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The Sun Interview
The Sun Interview
Outside Agitator
How Darryl Cherney Set Out To Save The Redwoods And Ended Up Suing The FBI (And Winning)
A radical is somebody who goes out to the furthest edge of the debate in order to gain leverage with which to move the larger body of thought. If an ant wants to move an elephant, he has to move as far out onto the seesaw as possible. Then, through the laws of physics, he can move the great weight. That’s what activists do, only in a more psychological fashion. You go as far out there as you can in order to move society. The problem is that, once you’re out there, you’re perceived as an extremist and society is unwilling to embrace you.
September 2002
The Sun Interview
Peril And Promise
Duane Elgin On Simplicity And Humanity’s Future
Simplicity lies at the intersection of spirituality and sustainability. If you put spirituality, or the inner life, together with sustainability, or the outer life of maintaining things, what you come up with is the simple life.
August 2002
The Sun Interview
Beyond Happiness And Unhappiness
An Interview With Spiritual Teacher Eckhart Tolle
If the shift in consciousness doesn’t happen very soon, then there’s not much chance that the planet will continue to survive. Or perhaps the planet might make it, but humans won’t. The planet may regenerate itself after a few hundred years, but humans will have disappeared. Imagine another hundred years of this consciousness, unchanged. Everything will just get magnified: more science, more technology, more weapons, more consumer goods, more of everything — a dreadful prospect.
July 2002
The Sun Interview
The Disenchanted Kingdom
George Ritzer On The Disappearance Of Authentic American Culture
Efficiency leaves no room for enchantment. Anything that is magical or mysterious is apt to also be meandering and inefficient. Furthermore, enchanted systems are often complex and highly convoluted, having no obvious means to an end. And how do you quantify the enchanted? Since it cannot be readily calculated, it is ignored and quite often eliminated.
June 2002
The Sun Interview
Singing To The Dawn
Thomas Berry On Our Broken Connection To The Natural World
If we want to survive and to remember what it is to be human, then we need to establish a viable pattern of activity for the whole earth community. This community should be governed by the principle that every being has three rights: the right to live; the right to occupy a habitat; and the right to fulfill its role in the ever-renewing processes of nature.
May 2002
The Sun Interview
Down To Business
Paul Hawken On Reshaping The Economy
I don’t believe you can train anybody, especially people in business. You can only present and embody ideas. I try to help people understand the idea that valuing and conserving our stock of natural capital can lead to astonishing breakthroughs in processes, products, and design. Again, people move toward possibility. Once they see that we can actually improve the quality of life for everyone on earth by using radically less “life,” they get excited.
April 2002The Sun Interview
Thinking Outside The Classroom
An Interview With Zenobia Barlow
Many children who weren’t excelling in the classroom have suddenly become academic superstars, because they have aptitudes — kinesthetic, spatial, musical, interpersonal — that tend to emerge more successfully outside the classroom. When you give kids rich and varied contexts, they rise to a level of excellence you might not have anticipated.
March 2002
The Sun Interview
Amid Plenty
Anuradha Mittal On The True Cause Of World Hunger
The United Nations estimates that around 830 million people in the world do not have adequate access to food. Numbers, though, distance us from the real pain felt by the hungry. Hunger is a form of torture that takes away your ability to think, to perform normal physical actions, to be a rational human being. There are people in my own country, India, who for months have not had a full stomach, who have never had adequate nutrition. This sort of hunger causes some to resort to eating anything to numb the pain: cats, monkeys, even poisonous roots.
February 2002The Sun Interview
What We’re Really Hungry For
An Interview With Geneen Roth On Mindful Eating
Many people, however, want to lose weight simply because they believe it will make them happy and stop their pain. So it’s not so much the weight they want to lose, but the pain. They are the main audience for my work.
January 2002
The Sun Interview
Driven By Desire
George Draffan On Why the Global Economy Won’t Satisfy Us
How can I be a responsible citizen while participating in an international market? Even if my intent is to do good, I can have only the slightest knowledge of the impacts of my consumption. I can’t know what injustice or ecological destruction the manufacture and purchase of my computer, for example, has wreaked. I’ve had no contact with the women in Thailand who will get cancer from putting hard drives together. It is impossible to understand all the social and environmental impacts of a computer made in a dozen different countries.
December 2001
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