Fire and Knowledge

Internet Explorer is not a browser—it’s a reader. People spend about 20 percent of the time browsing for information and 80 percent reading or consuming it. The transition has already happened. And we haven’t noticed.

–Ben Hill, as quoted in Newsweek, “The Future of Reading” (Nov 17, 2007)

At best, countercultural rebellion is pseudo-rebellion: a set of dramatic gestures that are devoid of any progressive political or economics consequences and that detract from the urgent task of building a more just society. In other words, it is rebellion that provides entertainment for the rebels, and nothing much else. At worst, countercultural rebellion actively promotes unhappiness, by undermining or discrediting social norms and institutions that actually serve a valuable function.

–Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (UK Edition, 2004), p. 65

To the size of states there is a limit as there is to other things, plants, animals, implements; for none of these retain their natural power when they are too large or too small, but they either wholly lose their nature or are spoilt.

–Aristotle in Joseph Pearce, Small is Still Beautiful: Economics as if Families Mattered (ISI Books: 2006), p. 116

Bill McKibben talks about how evangelical Christians are starting to care about the environment and includes a brief history on how this has come about.

My guess is that most people would be less offended to have it said of them that they have bad judgment than that they have bad taste.

–Joseph Epstein, Snobbery: The American Version (2002), p. 77

Even with … cautious parameters, selected in a biased manner to draw a maximally optimistic conclusion, the number of species doomed each year is 27,000. Each day it is 74, and each hour 3.

If past species have lived on the order of a million years in the absence of human interference, a common figure for some groups documented in the fossil record, it follows that the normal “background” extinction rate is about one species per one million species a year. Human activity has increased extinction between 1,000 and 10,000 times over this level in the rain forest by reduction in area alone. Clearly we are in the midst of one of the great extinction spasms of geological history.

–Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (1992, Harvard University Press), p. 280

Don’t you find it odd that people will put more work into choosing their mechanic or house contractor than they will into choosing the person who grows their food?

–Joel Salatin in Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 240

We have an “environmental crisis” because we have consented to an economy in which by eating, drinking, working, resting, traveling, and enjoying ourselves we are destroying the natural, God-given, world.

–Wendell Berry, “The Total Economy” in Citizenship Papers (2003), p. 64