Apothegms

Nuclear power is "so uneconomical that it is cheaper to write off a newly built nuclear plant than to run it." --Amory Lovins, 1992

A poignant quote in light of Japan's nuclear disaster--not that they needed a man-made disaster on top of two natural ones. Not that anyone needs a technology that is so potentially dangerous in the hands of humans, whether it be the hands of terrorists, governments, or power companies--requiring loss of freedom and excess militarization to lock it up as well as we can against any threat. Now insuring nuclear plants will get even more expensive, and our government will insist on continuing to subsidize it instead of spending the money on safe renewable energy like solar and wind that can come online in a fraction of the time as a nuclear power plant. So, to honor the painful irony of that quote, and celebrate the wondrous insights and inspiration contained in pithy aphorism, I'm reprinting here the apothegms page I used to have on Beyond the Batholith--Essays from the Eastern Sierra, and including new ones as I find them worthy of this page. I hope you enjoy these as much as I do.

apothegm, n. a short, pithy saying; aphorism aphorism, n. a terse saying embodying a general truth or astute observation

"Humanity now appropriates for its own use more than half of Earth's
accessible renewable fresh water and some 40 percent of its net photosynthetic product. This degree of human dominance leaves a dangerously thin margin of support for the millions of other species with which we share the planet--species that perform the vital work of nature on which our societies rest." --Sandra Postel in "Pillar of Sand"

"There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace."
-- Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

As Abraham Lincoln put it, “Whenever there is a conflict between human rights and property rights, human rights must prevail.” Property rights are meant to advance human well-being, not as an excuse to disregard it.

"...so far to my knowledge goes, there has been no such functionary as President of the United States for forty years, perhaps, if we except Cleveland. I do not call to mind any other President of the United States--there may have been one or two--perhaps one or two, who were not always and persistently presidents of the Republican Party, but were now and then for a brief interval really Presidents of the United States." --Mark Twain, 1906

"I don't think there is such a thing as an intelligent mega-rich person. For who with a fine mind can look out upon this world and hoard what can nourish a thousand souls." --Kabir, 1440-1518

"The only time a person feels more important than the whole of his community is when he is insane--or when he is driving." --Travis Hugh Culley, The Immortal Class

"The greatest and deepest tragedy in losing the splendor of the outer world is that we will always have an inner demand for it. We're genetically coded to exist in the world of beauty. Take away the world of beauty, and our genetic coding remains oriented toward that. We will have desires that can never be satisfied. Our integral spiritual development can never take place." --Thomas Berry

"By allowing the impulse toward greater privatization to usurp our public spaces, democracy itself becomes endangered." --Travis Hugh Culley, The Immortal Class

"I am only one; but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; I will not refuse to do the something I can do." --Helen Keller

"In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock." --Thomas Jefferson

"'Eternal Progress' is a nonsensical myth. What must be implemented is not a 'steadily expanding economy,' but a zero growth economy, a stable economy. Economic growth is not only unnecessary but ruinous." --Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn

"The more we look at it the more it is apparent that economic growth is a device for providing us with the superfluous at the cost of the indispensable." --Edward Goldsmith

"The aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption. The cultivation and expansion of needs is the antithesis of wisdom." --E.F. Schumacher

"I think television is evil. People talk about its value, but it turns people into zombies who just sit there and are passively entertained by this spiritless machine." --David Gaines, 1986

"Our lives belonged to these complicated, tinkering streams that pour through dry country like spells of magic." --Craig Childs, The Way Out, 2004

 

"Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but a manner of traveling." --Unknown

"Be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at the stars." --Henry Van Dyke

"Humans came into being at the end of the planetoid period... it was so brilliant. The birds appeared, at their most brilliant, the flowers, the trees, and then the mammals, by form so magnificent. ...Human intelligence requires a magnificent world, a beautiful world, a world of resonance and meaning. For humans to bear the burden of intelligence and responsibility, we need a beautiful world to inspire and heal us. --Thomas Berry

"Myth also is healing. But to lose the natural world is an enormous loss for the whole community. For children not to be able to see the stars or know their stories and have a mythic insight into the stars: it's a soul loss." --Thomas Berry

"Man, whether civilized or savage, is a child of nature--he is not the master of nature. He must conform his actions to certain natural laws if he is to maintain his dominance over his environment. When he tries to circumvent the laws of nature, he usually destroys the natural environment that sustains him. And when his environment deteriorates rapidly, his civilization declines." --Dale & Carter, Topsoil and Civilization, 1955

"The true problems of living--in politics, economics, education, marriage, etc.--are always problems of overcoming or reconciling opposites. They are divergent problems and have no solution in the ordinary sense of the word. ...To have to grapple with divergent problems tends to be exhausting, worrying, and wearisome. Hence, people try to avoid it and to run away from it. --E.F. Schumacher

"Be the character you'd be if you had nothing to lose." --Horoscope in a newspaper

"We speak glibly of conservation education, but what do we mean by it? If we mean indoctrination, then let us be reminded that it is just as easy to indoctrinate with fallacies as with facts. If we mean to teach the capacity for independent judgement, then I am appalled by the magnitude of the task... The ecological conscience, then, is an affair of the mind as well as the heart. It implies a capacity to study and learn, as well as to emote about the problems of conservation" --Aldo Leopold, 1947

"What we are asking, what Mono Lake is asking all of us is 'where are we going to draw the line?' If we don't share some water with Mono Lake what will be next? Will it be Lake Tahoe, will it be the Eel River, the Yukon? Will it be on and on until the last of our singing rivers and beautiful lakes are gone--because we've taken every last drop, we've watched the last waterfowl, and the last salmon, follow the California State emblem, the California Grizzly, into oblivion? It is a battleground in that sense: it's asking us: 'how much are we going to share with the earth?'" --David Gaines, co-founder of the Mono Lake Committee

"I certainly have found 'good in everything,'--in all natural processes and products--not the 'good' of the Sunday-school books, but the good of natural law and order, the good of that system of things out of which we came and which is the source of our health and strength. It is good that fire should burn, even if it consumes your house; it is good that force should crush, even if it crushes you; it is good that rain should fall, even if it destroys your crops or floods your land. Plagues and pestilences attest the constancy of natural law. They set us to cleaning our streets and houses and to readjusting our relations to outward nature. Only in a live universe could disease and death prevail. Death is a phase of life, a redistributing of the type. Decay is another kind of growth. ...The bad in things arises from our abuse or misuse of them or from our wrong relations to them." --John Burroughs, The Gospel of Nature, 1905

"...most evils are the means of producing some good. The yellow fever will discourage the growth of great cities in our nation; and I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man. True, they nourish some of the elegant arts; but the useful ones can thrive elsewhere, and less perfection in the others with more health, virtue, and freedom would be my choice." --Thomas Jefferson, Sept. 23, 1800

"The dangers of a lopsidedly tourism-dependent commerce are its economic shallowness and the damage it will inflict by overusing the environment" --J. Francis Stafford

"We are in danger of becoming scenery sellers--and scenery is subject to as much enthusiastic overuse and overdevelopment as grass and water. It can lead us into an ill-considered crowding on the heels of our resources. Landscape, with its basis of aridity, is both our peculiar splendor and our peculiar limitation. Without careful controls and restrictions in planning, tourists can be as destructive as locusts--can destroy everything we have learned to love about the West. I include you and me in my warning to entrepreneurs. We should all be forced to file an environmental impact study before we build so much as a privy or a summer cottage, much less a motel, a freeway, or a resort." --Wallace Stegner, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs (p. 55)

"This curious world we inhabit is more wonderful than convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used." --Henry David Thoreau

"The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately, or in the long run." --Henry David Thoreau

"Thank God men cannot as yet fly and lay waste the sky as well as the earth!" --Henry David Thoreau, 1817-1862

"Fortunately, nature has a few big places beyond man's power to spoil--the two icy ends of the globe, and the Grand Canyon." --John Muir in Steep Trails, 1918

"A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone." --Henry David Thoreau

"By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber." --Henry David Thoreau

"Go fish and hunt far and wide day by day, --farther and wider, --and rest thee by many brooks and hearth-sides without misgiving. Remember thy creator in the days of thy youth. Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures. Let the noon find thee by other lakes, and the night overtake thee every where at home.  ...Let not to get a living be thy trade, but thy sport. Enjoy the land, but own it not. Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling, and spending their lives like serfs." --Henry David Thoreau

"We should come home from far, from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day, with new experience and character." --Henry David Thoreau

"Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness, --to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of Nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and Titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and decaying trees, the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander." --Henry David Thoreau

"There is no sense and no sanity in objecting to the desecration of the flag while tolerating and justifying and encouraging as a daily business the desecration of the country for which it stands" --Wendell Berry

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science." --Albert Einstein

"When an ecosystem is fully functioning, all the members are present at the assembly. To speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness. Human beings came out of that wholeness, and to consider the possibility of reactivating membership in the Assembly of All Beings is in no way regressive." --Gary Snyder

"Never believe what you are told, that midsummer is the best time to go up the streets of the mountain--well--perhaps for the merely idle or sportsmanly scientific; but for seeing and understanding, the best time is when you have the longest leave to stay." --Mary Austin

"In that country which begins at the foot of the east slope of the Sierras and spreads out by less and less lofty hill ranges toward the Great Basin, it is possible to live with great zest, to have red blood cells and delicate joys, to pass and repass about one's daily performance an area that would make an Atlantic seaboard State, and that with no peril, and, according to our way of thought, no particular difficulty." --Mary Austin

"For all the toll the desert takes of a man it give compensations, deep breaths, deep sleep, and the communion of the stars." --Mary Austin

"...that mysterious country beyond Hot Creek where a hidden force works mischief, mole-like, under the crust of the earth. Whatever agency is at work in that neighborhood, and it is popularly supposed to be the devil, it changes means and direction without time or season. It creeps up whole hillsides with insidious heat, unguessed until one notes the pine woods dying at the top, and having scorched out a good block of timber returns to steam and spout in caked, forgotten crevices of years before. It will break up sometimes blue-hot and bubbling, in the midst of a clear creek or make a sucking, scalding quicksand at the ford." --Mary Austin

"The Great Basin is a unifying force; wherever you live in it, you flow toward every other part." --Wallace Stegner

"Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question of whether a still higher 'standard of living' is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free." --Aldo Leopold

"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." --Aldo Leopold

"One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise." --Aldo Leopold

"We shall never achieve harmony with land, any more than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations the important thing is not to achieve, but to strive." --Aldo Leopold

"So in a land which nature found suited to grass growing mixed with and under the shelter of sage, it is now proposed to eliminate the sage and create unbroken grassland. Few seem to have asked whether grasslands are a stable and desirable goal in this region. Certainly nature's own answer was otherwise. The annual precipitation in this land where the rains seldom fall is not enough to support good sod-forming grass; it favors rather the perennial bunchgrass that grows in the shelter of the sage." --Rachel Carson

"In some quarters nowadays it is fashionable to dismiss the balance of nature as a state of affairs that prevailed in an earlier, simpler world--a state that has now been so thoroughly upset that we might as well forget it. Some find this a convenient assumption, but as a chart for a course of action it is highly dangerous. The balance of nature is not the same today as in Pleistocene times, but it is still there: a complex, precise, and highly integrated system of relationships between living things which cannot safely be ignored any more than the law of gravity can be defied with impunity by a man perched on the edge of a cliff. The balance of nature is not a status quo; it is fluid, ever shifting, in a constant state of adjustment. Man, too, is part of this balance. Sometimes the balance is in his favor; sometimes--and all too often through his own activities--it is shifted to his disadvantage. --Rachel Carson

"We Americans cannot save the world... We Americans have our hands full in trying to save ourselves. And we've barely tried." --Edward Abbey

"Men and nature must work hand in hand. The throwing out of balance of the resources of nature throws out of balance also the lives of men." --FDR message to congress on the use of our Natural Resources, 1/24/35

"There perhaps are souls that never weary, that go always unhalting and glad, tuneful and songful as mountain water. No so, weary, hungry me. In all God's mountain mansions, I find no human sympathy, and I hunger. Ten days ago I came down from the ice to get a supply of the Two Breads, but, alack, I found only one!" --John Muir, October 1872

"To ask me whether I could endure to live without friends is absurd. It is easy enough to live out of material sight of friends, but to live without human love is impossible. Quench love, and what is left of a man's life but the folding of a few jointed bones and square inches of flesh? Who would call that life?" --John Muir, March 1873

"To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wildflower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour"
--William Blake

"What we had discovered, or rediscovered, was that the imagination has a free and spontaneous life of its own, that it can be trusted, that what flows from a spontaneous mind is poetry..." --Gary Snyder

"We have taught our children by precept and example that every living thing exists to be converted into cash, and that whatever would not yield a return should be quickly exterminated to make way for things that do."
--Hugh Nibley, Nibley on the Timely and the Timeless

"The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land mechanism. Only those who know the most about it can appreciate how little we know about it. The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: "What good is it?" If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first principle of intelligent tinkering. Have we learned this first principle of conservation: to preserve all parts of the land mechanism? No, because even the scientist does not yet recognize all of them."
--Aldo Leopold, Round River 

"[The naturalist] looks upon every species of animal and plant now living as the individual letters which go to make up one of the volumes of our earth's history; and, as a few lost letters may make a sentence unintelligible, so the extinction of the numerous forms of life which the progress of cultivation invariably entails will necessarily render obscure this invaluable record of the past. It is, therefore, an important object [to preserve them].

If this is not done, future generations will certainly look back upon us as a people so immersed in the pursuit of wealth as to be blind to higher considerations. They will charge us with having culpably allowed the destruction of some of those records of Creation which we had it in our power to preserve; and, while professing to regard every living thing as the direct handiwork and best evidence of a Creator, yet, with a strange inconsistency, seeing many of them perish irrecoverably from the face of the earth, uncared for and unknown."
--Alfred Russel Wallace, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, 1863.

"The environmental crisis is an outward manifestation of a crisis of mind and spirit. There could be no greater misconception of its meaning than to believe it to be concerned only with endangered wildlife, human-made ugliness, and pollution. These are part of it, but more importantly, the crisis is concerned with the kind of creatures we are and what we must become in order to survive."
--Lynton Caldwell, Living in the Environment

"Before I flew I was already aware of how small and vulnerable our planet is; but only when I saw it from space, in all its ineffable beauty and fragility, did I realize that humankind's most urgent task is to cherish and preserve it for future generations."
--Sigmund Jahn, Cosmonaut, German Democratic Republic

"Every man has only enough strength to complete those assignments of which he is fully convinced of their importance."
--Goethe 

"In the hour when the Holy One, blessed be he, created the first man, he took him past all the trees of the garden of Eden, and said to him: See my works, how fine and excellent they are! Now all that I have created, I have created for you. Ponder this, and do not corrupt and desolate my world; for if you corrupt it, there is no one to set it right after you,"
--The Midrash, Ecclesiastes, Rabbah vii.28

"Man’s Dominion is a call to service, not a license to exterminate."
--Hugh Nibley, Nibley on the Timely and Timeless

"Really not possible, I think, for me—the scholarly life, I mean. I’m too fond, much too fond, of fresh air and mundane pleasures." --Ed Abbey, 1949

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Too Long to Be Apothegms

"The Station", by Robert J. Hastings

Tucked away in our subconscious is an idyllic vision. We see ourselves on a long trip that spans the continent. We are traveling by train. Out the windows we drink in the passing scene of cars on nearby highways, of children waving at a crossing, of cattle grazing on a distant hillside, of smoke pouring from a power plant, of row upon row of corn and wheat, of flatlands and valleys, of mountains and rolling hillsides, of city skylines and village halls.

But uppermost in our minds is the final destination. On a certain day at a certain hour we will pull into the station. Bands will be playing and flags waving. Once we get there so many wonderful dreams will come true and pieces of our lives will fit together like a completed jigsaw puzzle. How restlessly we pace the aisles, damning the minutes for loitering--waiting, waiting, waiting for the station.

"When we reach the station, that will be it!" we cry. "When I'm 18." "When I buy a new 450SL Mercedes Benz!" "When I have put the last kid through college." "When I reach the age of retirement, I shall live happily ever after!"

Sooner or later we must realize there is no station, no one place to arrive at once and for all. The true joy of life is the trip. The station is only a dream. It constantly outdistances us.

So, stop pacing the aisles and counting the miles. Instead, climb more mountains, eat more ice cream, go barefoot more often, swim more rivers, watch more sunsets, laugh more, cry less. Life must be lived as we go along. The station will come soon enough.

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"Attitude", by Anonymous

The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than fact. It is more important than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company...church...a home. The remarkable thing is that you have a choice every day regarding the attitude that you will embrace for the day. We cannot change our past..we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable...The only thing we can do is play on the one string that we have and that is our attitude.

I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it. And so it is with you...You are in charge of your attitudes.

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I left Los Angeles where I was raised because the Los Angeles that I knew as a kid--which was great--disappeared. In favor of quick progress; short term gains. Suddenly the natural environment that was there as a kid when I grew up was replaced by concrete and freeways. The next thing you had was that wonderful clean fresh air where you could smell the fragrance of flowers was gone, replaced by smog. The next thing you knew there were smog alerts; young people and old people couldn't go outside their homes. And LA just sort of disappeared in the wake of supposed economic growth..

-Robert Redford in The Unforeseen

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The last one is from Edward Abbey

One final paragraph of advice: Do not burn yourself out. Be as I am... a reluctant enthusiast... a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it's still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizz, climb the mountains, hug the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly and contemplate the precious stillness, that lovely, mysterious and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to your body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much: I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those deskbound people with their hearts in a safe deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this: you will outlive the bastards.