Listening to the Land

EDWARD ABBEY:

The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only paradise we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need, if only we had the eyes to see.

 

I stand for what I stand on.

 

Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.

 

Wilderness. The word itself is music.

 

Be loyal to what you love, be true to the earth, fight your enemies with passion and laughter.

 

And the wind blows, the dust clouds darken the desert blue, pale sand and red dust drift across the asphalt trails and tumbleweeds fill the arroyos. Good-bye, come again.

 

Somewhere in the depths of solitude, beyond wilderness and freedom, lay the trap of madness.

 

You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light.

 

Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.

 

VENDANA SHIVA:

The abuse of the Earth is the ecological crisis.

 

Everything I need to know I learned in the forest.

DERRICK JENSEN:

The fundamental difference between civilized and indigenous ways of being is that for even the most open-minded of the civilized, listening to the natural world is a metaphor. For traditional indigenous peoples it is not a metaphor; it is how you relate to the real world.