Past Quotes of the Week
I believe that God the Creator exists now, as well as in the past and future, and is the source of our obligation to Creation, including other creatures, and especially including members of our own species who are suffering. Our ability and inclination to enrich the present at the expense of the future, and of other species, is as real and sinful as our tendency to further enrich the wealthy at the expense of the poor. To hand back to God the gift of Creation in a degraded state capable of supporting less life, less abundantly, and for a shorter future, is surely a sin. If it is a sin to kill and to steal, then surely it is a sin to destroy carrying capacity - the capacity of the earth to support life now and in the future. Sometimes we find ourselves in an impasse in which sins are unavoidable. We may sometimes have to sacrifice future life in order to preserve present life - but to sacrifice future life to protect present luxury and extravagance is a very different matter.- Herman Daly (1996)
The law of capitalist accumulation, mystified by the economists into a supposed law of nature, in fact expresses the situation that the very nature of accumulation excludes every diminution in the degree of exploitation of labour, and every rise in the price of labour, which could seriously imperil the continual reproduction, on an ever larger scale, of the capital-relation.- Karl Marx (1867)
With the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago and the vastly larger human populations it could support, people acquired the capacity permanently to alter entire landscapes.... More food made higher population densities possible, enabled larger permanent settlements with the specialized skills and inventiveness this implies, and shortened the time-spacing between children. This, in turn, enabled the higher populations to produce still more people which increased both the demand for food and the technical and organizational capacity to produce it. Pressure on the land and ecosystems increased accordingly and, in the process, ended even the possibility of returning to hunter-gathering for the majority of people. Ironically, the autocatalytic link between population growth, increasing social and technological capacity, and food production increased the quantity of edible calories per person but actually "left the food producers less well-nourished than the hunter-gatherers whom they succeeded.".... Not surprisingly, mortality rates at every age increased.... The spread of such plagues as cholera, tuberculosis, and leprosy had to await the rise of farming and the emergence of societies "crowded, malnourished, sedentary people constantly re-infected by each other and their own sewage". All this, together with the greater labour associated with agriculture, may help explain why many hunting-gathering peoples seem to have been reluctant to adopt farming as a way of life - agriculture spread at a crawl, a mere kilometre a year, across Europe in the period between 8000 and 3500 BC. In fact, the emergence of deliberate food production was probably stimulated as much by a gradual decline in the availability of "natural " food, particularly wild animal resources from over-hunting, as it was by any positive attraction. Thus it may be that agriculture, which has long been regarded as one of humanity's greatest cultural achievements and certainly one of the keystones in the foundation of civilization, may well have evolved more out of necessity than by choice.- William Rees (1999)
Devising an ecological technology or a new set of political institutions for the steady state is the lesser part of the problem, for its core is ethical, moral, and spiritual.- William Ophuls (1997)
Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [less developed countries]?... The economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable, and we should face up to that. I've always thought underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted; their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. The concern over an agent that causes a one-in-a-million change in the odds of prostate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostate cancer than in a country where under-five mortality is 200 per thousand.- Lawrence Summers, World Bank chief economist (1991)
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