“The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson"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, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, 1977, page 55, 56, 69."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, My Name Is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization, 1994, page 64."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 scheduled
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, 1974, page 206.“All our lauded technological progress -- our very civilization - is like the axe in the hand of the pathological criminal.”
-Albert Einstein, from a letter to Heinrich Zangger, December 6, 1917."Complex societies, it must be emphasized again, are recent in human history. Collapse then is not a fall to some primordial chaos, but a return to the normal human condition of lower complexity. The notion that collapse is uniformly a catastrophe is contradicted, moreover, by the present theory. To the extent that collapse is due to declining marginal returns on investment in complexity, it is an
economizing process."
-Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies, 1988, page 198."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."Societies collapse when stress requires some organizational change. In a situation where the marginal utility of still greater complexity would be too low, collapse is an economic alternative....
under a situation of declining marginal returns collapse may be the most appropriate response...One ambiguity in this view is the major loss of population that some times accompanies collapse...In fact, there are indications that leveling or actual decline of population may often precede collapse, even by several centuries...Collapse, if and when it comes again,
will this time be global. No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole. "
-Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies, 1988, page 198-199, 214."What if a
small group of world leaders were to conclude that the principal risk to the Earth [environment] comes from the actions of the rich countries? And if the world is to survive, those rich countries would have to sign an agreement reducing their impact on the environment. Will they do it? The group's conclusion is 'no'. The rich countries won't do it. They won't change. So, in order to save the planet, the group decides:
Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring that about? This group of world leaders form a secret society to bring about an economic collapse."
-Maurice Strong, Secretary General of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development; Senior Advisor to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan; Senior Advisor to World Bank President James Wolfensohn; Chairman of the Earth Council; Chairman of the World Resources Institute; Co-Chairman of the Council of the World Economic Forum; member of Toyota's International Advisory Board........quoted in Environmentalism: Ideology and Power, Donald Gibson, 2002, page 95."If we don't change, our species will not survive... Frankly, we may get to the point where
the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse."
-Maurice Strong, National Review magazine, September 1, 1997, page