“Contrary to popular belief, North America, and specifically the Great Lakes region, might be where metal technologies were first used by humans. Copper use emerged about 10,000 years ago. Sometime thereafter, people began to mine copper from the bedrock around Lake Superior, the remains of which can still be seen throughout the region today.”
Source: Great Water: The Lost Mines of Lake Superior
“Magic is Chaos, Art and Science. It is a curse, a blessing and progress. It all depends on who uses magic, how they use it, and to what purpose. And magic is everywhere. All around us. Easily accessible. It is enough to stretch out one's hand.”
Source: The Time of Contempt
“As the manufacturing base at home hollows out, human talent withers. If scientists are beset by constant worry about landing the next short-term contract, the prospects for profound discovery will not be auspicious.”
Source: China Rx: Exposing the Risks of America's Dependence on China for Medicine
“Look again at that (blue) dot (Earth seen from space). That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you have ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives...There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
Source: Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”
“...making relationships led to the historic intertribal agreements with the U.S. government to protect the cultural landscape of the Bears Ears as the first tribally focused national monument. Five different tribes nurtured relationships with the federal government to forever protect an earthly gift to be held in common. This was a transformative step toward healing a long history of colonial taking. That hopeful model of Indigenous economics was abruptly curtailed when Donald Trump reversed the decision and instead conveyed those sacred rights to a private uranium-mining company. It took an election to reverse it.”
Source: The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
“The universe—or at least the sentient constituents of it—comes to know itself through hermeneutic mediation. Put more personally, we come to know—and even become—ourselves through interacting with the world. You would not be able
to recognize your own face if you had never seen it mirrored in a reflective surface or photographed.... Moreover, in very basic ways, we are permeable, such that with every breath and every meal we are constantly exchanging matter with our surroundings. All of this should begin to put pressure on the commonsense bifurcation between mental inside and physical outside.”
Source: Metamodernism: The Future of Theory
“Wealth is much more than what GDP measures, and the market is not the only source of economic value. She (Kate Raworth) urges policymakers to recognize the values of common lands, green space, biodiversity.”
Source: The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
“As I have often said, not understanding something is not evidence for God or human frailty. It is just evidence of not understanding. And it should be an invitation to explore and learn.”
Source: The Known Unknowns: The Unsolved Mysteries of the Cosmos
“What we perceive as disorder is often the universe optimizing itself through feedback and adaptation - Tom Golway”
Source: Rethinking Entropy: Decaying or Optimizing