“I think we live in an era of problems that, if you step back and look at them globally, can't be solved. One response to that is, "Oh well, it's all hopeless. The natural world is getting wrecked, birds are disappearing, the planet is warming and so anything we might do on a smaller scale is meaningless."” IfsThinkingWorldWellsLooksProblemMightNaturalStepsPlanetsBirdResponseDisappearScalesErasHopelessMeaninglessNatural WorldOh Well Author:Jonathan Franzen
“The great writers to whom the world owes what religious liberty it possesses, have mostly asserted freedom of conscience as an indefeasible right, and denied absolutely that a human being is accountable to others for his religious belief. Yet so natural to mankind is intolerance in whatever they really care about, that religious freedom has hardly anywhere been practically realised, except where religious indifference, which dislikes to have its peace disturbed by theological quarrels, has added its weight to the scale.” WorldHumansCareReligionBeliefNaturalReligiousHuman BeingsLibertyMankindConscienceWeightToleranceScalesIndifferenceDislikeDeniedIntoleranceQuarrelsRealisedDisturbedTheologicalReligious FreedomReligious BeliefGreat WritersReligious Liberty Book:On Liberty: Mill's Works Source: On Liberty: Mill's Works
“The formation of scales and of the web of harmony is a product of artistic invention, and is in no way given by the natural structure or by the natural behaviour of our hearing, as used to be generally maintained hitherto.” WayUsedGivenNaturalProductsHarmonyStructureHearingScalesInventionUsed To BeArtisticBehaviourFormation Author:Hermann von Helmholtz
“To experience sublime natural beauty is to confront the total inadequacy of language to describe what you see. Words cannot convey the scale of a view that is so stunning it is felt.” LanguageFeltNaturalViewsScalesSublimeStunningInadequacy Author:Eleanor Catton
“Many scales of climate change are in fact natural, from the slow tectonic scale, to the fast changes embedded within glacial and interglacial times, to the even more dramatic changes that characterize a switch from glacial to interglacial. So why worry about global warming, which is just one more scale of climate change? The problem is that global warming is essentially off the scale of normal in two ways: the rate at which this climate change is taking place, and how different the "new" climate is compared to what came before.” WayTwoDifferentFactsProblemNaturalWorryNormalClimateRateClimate ChangeScalesDramaticJust OneGlobal WarmingTwo WaysEmbeddedDramatic Change Book:Heatstroke: Nature in an Age of Global Warming Source: Heatstroke: Nature in an Age of Global Warming