"Johnny Appleseed"

Davenport, IA, USA
male, age 43
committed relationship, 3 children
Joined Dec 4, 2006

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"Be who you are and say what you feel ... because those that matter won't    mind ... and those that mind won't matter."
- Dr. Seuss

After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on-have you found none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear- what remains?  Nature remains.

Walt Whitman

"According to my tradition, from the beginning of creation, every morning, when the sun comes up, we are each given four tasks by our Creator for that day.  First, I must learn at least one meaningful thing today.  Second, I must teach at least one meaningful thing to another person.  Third, I must do something for some other person, and it will be best if that person doe not even realize that I have done something for them.  And fourth, I must treat all living things with respect.  This spreads these things throughout the world" 

A Cree Native American storyteller and teacher

Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.  The future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike, timid and fearful in the face of bold projects and new ideas.  Rather, it will belong to those who can blend passion, reason and courage in a personal commitment to the ideas of American society.

Robert F. Kennedy, 1966

It is unlikely that the culture of an ethnic group or western civilization will be destroyed and a new culture erected in its place; however, cultures do change.

We must begin to live a sustainable, egalitarian, peaceful way of life.  This ccan happen through political or religious transformation, but at its core it's cultural transformation.

...it is surprising (and disappointing) that the reality that water is precious, finite, and irreplaceable, and that we have no substitutes for it,does not provide us with the appropriate impetus for a proactive approach to the sustainable use of water resources, whether on the local, regional, or global scale.  ~M.Holland, E. Blood, and L. Scaffer "Acheiving Sustainable Freshwater Systems"

"Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray

in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul." ~ John Muir

For civilization as a whole, the faith that is so essential to restore the balance now missing in our relationship to the earth is the faith that we do have a future.  We can believe in that our future and work to acheive it and preserve it, or we can whirl blindly on, behaving as if one day there will be no children to inherit our legacy.  The choice is ours; the earth is in the balance.

Senator Al Gore, 1992

"The Government simply cannot make up their minds, or they cannot get the Prime minister to make up his mind. So they go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.... The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences." Winston Churchill, November 12, 1936

Our inability to provide adequate protection for the world's food supply is, in my opinion, simply another manifestation of the same philosophical error that has led to the global environmental crisis as a whole: we have assumed that our lives need to have no real connection to the natural world, that our minds are seperate from our bodies, and that as disembodied intellects we can manipulate the world in any way we choose. Precisely because we feel no connection to the physical world, we trivialize the consequences of our actions. And because this linkage seems abstract, we are slow to understand what it means to destroy those parts of the environment that are crucial to our survival. We are, in effect, bulldozing the Gardens of Eden.

"much of the apparant economic growth may in fact be an illusion based on a failure to account for reduction in natural capital." Colin Clark, University of British Columbia

If the need to rethink our throw away mentality has become obvious, it is also clear that the effort has to involve more than a search for mechanical solutions. I have come to believe that the waste crisis - like the environmental crisis as a whole - serves as a kind of mirror in which we are able to see ourselves more clearly if we are willing to question more deeply who we are and who we want to be, both as individuals and as a civilization. Indeed, in some ways the waste crisis serves perhaps the best vehicle for asking some hard questions about ourselves.

For example, if we have come to see things we use as disposable, have we similarly transformed the way we think about our fellow human beings? Mass civilization has led to the creation of impersonal, almost i,personal process for educating, employing, sheltering, feeding, clothing, and disposing of billions of people. Have we, in the process, lost an appreciation for the uniqueness of each one? Have we made it easier to give up on someone who needs extra attention or repair? Traditional societies venerate the oldest among them as unique repositories of character and wisdom. We, however, are all too willing to throw them away, to think of them as used up, no longer able to produce new things to consume. We mass-produceinformation and in the process devalue the wisdom of a lifetime, assuming that it can easily be replaced by skimming the froth of essential data off the floodtide of information rushing through our culture. For similar reasons, we have devalued the importance of education (even as we increase the lip service we pay for it). Education is the recycling of knowledge, and since we have emphasized the production and constant consumption of massive quantities of information, we don't feel the same need to respect and reuse the refined accumulation of learning treasured by those who have come before us.

Our species used to flourish within the intricate and interdependent web of life, but we have choosen to leave the garden. Unless we find a way to dramatically change our civilization and our way of thinkingabout the relationship between humankind and the earth, our children will inherit a wasteland.

It is not so much the easy lies we tell each other as the hard truths that are never told at all.

When future generations wonder how we could go along with our daily routines in silent complicity with the collective destruction of the earth, we will, like the Unfaithful Servant, claim that we did not notice these things because we were morally asleep?  Or will we try to explain that we were not so much asleep as living in a walking trance, a strange Cartesian spell under whose influence we felt no connection between our routine, banal acts and the moral consequences of what we did, as long as they were far away at the other end of the massive machine of civilization?

Al Gore, Earth in the Balance, Ecology and the Human Spirit, 1992

This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth.  All things are connected like the blood that unites us all.  Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it.  Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

Nature is imperfectly perfect, filled with loose parts and possibilities, with mud and dust, nettles and sky, transcendent hands-on moments and skinned knees. What happens when all the parts of childhood are soldered down, when the young no longer have the time or space to play in their family's garden, cycle home in the dark with the stars and moon illuminating their route, walk down through the woods to the river, lie on their backs on hot July days in the long grass, or watch cockleburs, lit by the morning sun, like bumblebees quivering on harp wires? What then?

Ben Stein, professor and author

Nature-the sublime, the harsh, and the beautiful- offers something that the street or gated community or computer game cannot. Nature presents the young with something so much greater than they are; it offers an environment where they can easily contemplate infinity and eternity. A child can, on a rare clear night, see the stars and perceive the infinite from a rooftop in Brooklyn. Immersion in the natural environment cuts to the chase, exposes the young directly and immediately to the very elements from which humans evolved: earth, water, air, and other living kin, large and small. Without that experience, as environmental psychologists Louise Chawla says, "we forget our place, we forget that larger fabric on which our lives depend."
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause,
who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at
worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring so greatly, so that
his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know
neither victory nor defeat - Theodore Roosevelt

"The human spirit is never finished when it is defeated. It is finished when it surrenders."

"Even if I knew the world would end tomorrow, I would plant a tree today." - Martin Luther King Jr.

If humanity continues to engage in unbridled exploitation of natural resources, or continues to exhibit uncontrolled pollution, it can eventually overwhelm nature's ability to provide the needed resource base and pollutant assimilative capacity needed for economic growth. This fact will ensure that, although temporary economic gains may be realized, the desired economic development cannot be maintained over the long term, and will usually have direct environmental or economic consequences. Walter Rast and Marjorie M. Holland

Despite our dependence on healthy ecosystems, society has made the decision to continue life as usual until a loss of valued goods and services is realized; then, society will expect and rely on science to clean up the mess and make it look natural.
Hilderbrandt et a. 2005

"We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children."   Native American Proverb

"...Among those defects is the arrogant presumption inherent in the presumption that it is up to us to manage and sustain the planet and that we are capable of doing the job. This presumptuousness lends a self-contradictory tone to sustainability because the idea that we can and should manage everything is what has helped get us and the earth in so much trouble in the first place" "Almost always, however, energy sustainability is seen as coming about through technological change-from development of new energy sources and improvements in efficiency of energy generation and use- not by moral exertion and change in world view." "technological strategies- the hydrogen economy, fuel cells, solar power - which are by themselves utterly inadequate to solve the problem", David Ehrenfeld 1981, 2000, 2003, 2005

Vaclav Smil 2003 calls for energy conservation as "part of much broader appeals for moderation (if sacrifice seems too strong a term),frugality, and cooperation for the sake of a common good that form moral foundations of every high civilization"

"When we plant Trees, we plant the Seeds of hope and the Seeds of Peace"
Wangari Maathai ˜

"Defenders of the short-sighted men who in their greed and selfishness will, if permitted, rob our country of half its charm by their reckless extermination of all useful and beautiful wild things sometimes seek to champion them by saying the 'the game belongs to the people.' So it does; and not merely to the people now alive, but to the unborn people. The 'greatest good for the greatest number' applies to the number within the womb of time, compared to which those now alive form but an insignificant fraction. Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage of these unborn generations. The movement for the conservation of wild life and the larger movement for the conservation of all our natural resources are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose, and method." ~Theodore Roosevelt ~

A Book-Lover's Holidays in the Open, 1916

Widespread concern over global resources has stimulated considerable interest in conducting evaluations of land-use programs in terms of environmental health and the sustainability of modern ecosystems. However, these terms are vague and measuring success tends to be difficult because diverse stakeholders evaluate programs from very different perspectives.  In some cases, definitions of success may be unrealistic because of expectations that an ecosystem can be returned to its original condition or managed to optimize a single function or value. Regardless, the response of the entire system to land-use change will result in a mix of positive and negative changes, and depending on stakeholder perspective, will result in success or failure of specific programs or land-use practices. Given the inherent ambiguity of these types of evaluations, we think a paradigm shift is needed to objectively evaluate land-use practices implemented through acts of Congress. Specifically, programs need to be evaluated from a perspective that considers interrelationships of ecosystems, and ecosystem components, in the modern landscape. Further, evaluations of success should be within the context of ecological fit, which we define here as how well specific acts of Congress are integrated with acts of nature. This definition is analogous to one proposed by Aldo Leopold, which states that “an understanding of ecology does not necessarily originate in courses bearing ecological labels; it is quite as likely to be labeled geography, botany, agronomy, history, or economics” (Leopold,
1949).

Key to understanding rationale for the method of evaluation we propose is that many acts of nature at specific geographic locations cannot be changed (e.g., basic parent material, climate); hence, success will depend on how well acts of Congress are coordinated with acts of nature. Based on ecological fit, programs would be successful if they result in land-use changes that optimize specific functions, yield sustainable habitats, and do not produce unintended and negative impacts on other ecosystem functions valued by society. Again, this is similar to Leopold (1949), who stated “quit thinking about decent land-use as solely an economic problem.

Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” Although evaluating programs within the context of ecological fit is clearly needed, conducting such evaluations will be daunting because ecosystems are complex and basic processes are interrelated. Thus, multiple aspects of an ecosystem must be evaluated simultaneously to obtain accurate assessments.

Although evaluations based on ecological fit will not eliminate the perception of negative change from the perspective of individual stakeholder groups, such evaluations would provide an objective and scientific approach to evaluate programs in relation to stated objectives because functional changes attributable to specific land-uses could be quantified and predicted. Further, it would provide a means to develop new programs that optimize specific ecological functions, minimize unintended outcomes, and bring diverse stakeholder groups closer to consensus.

Quantifying the Environmental Benefits of the Conservation Reserve Program on Prairie Wetlands: Separating Acts of Nature from Acts of Congress-
By Ned H. Euliss, Jr., and M.K. Laubhan

Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours,
Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children,
as the leopard; yet we are so early weaned
from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively
an interaction of man on man.

-Henry David Thoreau

As philosopher Bertrand Russell noted, "To be without some of the
things you want is an indispensable part of happiness." You see ... there are two
ways to be rich -- make more or desire less.

"Never doubt that a small group of committed people can CHANGE THE WORLD. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

-Margaret Mead

I will leave the interpretation of committed up to each of you and only you will know ;) DAB

This we know:
The earth does not belong to man,
man belongs to the earth.
All things are connected
like the blood that unites us all.
Man did not weave the web of life,
he is merely a strand in it.
Whatever he does to the web,
he does to himself.
Chief Seattle

"The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn"
Ralph Wlado Emerson

Even Einstein said "nothing would benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."