"We are the human beings. That's very important. We all know to say the words, we know the terms, and I know we know the terms because they taught them to us, they programmed them into us: the words, 'human beings'. Our relationship to reality is in that definition. The DNA of the human, the bone, flesh and blood of the human, is literally made up of the metals, minerals and liquids of the earth. So we are parts of the earth....One of the objectives of this technologic, civilized perceptional reality has got to do with erasing the memories of the human beings. We have a common collective experience. We are all the descendants of tribes. Back in the time of the original dream we were all tribes, and we were all the earths children. We all knew that the earth was our mother. And that we were all part of a spiritual reality, because we had being. We understood that there was a spiritual reality and we were physical in a spiritual reality."
-John Trudell

"What we see, hear, touch, taste, smell, feel, and understand about the world has been processed for us. Our experiences of the world can no longer be called direct, or primary. They are secondary, mediated experiences...We are surrounded by a reconstructed world that is difficult to grasp how astonishingly different it is from the world of only one hundred years ago, and bears virtually no resemblance to the world in which humans beings lived for four million years before that...At the moment when the natural environment was altered beyond the point that it could be personally observed, the definitions of knowledge itself began to change. No longer based on direct experience, knowledge began to depend upon scientific, technological, industrial proof...Now they tell us what nature is, what we are, how we relate to the cosmos, what we need for survival and happiness, and what are the appropriate ways to organize our existence...As we continue to separate ourselves from direct experience of the planet, the hierarchy of technoscientism advances..."
-Jerry Mander

“All our lauded technological progress -- our very civilization - is like the axe in the hand of the pathological criminal.”
-Albert Einstein

"Collapse has already begun, and progressed quite far without our notice. Rumblings of awareness have become increasingly ambient in the popular imaginaton in recent years, though full acceptance of the situation remains rare. The current level of complexity cannot be maintained, and individual regions cannot collapse on their own--they must collapse as a system. Whether the final blow is dealt by environmental problems, health issues, or the inability of diminishing resources to fuel our continued growth, the fragile interconnectedness of our globalized, industrial civilization will eventually propogate a catastrophic, catabolic collapse that will cascade through the entire system, feeding on itself until we have reached the next lowest level of sustainable complexity: the Stone Age."
-Jason Godesky, Thesis #20: Collapse is an economizing process.

"Because we are creatures who were born to live in vital participation with the natural world, the violation of this participation forms the basis of our original trauma. This is the systemic removal of our lives from our previously assumed elliptical participation in nature’s world from the tendrils of earthy textures, the seasons of sun and stars, carrying our babies across rivers, hunting the sacred game, the power of the life force. It is a severance that in the western world was initiated slowly and subtly at first with the domestication of plants and animals, grew in intensity with the emergence of large-scale civilizations, and has developed to pathological proportion with mass technological society until today you and I can actually live for a week or a month without smelling a tree, witnessing the passage of the moon, or meeting an animal in the wild, much less knowing the spirits of these beings or fathoming the interconnections between their destinies and our own. Original trauma is the disorientation we experience, however consciously or unconsciously, because we do not live in the natural world. It is the psychic displacement, the exile, that is inherent in civilized life. It is our homelessness."
-Chellis Glendinning

"In machine based societies, the machine has incorporated the demands of the civil power or of the market, and the whole life of society, of all classes and grades, must adjust to its rhythms. Time becomes lineal, secularized, "precious"; it is reduced to an extension in space that must be filled up, and sacred time disappears. The secretary must adjust to the speed of her electric typewriter; the stenographer to the stenotype machine; the factory worker to the line or lathe, the executive to the schedule of the train or plane and the practically instantaneous transmission of the telephone; the chauffeur to the superhighways; the reader to the endless stream of printed matter from high speed presses; even the schoolboy to the precise periodization of his day and to the watch on his wrist; the person at "leisure" to a mechanized domestic environment and the flow of efficiently schedule entertainment. The machines seem to run us, crystallizing in their mechanical or electronic pulses the means of our desires. The collapse in time to a extension in space, calibrated by machines, has bowdlerized our natural and human rhythms and helped disassociate us from ourselves. Even now, we hardly love the Earth or see with eyes or listen any longer with our ears, and we scarcely feel our hearts beat before they break in protest."
-Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive.