Today is election day in Canada. Please vote. Please do it with kindness and consideration for our planet and for the people who most need help.
This month, I’ve been collecting quotes and links about humanity and the earth. Here are some that touched me the most.
“The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.”
Ecological Literacy: Educating Our Children for a Sustainable World by David W. Orr
We are alive for the briefest moment. But that time is a gift from the universe… What’s important with the time you have?
A beautiful poem of loss and hope by Frederick Joseph.
More mourning and hope from another beautiful writer, John Green.
A couple of these links include powerful examples of humanity’s “temporal range,” the amount of time humans have existed. The Overstory by Richard Powers (one of the best books I’ve read), includes another, which I’ve copied below. I hope you’ll read this passage and think about our place in the world and the impact we have.
“Say the planet is born at midnight and it runs for one day.
First there is nothing. Two hours are lost to lava and meteors. Life doesn’t show up until three or four a.m. Even then, it’s just the barest self-copying bits and pieces. From dawn to late morning–a million million years of branching–nothing more exists than lean simple cells.
Then there is everything. Something wild happens, not long after noon. One kind of simple cell enslaves a couple of others. Nuclei get membrances. Cells evolve organelles. What was once a solo campsite grows into a town.
The day is two-thirds done when animals and plants part ways. And still life is only single cells. Dusk falls before compound life takes hold. Every large living thing is a latecomer, showing up after dark. Nine p.m. brings jellyfish and worms. Later that hour comes the breakout–backbones, cartilage, an explosion of body forms. From one instant to the next, countless new stems and twigs in the spreading crown burst open and run.
Plants make it up on land just before ten. Then insects, who instantly take to the air. Moments later, tetrapods crawl up from the tidal muck, carrying around on their skin and in their guts whole worlds of earlier creatures. By eleven, dinosaurs have shot their bolt, leaving the mammals and birds in charge for an hour.
Somewhere in that last sixty minutes, high up in the phylogenetic canopy, life grows aware. Creatures start to speculate. Animals start teaching their children about the past and the future. Animals learn to hold rituals.
Anatomically modern man shows up four seconds before midnight. The first cave paintings appear three seconds later. And in a thousandth of a click of the second hand, life solves the mystery of DNA and starts to map the tree of life itself.
By midnight, most of the globe is converted to row crops for the care and feeding of one species. And that’s when the tree of life becomes something else again. That’s when the giant trunk starts to teeter.”
Home on 129 Acres 