Home Green Home

Here is a picture of the installation that we did at Home Green Home, in Ithaca, on Gallery Night.  The little pieces of paper have environmental quotes on them.  I've listed them for you below. 

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.                                                            
          Kurt Vonnegut


A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.
                                    Beverly Sills

A very Faustian choice is upon us: whether to accept our corrosive and risky behavior as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth, or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic.
                                            E. O. Wilson


For 200 years we’ve been conquering Nature.  Now we’re beating it to death. 

                   Tom McMillan


There is a sufficiency in the world for man’s need but not for man’s greed. 
                     Gandhi


Time and space - time to be alone, space to move about - these may well become the great scarcities of tomorrow. 
                         Edwin Way Teale


Soon silence will have passed into legend.  Man has turned his back on silence.  Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation... tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego.  His anxiety subsides.  His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.                                                                     Jean Arp


How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and of oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life? 
                                                       Charles A. Lindbergh


It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.                            
 Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854 

     
We’re finally going to get the bill for the Industrial Age.  If the projections are right, it’s going to be a big one:  the ecological collapse of the planet.
                                                                    Jeremy Rifkin


Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he’s been given.  But up to now he hasn’t been a creator, only a destroyer.  Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life’s become extinct, the climate’s ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day. 
                                                 Anton Chekhov


A human being is part of the whole, called by us “Universe,” a part limited in time and space.  He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest 
- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.  This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.  Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole [of] nature in its beauty. 
                                       Albert Eintein


Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo:  not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences. 
                                   Lewis Mumford


It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment. 
                              Ansel Adams


To people who think of themselves as God’s houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief.  Or stupid.  A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today.  Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it.
 
                               Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams


All in favor of conserving gasoline, please raise your right foot.             
                                                      Author Unknown


As we watch the sun go down, evening after evening, through the smog across the poisoned waters of our native earth, we must ask ourselves seriously whether we really wish some future universal historian on another planet to say about us:  “With all their genius and with all their skill, they ran out of foresight and air and food and water and ideas,” or, “They went on playing politics until their world collapsed around them.”
                                             U Thant


We must not be forced to explore the universe in search of a new home because we have made the Earth inhospitable, even uninhabitable.  For if we do not solve the environmental and related social problems that beset us on Earth - pollution, toxic contamination, resource depletion, prejudice, poverty, hunger - those problems will surely accompany us to other worlds. 

    Donald G. Kaufman and Cecilia M. Franz, Biosphere 2000

Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain,
For strip-mined mountain’s majesty above the asphalt plain.
America, America, man sheds his waste on thee,
And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.
                                                                         George Carlin


There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew. 
     
             Marshall McLuhan


At every turn, when humanity is asked the question, 'Do you want temporary economic gain or long-term environmental loss, which one do you prefer,' we invariably choose the money.
                                Ethan Hawke



The old Lakota was wise.  He knew that man’s heart away from nature becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too. 
                              Chief Luther Standing Bear

Our environmental problems originate in the hubris of imagining ourselves as the central nervous system or the brain of nature.  We’re not the brain, we are a cancer on nature. 
                                       Dave Foreman


I conceive that the land belongs to a vast family of which many are dead, few are living, and countless numbers are still unborn. 
                 Author Unknown


Economic advance is not the same thing as human progress.                                                        John Clapham

 

The Face of the Mystery

There Is No Separation...

Knowledge and belief describe the boundaries and constitute the contents and projections of the self. And the groups and institutions from which the self derives much of its identity and sense of destiny, also depend for their own on particular bodies of knowledge and belief. None of this fragmentary psychological and cultural content is related to the truth which is one, total, actual, and therefore not reducible to the knowledge of one presuming to stand outside of it. In other words, the very presence and outreach of the tribal and personal self is the negation of truth.

For one who is only interested in the possibility of finding the truth, there is then only one question then: Can individual instances of a general phenomenon of mental conditioning by previous experience and knowledge (personal memory and cultural tradition), revert to the source, the original truth? Can the human being give way to life itself?

It is of utmost importance to realize that this possible transit from the mental reality created by experience and preinformed desire to what is largely independent from such reality, cannot possibly occur in time. So “transit” is not an adequate term for what we are trying to convey here. We are not asking whether the self can move from one state of consciousness to a presumably better one guided by its own or somebody else's prescription. We are asking rather whether the ongoing accumulation and projection of experience that constitutes the self can come to an end.

No one can “know” the truth because it is unrelated to the trappings of the personal self: experience, knowledge, and desire. But complete and direct perception of the actual nature of the self and of the suffering it creates with its fragmentary, conflictive, and enduring mental content, is already on the threshold of truth because such insight cannot but obliterate the self. 

Drawing by Kim Schrag

Who Are We?

If put to the test kindly, who would be able to prove that she or he is perfectly unique and, therefore, existing independently from everything else? Who could prove that personal existence is not an integral part of the restless movement of existence as a whole? And who would dare argue that personal consciousness is conceivable outside of its peculiar cultural moorings, or the unquiet particular brain something apart from the interpenetrating and rather impersonal material reality of the Universe?
Are we just multiple sets of insubstantial personal and tribal memories driven by the same foolish desire for exclusive self-realization and, therefore, ultimately condemned to destroy ourselves? Or is it the case that, being nothing in ourselves personally, together we constitute the point of awareness (or one of the points of awareness) of the unthinkably complex mental and material reality of the cosmos and, beyond even that, the very timeless and formless ground from which all form comes into being and into which all form goes to die? 

The Gateway to All Understanding...