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Quote by David W. Orr

“It is much easier to make intellectual messes than it is to clarify complicated issues, especially when real solutions would challenge the status quo and require much careful thought across many fields of knowledge. Problems of climatic change, biotic impoverishment, population growth, and the choices to be made by various technologies and the transition to a sustainable and decent society with an economy that works over the long-term are difficult, complex, and intertwined problems with many possible answers.”

Quote by David W. Orr

Book:The Last Refuge: Patriotism, Politics, and the Environment in an Age of Terror

Work

The Last Refuge: Patriotism, Politics, and the Environment in an Age of Terror

The Last Refuge delves into the complex relationship between national identity, political ideologies, and environmental issues amidst the backdrop of contemporary terrorism. It examines how these factors intertwine and influence each other in a world facing security challenges. more

Author

David W. Orr (b. 1944) is a prominent American environmental educator, author, and professor at Oberlin College. He is widely recognized as a pioneer in environmental education, focusing on ecological literacy, sustainability, and green campus design. Orr authored influential books such as 'Ecological Literacy' and 'Earth in Mind,' and led the creation of the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies at Oberlin, one of the greenest buildings globally. His work has significantly shaped environmental education, ecological design, and public policy. more

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“It is our duty to preserve huge tracts of land in something resembling its native condition. The biological interactions necessary to insure the continuities of life are astonishingly complex, and cannot take place in islands of semiwilderness like the national parks.”

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Author:William Kittredge

“It is so important not to let ourselves off the hook or to become apathetic or cynical by telling ourselves that nothing works or makes a difference. Every day, light your small candle.... The inaction and actions of many human beings over a long time contributed to the crises our children face, and it is the action and struggle of many human beings over time that will solve them-with God's help. So every day, light your small candle.”

“It is therefore absurd to approach the subject of health piecemeal with a departmentalized band of specialists. A medical doctor uninterested in nutrition, in agriculture, in the wholesomeness of mind and spirit is as absurd as a farmer who is uninterested in health. Our fragmentation of this subject cannot be our cure, because it is our disease. The body cannot be whole alone. Persons cannot be whole alone. It is wrong to think that bodily health is compatible with spiritual confusion or cultural disorder, or with polluted air and water or impoverished soil.”

Source: The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry

“It would be rash to conclude that, on balance, the environment of the globe as a whole is either deteriorating or improving, or that the survival of the societies we know depends upon filling a simple set of prescriptions. It is all too complex and dynamic, whether it involves managing greenhouse gases or Nile snails... The future condition of the globe's interlocking natural and social systems depends more on human behavior than on the further investigation of natural processes, however desirable that may be.”

“Let us protect our children; and let us not allow them to grow up into emptiness and nothingness, to the avoidance of good hard work, to introspection and analysis without deeds, or to mechanical actions without thought and consideration. Let us steer them away from the harmful chase after material things and the damaging passion for distractions... Let us educate them to stand with their feet rooted in God's earth, but with their heads reaching even into heaven, there to behold truth.”

“Love in truth-caritas in veritate-is a great challenge for the Church in a world that is becoming progressively and pervasively globalized. The risk for our time is that the de facto interdependence of people and nations is not matched by ethical interaction of consciences and minds that would give rise to truly human development. Only in charity, illumined by the light of reason and faith, is it possible to pursue development goals that possess a more humane and humanizing value.”

Source: Charity in Truth

“The sharing of goods and resources, from which authentic development proceeds, is not guaranteed by merely technical progress and relationships of utility, but by the potential of love that overcomes evil with good.”

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“No individual life is an end in itself. One can live fully only by participating fully in the succession of the generations, in death as well as in life. Some would say (and I am one of them) that we can live fully only by making ourselves answerable to the claims of eternity as to those of time.”

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Book:Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition

Source: Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition

“No institutions in modern society are better equipped to catalyze the necessary transition to a sustainable world than colleges and universities. They have access to the leaders of tomorrow and the leaders of today. What they do matters to the wider public.”

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Author:David W. Orr

“Now comes the threat of climate crisis - a threat that is real, rising, imminent, and universal. Once again, it is the 11th hour. The penalties for ignoring this challenge are immense and growing, and at some near point would be unsustainable and unrecoverable. For now we still have the power to choose our fate, and the remaining question is only this: Have we the will to act vigorously and in time, or will we remain imprisoned by a dangerous illusion?”

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Author:Al Gore