Environmentalists From The United States

"Physics is not a newcomer to televised education. The first televised physics lecture dates... to the 1930s. A remarkable number of today's American research physicists—particularly... from rural and poorer sections of the country—trace their interest... to the... in the 1960s. The Mechanical Universe follows in that tradition..."

"Intellectually, technically and philosophically, physics and television are two separate cultures with almost no bridges between... [I]t is... time consuming and arduous... to span the gap... [T]here is no one... [at] Caltech... capable of reading, much less writing, a television script competently. ...[T]here is no one on the production side who knows enough... physics... to plan an important sequence, much less write a script or produce a program. This situation is a symptom of the malady of science illiteracy that ' is intended to help cure...""

"The lack of qualified high-school physics teachers in the United States is a notorious (and self-perpetuating) problem. ...[C]ombating that problem was... one of the central goals of the TMU project. ...The idea was to induce teachers to study the college-level version so ...they could use the high-school materials ...with poise and confidence."

"... I haven’t wanted to write the same book over and over again, so I’ve gone back to what was really my earliest interest, which is what other animals do and why do they do it. My upcoming book, “Alfie and Me,” is also much more about the human relationship with the rest of life on Earth, why it’s the way it is for us now, and how it was in other cultures, in other times. And it’s really about what kind of relationship with the world we can have when we blur the usual boundary between us and other species. The narrative story is wrapped around a little baby that was near death that somebody found on their lawn and was brought to us, and whom we raised. She decided to stay around our property and to get a wild mate, and to raise young in a that I put up on the outside wall of my studio."

"[At age 11] I noticed this truck full of calves and bonded with one in particular, who kept kissing me. After about an hour the truck driver came out of the restaurant. I asked him what the calf's name was, and he said, "Veal, tomorrow morning by 7 o'clock." That was it: I could no longer disassociate the creature from what was on my plate."

"When people talk about reincarnation, I always feel that if there is such a thing, this is definitely my first time, because I'm always amazed. I'm both amazed at how horrifically we can treat each other and all other living things, and also amazed at the wonder and the beauty. I'm like: 'Oh my God, look at that bird!' or 'Look at that flower!' literally every single day. I can't get over how people are putting so much energy and so many resources into going to Mars when everything we could ever dream of is on this planet, if we just take care of it. What do they have on Mars? They don't even have oxygen up there!"

"Come visit us again and again. This is a state of excitement. But for heaven's sake, don't come here to live."

"Psychiatrist R. D. Laing, among others, has said that the growing incidence of mental illness these days may be explained in part by the fact that the world we call real and which we ask people to live within and understand is itself open to question. The environment we live in is no longer connected to the mix of planetary processes which brought us all into being. It is solely the product of human mental processes. It is real, but only in the way that a theatrical play or a fun house is real. Our artificial environment is there and we can experience it, yet it has been created on purpose by other humans. It is an interpretation of reality; it no longer reveals how nature works and it cannot provide much useful information to human beings who seek to see their own lives as part of some wider natural process. We are left with no frame of reference untouched by human interpretation."

"Television is an experience that can be had by virtually everyone at the same time. By substituting for a greater diversity of experiences and unifying everyone with it, it aids commercial efficiency. With all people confined to the same mental and physical condition, a single advertising or political voice appropriate to the common mood can influence everyone."

"Television encourages separation: people from community, people from each other, people from themselves, creating more buying units and discouraging organized opposition to the system. It creates a surrogate community: Itself. It becomes everyone’s intimate advisor, teacher and guide to appropriate behavior and awareness. Thereby, it becomes its own feedback system, furthering its own growth and accelerating the transformation of everything and everyone into artificial form. This enables a handful of people to obtain a unique degree of power."

"Because superior non-animal methods are used for this exact training by military and civilian programs around the world, animals are clearly not required to meet your objectives. … I'm sure you agree that our military personnel deserve state-of-the-art training and that our country deserves to be respected for its civilized treatment of animals."

"It's been at least 20 years. I used to eat burgers and steak, and I would just be knocked out afterward; I had to give it up. The first thing was dairy. I was about 24 years old and I had tons of acne and mucus. I met some random girl on a bus who told me to quit dairy and all those symptoms would go away three days later. By God she was right."

"If you eat chicken, maybe you're on one level. If you wear a mink coat, maybe you're on another level. But if you wear cosmetics, cosmetics that are tested on animals, then you're just unconscious. Really, my message is simple. It's a message of compassion. In this world that is spinning madly out of control, we have to realize that we're all related. We have to try to live harmoniously."

"I have looked attentively at chickens raised in this battery] fashion, and to me they seem to be unhappy and in poor health. Their combs are dull and lifeless except for glaring and unnatural patches of color that appear occasionally … The battery chickens I have observed seem to lose their minds about the time they would normally be weaned by their mothers and off in the weeds chasing grasshoppers on their own account. Yes, literally, actually, the battery becomes a gallinaceous madhouse. The eyes of these chickens through the bars gleam like those of maniacs. Let your hand get within reach and it receives a dozen vicious peeks—not the love peck or the tentative peek of idle curiosity bestowed by the normal chicken, but a peck that means business, a peck for flesh and blood, for which in their madness they are thirsting."

"Man is innately a creature of love. That love is the most powerful force in the universe, and eventually — it's a very slow process — it will conquer. I think there will come a time, and this is down the road a great many years, when civilized people will look back in horror on our generation and the ones that have preceded it: the idea that we should eat other living things running around on four legs, that we should raise them just for the purpose of killing them! The people of the future will say “meat-eaters!” in disgust and regard us in the same way that we regard cannibals and cannibalism."

"The basic message of Gunsmoke was that there's going to be the bad and there's going to be the good. And most of the time, the good will win out. That's an old theme. There are no new themes, it's just the way you do them. It's the way you bring fresh characters to that theme."

"To produce 1 lb. of feedlot beef requires 7 lbs. of feed grain, which takes 7,000 lbs. of water to grow. Pass up one hamburger, and you'll save as much water as you save by taking 40 showers with a low-flow nozzle. Yet in the U.S., 70% of all the wheat, corn and other grain produced goes to feeding herds of livestock. Around the world, as more water is diverted to raising pigs and chickens instead of producing crops for direct consumption, millions of wells are going dry. … In the U.S., livestock now produce 130 times as much waste as people do. Just one hog farm in Utah, for example, produces more sewage than the city of Los Angeles. These megafarms are proliferating, and in populous areas their waste is tainting drinking water. In more pristine regions, from Indonesia to the Amazon, tropical rain forest is being burned down to make room for more and more cattle. … We, at least, have the flexibility—the omnivorous stomach and creative brain—to adapt. We can do it by moving down the food chain: eating foods that use less water and land, and that pollute far less, than cows and pigs do. In the long run, we can lose our memory of eating animals, and we will discover the intrinsic satisfactions of a diverse plant-based diet, as millions of people already have."

"Longer than memory we have known that each animal has its power and place, each a skill, virtue, wisdom, innocence — a special access to the structure and flow of the world. Each surpasses ourselves in some way. Together, sacred, they help hold the cosmos together, making it a joy and beauty to behold, but above all a challenge to understand as story, drama, and sacred play."

"Animals are among the first inhabitants of the mind's eye. They are basic to the development of speech and thought. Because of their part in the growth of consciousness, they are inseparable from the series of events in each human life, indispensable to our becoming human in the fullest sense."

"I rarely go back to a book, since I never feel sufficiently caught up in my own work. However, a few years ago, on a stalled expedition, I had an opportunity to reread The Idiot, which I’ve always thought of as “my favorite novel” (if such a thing can be; the great ones are no more comparable than the sun and the sky). I wanted to see if that book held up — if it was as heartbreaking and magnificent as I once thought it, and of course it was. Whereas — well, let’s simply say that most modern novels, even the better ones, are pretty dinky in ambition and certainly unworthy of a second reading when one knows that great ones are still out there unread. … I admire many of my contemporaries, especially those who risk something or bring some new element to their work. … Of course, there are single novels that are excellent, but what interests me most is the working through from book to book of some recurrent obsession or at least preoccupation, a reverberation from within, which may burst the work wide at any moment, though it often seems half-hidden from the writer. What I’m trying to describe, I guess, is conflagration, a life burning up, as lives do in Dostoyevsky. Obsession that isn’t crazed or criminal is always enthralling."

"Toni Morrison, Kay Boyle, Philip Roth, Peter Matthiessen, Anne Tyler, and Rosellen Brown read an unknown manuscript and responded with those quotes and marks of approval that appear on book jackets. These were completely unsolicited and I still find it remarkable that these writers, overwhelmed with pleas and manuscripts, picked up Love Medicine and responded. There were a great number of people kind along the way. One hears much more about the egomania and posturing of writers than one does about the devotion that writers have for one another's work."

"Many great writers inspired me, of course, but inspiration is not the same as a direct influence. I was often stirred by the beauty of great prose, the passion and startling intensity of hard-won truths, which leapt from that creative fire. … For the writer, therefore the reader, fresh truth is exhilarating, even painful truth, as in Kafka or Céline. Isn’t that what good writing finally arrives at? The insights and epigrams of Alexander Pope weren’t clichés when he wrote them, any more than those resounding lines in Shakespeare. They only became dog-eared from overuse."

"Peter Matthiessen’s writing — fiction and nonfiction — does not provide approximations. What it does do with inimitable skill is put a reader at the live heart of life — a powerful, rich sense of immediacy, of being in that moment. … He is a man of tough-minded opinion, deeply earned and forthrightly rendered, with passion and quick humor ringed with what one writer calls a "useful melancholy." … There is, to my mind, no writing life more vital and of greater distinction in the second half of our century. Matthiessen’s prodigious and varied works led William Styron to call him "an original and powerful artist . . . who has produced as distinguished a body of work as any writer of our time . . . He has immeasurably enlarged our consciousness.""

"When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions — such as merit, such as past, present, and future — our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment. We identify, label, and interpret our surroundings as abstract concepts, quite separate from another concept, which is our own separate identity and ego."

""Warbler Woods" (For Peter Matthiessen) Never too proud to tip his head back./To gaze, look beyond.../He knew the names of every warbler,/stitched inside his skin,/the seven eagles, graceful cranes, he followed them/to tucked-away forests and creeks, could see/a slightest flicker of movement,/a nesting memory, how the world was once,/would never be again./He could stand under skies for hours,/never weary of their habits, never tire."

"I am a writer. A fiction writer who also writes nonfiction on behalf of social and environmental causes or journals about expeditions to wild places. I have written more books of nonfiction because my fiction is an exploratory process — not laborious, merely long and slow and getting slower."

"The ancient intuition that all matter, all “reality,” is energy, that all phenomena, including time and space, are mere crystallizations of mind, is an idea with which few physicists have quarreled since the theory of relativity first called into question the separate identities of energy and matter. Today most scientists would agree with the ancient Hindus that nothing exists or is destroyed, things merely change shape or form; that matter is insubstantial in origin, a temporary aggregate of the pervasive energy that animates the electron. … The cosmic radiation that is thought to come from the explosion of creation strikes the earth with equal intensity from all directions, which suggests either that the earth is at the center of the universe, as in our innocence we once supposed, or that the known universe has no center. Such an idea holds no terror for mystics; in the mystical vision, the universe, its center, and its origins are simultaneous, all around us, all within us, and all One."

"In another life — this isn’t what I know, but how I feel — these mountains were my home; there is a rising of forgotten knowledge, like a spring from hidden aquifers under the earth. To glimpse one’s own true nature is a kind of homegoing, to a place East of the Sun, West of the Moon — the homegoing that needs no home, like that waterfall on the upper Suli Gad that turns to mist before touching the earth and rises once again into the sky."

"The progress of the sciences toward theories of fundamental unity, cosmic symmetry (as in the unified field theory) — how do such theories differ, in the end, from that unity which Plato called “unspeakable” and “indiscribable,” the holistic knowledge shared by so many peoples of the earth, Christians included, before the advent of the industrial revolution made new barbarians of the peoples of the West? In the United States, before spiritualist foolishness at the end of the last century confused mysticism with “the occult” and tarnished both, William James wrote a master work of metaphysics; Emerson spoke of “the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal One . . .”; Melville referred to “that profound silence, that only voice of God”; Walt Whitman celebrated the most ancient secret, that no God could be found “more divine than yourself.” And then, almost everywhere, a clear and subtle illumination that lent magnificence to life and peace to death was overwhelmed in the hard glare of technology. Yet that light is always present, like the stars of noon. Man must perceive it if he is to transcend his fear of meaningless, for no amount of “progress” can take its place. We have outsmarted ourselves, like greedy monkeys, and now we are full of dread."

"Zen has been called the "religion before religion," which is to say that anyone can practice, including those committed to another faith. And that phrase evokes that natural religion of our early childhood, when heaven and a splendorous earth were one. But soon the child's clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions and abstractions. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines, and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, at the bottom of each breath, there is a hollow place that is filled with longing. We become seekers without knowing what we seek."

"There’s a creation, a creating force. But whatever it is is in everything we see. It’s in that log, in that stone. It’s just the power. And I’ve had many experiences with it. Certain circumstances bring it out, which all the mystics know. That is part of our Zen training too. It’s called an "opening." … For a second, you see what the world is. It is a whole other way of seeing, which is horrible, terrifying, and extraordinary and a great blessing to have."

"I have often tried to isolate that quality of "Zen" which attracted me so powerfully to its literature and later to the practice of zazen. But since the essence of Zen might well be what one teacher called "the moment-by-moment awakening of mind," there is little that may sensibly be said about it without succumbing to that breathless, mystery-ridden prose that drives so many sincere aspirants in the other direction. In zazen, one may hope to penetrate the ringing stillness of universal mind, and this "intimation of immortality," as Wordsworth called it, also shines forth from the brief, cryptic Zen texts, which refer obliquely to that absolute reality beyond the grasp of our linear vocabulary, yet right here in this moment, in this ink and paper, in the sound of this hand turning the page."

"Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. And this debasement of our vision, the retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters into safe crannies, the desperate instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the earth and air and water from which we came."

"A Mahayana teaching with a strong Taoist infusion, Ch'an or Zen cast off the dead weight of priestly ritual and mindless chanting of the sutras or scriptures — the records of the Buddha's teachings — and returned to the simple zazen way of Shakyamuni. In a statement attributed to the First Chinese Patriarch, Bodhidharma, an old monk from India who is loosely associated with the birth of Zen, the new teaching was described as "a special transmission outside the scriptures, not founded upon words or letters. By pointing directly to man's own mind, it lets him see into his own true nature and thus attain Buddhahood.""

"Economism is the view that the economy is the most important part of society and that the other dimensions such as politics and education should serve it. Economism has become the ruling ideology, not because of claims of economists, but because of the decisions of political leaders, financiers, corporate leaders, and the general public."

"Schumacher ... rightly saw that in the world today Buddhism is a more potent basis for resisting the economism that rules the West and through it most of the East."

"Jesus said that we could not serve both God and wealth, and it is obvious that Western society is organized in the service of wealth."

"Whereas traditional Christianity calls for the subordination of all other commitments to the commitment to God, Buddhism teaches us to give up all craving and attachment, just those aspects of the human psyche that ground economism."

"Were the '80s as bad as some people think? At least one social interpreter, Mark Satin ..., says no. ... Satin maintains that a new cultural archetype emerged during the '80s, "the caring individual," or one who is equally committed to self-development and social change, to individual freedom and social justice. A true grassroots democracy, he argues, requires these personally and socially responsible individuals. ... Just as he rejects the "media caricature" of the '80s, he rejects some of the romanticization of the 1960s. An antiwar activist who fled to Canada to organize similarly disaffected Americans, Satin ... recalls the era as divisive and judgmental, with too much emphasis on us-vs.-them. "I hope what we're moving toward is an integration of individualism and community with acceptance of the diversity in our society," he says."

"It has been said that the difference between successful people and most others is that successful people "fail" more often. In other words, experiments always yield information. Mark's life – a series of experiments – shows that it's important for all of us to rediscover the importance of commitment and experiment. Mark is beginning to view his life trajectory with a little more compassion. He likes to say he's living evidence of "what you can do with determination and no fancy credentials or resources." And yet he did have one priceless resource: the courage of his conviction. In certain esoteric systems, the Fool is considered the most advanced level of spiritual attainment. The Fool, in this light, is trusting enough to throw himself headlong into life. The Fool makes mistakes – and thereby makes discoveries. This is a book of such discoveries."

"The most important departure from politics-as-usual that Satin ascribes to the radical middle is a commitment to finding a higher common ground that integrates best insights from both the left and the right. ... There is no way to do justice here to Satin's outpouring of specific policy proposals. No one will agree with all of them. But there is a good deal of fresh thinking here, and some of the policy ideas Satin presents may turn out to be very important. The most troubling aspect of Radical Middle is Satin's tendency to exaggerate how far along this approach to politics really is. ... Satin's tendency to set out his own favorite policy ideas as if they are the official position of the radical middle, for which he is serving as spokesman, is problematic. It risks turning the radical middle into a new ideology with a detailed political platform."

"Satin grew up in a small town in Minnesota and felt an instinctive sort of rebellion, but unlike Bob Dylan, he did not play the guitar and so had no way of expressing it."

"That folks like Mark Satin now package their wares in the soft pastels of personalist psychology rather than the primary colors (among them, red) of Herbert Marcuse helps keep the national blood pressure down, but in truth it's simply another example of the Ralph Lauren-ization of American politics."

"In his new book, Radical Middle ..., which provided the initial inspiration for this article, Satin fleshes out pragmatic new policy ideas. ... Satin draws inspiration from nonpolitical realms of society where people are blending what works from various orthodoxies. He points to developments like integrative medicine, ... socially responsible business, ... and judges' increasing use of psychology, economics, and even literature in crafting legal opinions. "Politics," he says ruefully, "is the last area of society where this kind of creative thinking is taking hold.""

"Distinctions between the two parties are of little interest to Satin. Having spent his entire political life outside conventional politics, Satin firmly believes that the current system can't lead to the moderate majority he wants. The most "radical" thing about Mark Satin's Radical Middle is the extraordinary depth of the author's belief that identifying solutions to America's problems depends on spurning conventional party politics."

"Even though Satin continually inveighs against the "impractical idealism" that (by his own admission) much of his own career exemplifies, his book ultimately places him in the sturdy tradition of "idealistic" American reformers who think smart and principled people unencumbered by political constraints can change everything. For all the stylistic differences, Radical Middle echoes the message of Ross Perot's 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns, which placed unlimited cash at the disposal of the proposition that a (nominally) uncorrupted and nonpartisan candidate could simply "open up the hood" of American government and fix things."

"The term "radical middle" debuted on the national stage in 1995 in a Newsweek cover story by Joe Klein. ... Almost a decade later, the electorate is more polarized than ever. ... Not so, according to New Age activist-cum-sensible centrist, Mark Satin, whose new book Radical Middle announces the arrival of a kinder, gentler radical middle, Think of it as a "compassionate conservatism" for the center-left. ... Satin wants his book to be the movement's manifesto. Like the political newsletter he's been issuing since 1999, .. Satin's rhetoric employs New Age emotionalism in the service of mostly hard-nosed, rational solutions to a broad spectrum of social and political problems. True to claim, the policy proposals cataloged here don't fit neatly into the standard left / right model. ... The most provocative ideas combine a leftist concern for the commonwealth with a conservative instinct for individual responsibility and self-reliance."

"New Options is spearheading a movement that is still nameless. He [Satin] no longer uses the "New Age" moniker, as it now conjures up Shirley MacLaine and Windham Hill. Though he's active in the U.S. Green movement, ... he's reluctant to identify his newsletter as a Green publication. "The U.S. Green movement so far is characterized by an ineptness of organizing strategy and a substantial degree of cultural alienation from the American mainstream," he says. ... But Satin isn't reaching for the brick pile. He says he's content with New Options pragmatic stance. "I think it's a third path which alienated people can move to once they become bored with their own alienation.""

"Mark Satin, in his Washington newsletter Radical Middle, describes the domination of the public debate about the [biotechnology] issue by two different groups. ... Satin's report carries the encouraging news of an emerging group with a different voice, one that is "nuanced, hopeful, adult" and that he calls the "voice of cautious optimism." It is essentially a willingness to listen to both sides of the argument."

"Mark Satin's irritating Radical Middle is a timely clue to what gave liberalism a bad name. It opens breathlessly. ... Satin ... perceive[s] obvious solutions to almost everything. The greater part of the book consists of short chapters that state daunting problems and then summarily solve them. ... Why do so many liberal preachments grate like glass shards on a blackboard? Well, maybe it's the haut à bas tone, the disdain of politics, the smug armchair analyses, the insufferable smart-aleckness."