Hope Beneath Our Feet:

Restoring Our Place in the Natural World

Twelve Quotes

“Nature is crude and erotic, chaotic and profuse, rampant and zealous, brutal and violent, uncontrollable despite our best efforts, and completely uninhibited. Small wonder the natural world terrifies many people and also embarrasses the prim Puritans among us.”

DIANE ACKERMAN: From the essay: The Healing Power of Nature

“The world has changed and will continue to do so. We have two choices with how to move forward: we can sit, curled up in a little ball, rocking back and forth while hoping it will fix itself, or we can get out there (age being no barrier as I’m eighty-two years old) and do something about it.”

BILL MOLLISON, the founder of Permaculture. From the essay: Getting Ready for Change

“We need to stop this culture that is killing the planet. Nothing else matters. NOTHING else matters.”

DERRICK JENSEN: From the essay: Nothing Else Matters

“It’s the worst of bad manners—and self-protection, I think, in a nervously cynical society—to ridicule the small gesture. These earnest efforts might just get us past the train-wreck of the daily news, or the anguish of standing behind a child, looking with her at the road ahead, searching out redemption where we can find it: recycling or carpooling or growing a garden or saving a species or something. Small, stepwise changes in personal habits aren’t trivial. Ultimately they will, or won’t, add up to having been the thing that mattered.”

BARBARA KINGSOLVER: From the essay: The Original Human Vocation

 “There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn’t bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: you are brilliant, and the earth is hiring. The earth couldn’t afford to send recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night-blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here’s the deal: forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.”

PAUL HAWKEN: From the essay: Commencement Address

 “I am mindful that there are many who live in denial and will resist change until they are forced by personal circumstance to respond, and they will come around in their own time. My job is to not get distracted by how others behave but rather to find my path of contribution.”

VIVIENNE SIMON: From the essay: Fostering Light in Dark Times

“We cannot, of course, save the world, because we do not have authority over its parts. We can serve the world though. That is everyone’s calling, to lead a life that helps.”

BARRY LOPEZ: From the essay: Eden Is a Conversation

“Spend the day with a mystic, lunatic, or writer. Or, for that matter, a child (who, if schooling and society don’t manage to weld shut his door to amazement, will no doubt one day become a mystic, lunatic, or writer). These people have their heads screwed on sideways and hobble around gob smacked by the beauty and despair of the world. If you opt to spend the day with a child, try to find a small one, preferably raised by hippies on a commune on the coast, but really any child will work, if you actually pay attention to what they have to show you.”

MUNJU RAVINDRA: From the essay: Wonder: A Practice for Everyday Life

“Sometimes my gratitude is almost more than I can bear. I bear it, often, weeping. As now.”

ALICE WALKER: From the essay: To Do the Will of God, Come What May

“Ahimsa, or nonviolence, is the basis of many faiths that have emerged on Indian soil. Translated into economics, nonviolence implies that our systems of production, trade, and consumption should not use up the ecological space of other species and other people. Whenever we engage in consumption or production patterns that take more than we need, we are engaging in violence. Non-sustainable consumption and non-sustainable production constitute a violent economic order.”

DR. VANDANA SHIVA: From the essay: Earth Rights

"...I can take a breath and remember—to listen as well as talk to nature, to receive the breath of the earth through plants and trees, to feel the smallest vibration of relationship in our actions—to redeem my indigenous mind and move from human centered thinking to earth centered perception."

KAYLYNN SULLIVAN TWOTREES: From the essay: Indigenous Mind

“Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment (beware of such moments!) but as an endless succession of surprises, moving zigzag toward a more decent society. We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.

(…)

 I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world.”

HOWARD ZINN: From the essay: The Optimism of Uncertainty

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