, but about the things they’ve not done, the goals they never reached, the type of lover or friend or parent they wished they’d been but know they failed to be. Yet our culture encourages us to sit in front of a flickering box for dozens (at least) of hours a week, hundreds to thousands of hours a year, and thereby watch, as if from a distance, the time of our lives flow through our hands like dry sand.”
-from The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight

Barbara Kingsolver: “If a middle-aged woman studying agriculture seems strange, try this on for bizarre: Most of our populace and all our leaders are participating in a mass hallucinatory fantasy in which the megatons of waste we dump in our rivers and bays are not poisoning the water, the hydrocarbons we pump into the air are not changing the climate, overfishing is not depleting the oceans, fossil fuels will never run out, wars that kill masses of civilians are an appropriate way to keep our hands on what’s left, we are not desparately overdrawn at the environmental bank and, really, the kids are all right.”
-from “A Good Farmer,” her foreword to The Essential Agrarian Reader

Terence McKenna: “We have a secret history. Knowledge has been lost to us and is only now recoverable in the light of the mindset possible if we accept the new chaos paradigm. How this secret history relates to the Gaian mind and the world soul is a kind of new revelation. We must become aware of the astonishing fact that as a species we are the victims of an instance of traumatic abuse in childhood. As human beings, we once had a symbiotic relationship with the world-girdling intelligence of the planet that was mediated through shamanic plant use. This relationship we disrupted and eventually lost by the progressive climatic drying of the Eurasian and African land masses…. Psychoactive compoounds that were brought into the expanding human diet during the early part of our evolution inhibited the formation of the ego, promoting instead collectivist, tribal partnership values operating intuitively in a reciprocal feedback relationship with the feminine vegetable matrix of the biosphere. In other words, nothing was verbalized and everything was felt. Everything was intuited. Regularly, at the new and full moons, small groups of hunter-gatherers and pastoralists took hallucinogenic plants and dissolved their boundaries, engaging in group sex and annealing irregularities that had cropped up in their personal self-imaging since the last session. These practices kept cultural reality grounded on the plane of group and species values, which was in dynamic balance with the ecosystem.”
-from Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness