A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
—Dr. MartinLuther King, jr.
Our leaders have completely failed. We are never going back to normal. The climate and biosphere are breaking down… What we call ‘normal’ is an extreme system based on exploitation of people and planet.”
—Greta Thunberg, December 2022
Without any binding commitments to rapidly and immediately reduce greenhouse gases, the world stands no chance to deliver on the 1,5°C limit and … minimising risks of uprooting the life supporting systems we all depend on and endangering countless human lives.”
—Greta Thunberg, following COP 27
when the tub is overflowing, the first thing to do is shut off the water — not talk about turning it down a little (or even worse, just pretending it’s not happening) —Greta Thunberg on phasing out fossil fuels, in The Climate Book – The Facts and the Solutions (2022)
green hydrogen is not just about small local projects. It is now a full-fledged commodity, able to compete with coal, oil, and natural gas in both costs and volumes…” — Thierry Lepercq, Recharge News, 16 February 2022
I can hear change humming
In its loudest, proudest song.
I don’t fear change coming,
And so I sing along.
—Amanda Gorman, in ‘Change Sings…’ (2021)
If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”
—Malcolm X
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way.” —Arundhati Roy
“unity without a sense of justice, equality and fairness is just toxic mob mentality…”
—Amanda Gorman
We need to get … people who are driving cars today to stop driving cars by 2030 or 2040.” —Cameron Roberts, Carleton University (Ottawa)
No violencia es nuestra fuerza” (Nonviolence is our strength’) —César Chávez
When asked what he thought of western civilization, Gandhi reportedly said that he thought it would be a good idea.
“As with everything else in the United States, when things go wrong, the people who suffer are low-income people and racial minorities because of centuries of systemic racism.” —Elliott Fisher, professor at The Dartmouth Institute, August 2020
I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.” ― Angela Y. Davis
the prison, the reformatory, and the jail have achieved only a shocking record of failure. There is overwhelming evidence that these institutions create crime rather than prevent it.” —National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals, 1973
Our security doesn’t lie in hammering every person into a version of ourselves. It lies in our ability to keep welcoming the next generation, and watching how their gifts and passions unfold to … adapt to the changing times. —Shannon Hayes, ’The Radical Homemaker’
‘We should be inspired by people… who show that human beings can be kind, brave, generous, beautiful, strong—even in the most difficult circumstances. —Rachel Corrie
If solutions within the system are so impossible to find, maybe we should change the system itself. —Greta Thunberg
When will we ever learn?” —Pete Seeger, ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?’
‘A much more insidious form of climate denial is saying you believe in science and yet not taking the dramatic and immediate action that is equal to the scale of the problem.’ —Jesse D. Palmer in Slingshot, Spring 2019
…my great great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while the Planet was plundered?
what did you do when the Earth was unravelling?…
—excerpt from Drew Dellinger’s ‘
“We don’t have time to sit on our hands as our planet burns. For young people, climate change is bigger than election or re-election. It’s life or death.… —Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.”
―Wendell Berry
“We can no longer save the world by playing by the rules because the rules have to be changed.” —15-year-old Greta Thunberg at COP24
“Someone needs to explain to me why wanting clean drinking water makes you an activist, and why proposing to destroy water with chemical warfare doesn’t make a corporation a terrorist”
—Winona LaDuke
He knew about warfare and hatred, but not about climate change or toxic pollution — and his thought is as true today as ever
‘The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.’
—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German theologian
posted 24 March 2018
“the powerful do what they wish and the weak suffer what they must”
—Athenian historian & military leader Thucydides, in History of the Peloponnesian War
posted 11 January 2018
“The really inconvenient truth is that global warming is not about carbon—it’s about capitalism… and the war that system is waging on Earth.”—Naomi Klein, in This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate
posted 19 October 2017
Back to the future?
“We should be using nature’s inexhaustible sources of energy—sun, wind, and tide….”
—Thomas Edison, in a 1931 conversation with Henry Ford & Harvey Firestone
posted 3 September 2017
“A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place, but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of idea.
—poet John Ciardi (1916–1986)
posted 10 June 2017
“Serving healthy and sustainably grown food is as essential to the health of our community as the medical care we provide.”
—Siobhan McNally, MD; Pediatrician, Berkshire Medical Center
posted 10 June 2017
“Unsustainable actions have affected the ecological processes and functions that keep our planet stable… violating the human rights of younger and future generations by taking away their opportunity to live in a healthy, stable living environment.”
—Leah Boecker, former intern, in her 2013 Essay ‘Sustainability and the Rights of Future Generations‘
posted 14 January 2017
“We must begin to understand that we are all in this together. In our globalized world, everything we do affects not only the people around us, but also the people on the other side of the world. Almost every decision we make has an environmental impact, and therefore, an impact on human rights.”
— Jacy Good, former campus sustainability intern and 2008 Muhlenberg College graduate, in ‘Whatever We Do to the Web of Life We Do to Ourselves‘.
posted 14 December 2016
“The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”
—Neil deGrasse Tyson, Physicist, Director of the Hayden Planetarium
posted 23 December 2016:
“Even if fully implemented, the Paris agreement is consistent with a temperature increase of 3.2°C.… Pathways for staying well below 2° and 1.5°C require deep emissions reductions….” —2016 Emissions Gap Report
posted 20 October 2016:
“We face a stark choice: we can destroy the conditions for human life on the planet by clinging to ‘free-market’ fundamentalism, or we can secure our future by bringing commerce within the laws of ecological sustainability and social justice.’
—Vandana Shiva, author and scientist
posted 26 September 2016:
“Too many people today accept the notion that their fate is solely a matter of individual responsibility, irrespective of wider structural forces…. This troubling trend is not only profoundly anti-democratic, but also works to eliminate structural, systemic, and social concerns from public discourse.”
—Henry A. Giroux, in his new book, America at War with Itself.
posted 9 September 2016:
“The U.S. government is wiping out our most important cultural and spiritual areas… and as it erases our footprint from the world, it erases us as a people.”
—LaDonna Brave Bull Allard
posted 8/24/16:
“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
—George Orwell, in his visionary novel 1984
posted 8/9/16:
“As the Third Circuit Court of Appeals has recently held [2008], the existence of a permit to use public property does not allow the permit holder (or the police) to restrict free speech activities that do not obstruct the permitted activity.”
—American Civil Liberties Union of PA, in a letter to the City of Bethlehem, July 2010
posted 7/31/2016:
“The people have a right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic, and esthetic values of the environment. Pennsylvania’s public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come. As trustee of these resources, the Commonwealth shall conserve and maintain them for the benefit of all the people.”
—Article I, §27 – Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
posted 7/26/2016:
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
– Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America, 1789
posted 7 July 2016:
“Climate change is the single greatest threat facing our planet. The debate is over, and the scientific jury is in: global climate change is real, it is caused mainly by emissions released from burning fossil fuels, and it poses a catastrophic threat….”
—Senator Bernie Sanders, 2016
posted June 17, 2016
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
—Preamble to the Declaration of Independence, issued by the Continental Congress in creating the
United States of America, July 4, 1776
posted June 2
“It does not take a majority to prevail… but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.”
—Samuel Adams
posted May 16:
“The building of movements and sustained civil disobedience is far more important than voting. Voting without powerful and organized movements is futile. Voting without profound electoral reform, including banishing corporate money from politics, is useless.”
—Chris Hedges, 16 April 2016
posted May 9, 2016:
“Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise.”
—Fr. Daniel Berrigan (1921–2016), at the Catonsville 9 Trial in 1968
posted 4/3/16:
“Growing that grain will require the felling of forests, the plowing of prairies, the draining of wetlands, and the destruction of topsoil. In most places on earth, it will never be sustainable, and where it just possible might be, it will require rotation with animals on pasture. So you’re an environmentalist; why are you still eating annual monocrops?”
– Lierre Keith, The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability, 2009: 100-101.
posted 2/6/16:
“Where was I going to draw the line [between beings it was okay and not okay to kill]? Mammals, fish, insects, plants, plankton, bacteria? If ‘what’ became ‘who’, then what would be left to eat? I have my answer, finally. I’m not going to draw a line. I’m going to draw a circle.”
– Lierre Keith, The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability, 2009: 92-93.
posted 1/23/16:
“One tablespoon of soil contains more than one million living organisms. Their life processes—eating, excreting, tunneling, communicating, exchanging—were what made the rest of the planet livable.”
– Lierre Keith, The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability, 2009: 18-19.
posted 1/13/16:
“I had built my entire identity on death being an ethical taboo, a moral horror, one that provoked a visceral shudder through body and soul. But ‘death-free’ is not an option that the processes of life offers us.”
– Lierre Keith, The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability, 2009: 77
posted 1/6/16:
“The truth is that agriculture requires the wholesale destruction of entire ecosystems. The truth is also that life isn’t possible without death, that no matter what you eat, someone has to die to feed you.”
– Lierre Keith, The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability, 2009: 3
posted 12/23/15:
“Seek joy, play often, and pursue adventure. Your brain will do the rest.”
– James Clear, “The Science of Positive Thinking: How Positive Thoughts Build Your Skills, Boost Your Health, and Improve Your Work“, 9/8/2013
posted 12/16/15:
“The people of New Hampshire, rather than continuing to waste time, energy, and financial resources in regulatory red herrings, instead are enacting local rights-based ordinances and working to drive those rights into the state constitution.”
— New Hampshire Community Rights Network Press Release, 12/11/15
posted 12/2/15:
“In America’s current state of political disorientation, where millions of its citizens are barely surviving, and the vast remainder are experiencing vastly diminished life chances, income and opportunities as compared to the generations that preceded them, perhaps being ‘thankful’ [on Thanksgiving] is actually a condition of surrender and learned helplessness.”
— Chauncey Devega, 11/27/15, www/salon.com, accessed via Popular Resistance
posted Nov 2015:
“Populists have always been out to challenge the orthodoxy of the corporate order and to empower workaday Americans so they can control their own economic and political destinies… [unlike] classic liberalism, which seeks to live in harmony with concentrated corporate power by trying to regulate its excesses.”
—Jim Hightower, in Hightower Lowdown, May 2009, Vol 11, No 5