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Sunbeams

Cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed . . . by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.

Roland Barthes

Sunbeams

Underground nuclear testing, defoliation of the rain forests, toxic waste . . . Let’s put it this way: if the world were a big apartment, we wouldn’t get our deposit back.

John Ross

Sunbeams

Every civilization reaches a moment of crisis. . . . This crisis presents its challenge: smash or go on to higher things. So far no civilization has ever met this challenge successfully. History is the study of the bones of civilizations that failed, as the pterodactyl and the dinosaur failed.

Colin Wilson

Peak Experience

The Age Of Oil Is Coming To An End: An Interview With Richard Heinberg

We’re on the verge of an infrastructural shift as profound as any in human history, on the scale of the Industrial Revolution. You might say we’re going to be seeing the other side of that revolution, and it will change our political system, our ideologies, and our beliefs.

Island Of The Damned

Oh, and there is one other problem — the elephant sitting in the room, and certainly the most profound explanation for Nauru’s contemporary interest in money laundering: a century of phosphate mining has denuded roughly 80 percent of the island.

Sunbeams

If you see a whole thing — it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives. . . . But up close a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Waiting For Salmon

How global warming will affect the fate of chinook salmon, and all that’s tied to them, is one of the many Gordian knots in natural history blithely dismissed by Americans still trying to pull Charles Darwin’s pants down.

Against The Current

Barry Lopez On Writing About Nature And The Nature Of Writing

I’ve become acutely aware of the political danger the country is in. The champions of material wealth, the acolytes of technology, and the religious extremists are so loud, so bellicose, so uncompromising. Who will rein them in? Who’s not afraid to criticize their notions of “progress”?

Sunbeams

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

Ansel Adams