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Frankly, we don't deserve this planet, and Mother Nature
is about to take it away from us. It's time for us to either grow up, or
perish. And all these people who say "we have to protect the economy,
not the environment" should probably just be rounded up and shipped off
to Mars where they can play with the Martian dust all they want until they
finally get the picture.
~ Mike
Adams, the Health Ranger
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We are members of the most destructive
culture ever to exist. Our assault on the natural world, on indigenous
and other cultures, on women, on children, on all of us through the
possibility of nuclear suicide and other means--all these are
unprecedented in their magnitude and ferocity.
~ Derrick Jensen
Listening to the Land
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The next federal election will decide Canada's
fate. If any party - or combination of parties - that supports the FTA
and NAFTA forms the next government, Canada is dead.
~ Paul Hellyer
Globalization
is Killing Canada: Fight for Your Freedom - October 2000
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We abuse land because we regard it
as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which
we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.
~ Aldo Leopold
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Meanwhile, down at the mall, there’s
a mid-season sale. Everything’s discounted -- oceans, rivers, oil,
gene pools, fig wasps, flowers, childhoods, aluminum factories, phone
companies, wisdom, wilderness, civil rights, ecosystems, air -- all 4.6
billion years of evolution. It’s packed, sealed, tagged, valued and
available off the rack (no returns). As for justice, I’m told it’s
on offer, too. You can get the best that money can buy.
~ Unknown
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It is clear to me that we are going to
hit the wall. I feel like we're in a giant car, heading for a wall at
100 miles/hour, and everybody in the car is arguing about where they
want to sit. It doesn't matter who is driving - just turn the wheel and
put the brakes on. A few of us are saying that, but we're locked in the
trunk and nobody can hear us! As I see it, the economy is going to
crash, because it is built on nothing. Let's see if we are going to
survive.
~ David Suzuki
(quoted in "Leading the way to the Sacred Balance" interview
by Dominique La Roche in Health'N Vitality, Issue 22, Sept 2003)
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The Earth is not dying. It is being killed and
the people killing it have names and addresses.
~ Utah Phillips
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Everything faded into mist. The
past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.
~ George Orwell - 1984
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In 2005, the world . . . pass[ed] the
trillion-dollar mark in the expenditure, annually, on arms. We're
fighting for $50 billion annually for foreign aid for Africa: the
military total outstrips human need by 20 to 1. Can someone please
explain to me our contemporary balance of values?
~ Stephen Lewis
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. . . we have to accept that our
tragedy lies always in our past, that we have to live with our
ancestors' folly and suffer for it, just as they, in their turn,
suffered, and as we, through our vanity and ignorance, ensure the pain
and suffering of our own children. How to correct history, that's the
thing.
~ Robert Fisk
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Peace on earth depends on our ability to secure our
living environment.
~ Wangari Maathai, 2004
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Growth...for the sake of
growth...not determined by any overarching social principle...[is] the
phenomenon which, when it occurs in the human body, is called cancer.
~ Lesslie Newbigin, missionary and
theologian
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We are unwilling victims in a huge
radiation, chemical, and genetic engineering experiment, without our
informed consent.
~ Lynn Howard Ehrle,
Organic Consumers Association
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Eventually the world will no longer be
divided by the ideologies of 'left' and 'right' but by those who accept
ecological limits and those who don't.
~ Wolfgang Sachs
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Throughout history, it has been the
inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those
who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice
when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to
triumph.
~ Haile Selassie
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The simple fact is that
if anyone is unaware of the grave problems that threaten the survival of
life on this planet then they are anthropocentrically arrogant (man
is the centre of the universe) or just plain wilfully ignorant.
~ Captain Paul Watson,
Founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (1977)
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Progress is the absolute destruction
of the real world in favour of a technology that creates a comfortable
way of life for a few fortunately situated people. Within our lifetime
the differences between the Indian use of the land and the white use of
the land will become crystal clear. The Indian lived with his
land. The white destroyed his land, he destroyed the planet earth.
~ Vine Deloria, Jr, a renowned Native
American intellect, historian, author, scholar and activist and much
more, was born March 26, 1933 and died November 13, 2005. He will be
missed.
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Remember this:
that in politics the question seldom arises to do the idea right.
The best that generally
to be expected is to maintain a certain object. And for the
accomplishment of this object, many things have to be done which are
questionable.
And many things have to
be submitted to which, if rigorously investigated, could not be approved
of.
~ Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the 8th Prime Minister of Canada
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In the course of history,
there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of
consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground. A time when we have to
shed our fear and give hope to each other. --- That time is now.
-Dr. Wangari Maathai, Kenya's
"Green Militant" and winner of Nobel Peace Prize, 2004
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Our
present 'leaders'- the people of wealth and power - do not know what it
means to take a place seriously: to think it worthy, for it's own sake, of
love and study and careful work. They can not take any place seriously
because they must be ready at any moment, by the terms of wealth and power
in the modern world, to destroy any place.
~ Wendell Berry, Out of Your Car, Off
of Your Horse
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Only after the last tree has been cut
down. Only after the last river has been poisoned. Only after
the last fish has been caught. Only then will you find that money
cannot be eaten.
~ Cree Indian Prophesy
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We should not have to vouchsafe the
safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of it as
possible.
~ Monsanto director, in The
Ecologist, May 2005
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What kind of world will we leave to our
great-great-grandchildren? And on what basis will they judge us?
~ G. Miller, Ontario's Environment
Commissioner, Toronto Star, October 22 2004
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The
planet earth is a seamless structure with a thin slice of sustaining air,
water and soil that supports almost four billion people. This thin slice
belongs to all of us, and we use it and hold it in trust for future
Earthlings. Here we must take our stand.
~
Ralph
Nader 1970
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You can pay your farmer, or you can pay
your doctor.
~ Greg Higgins, Chefs Collaborative
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Our present 'leaders'- the people of
wealth and power - do not know what it means to take a place seriously: to
think it worthy, for it's own sake, of love and study and careful work.
They can not take anyplace seriously because they must be ready at any
moment, by the terms of wealth and power in the modern world, to destroy
any place.
~ Wendell Berry, Out of Your Car, Off
of Your Horse
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To put the world in order, we must first
put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must put the
family in order; to put the family in order, we must cultivate our
personal life; and to cultivate our personal life, we must first set our
hearts right.
~ Confucius
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When I despair, I remember that all
through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have
been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but
in the end they always fall. Think of it - always.
~ Mahatma Gandhi
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Who looks outside, dreams; who looks
inside, awakes.
~Carl Gustav Jung
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Science is not bad, but there is bad
science. Genetic engineering is bad science working with big
business for quick profits against the public good.
~Mae-Wan Ho, "Genetic Engineering:
Dream or Nightmare?" 1998
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The generation that destroys the
environment is usually not the generation that suffers.
~ Waangari Maathai, Kenya's "Green
Militant" and winner of Nobel Peace Prize, 2004
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A CORPORATION, essentially, is a pile of
money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
~Wendell Berry, The Idea of Local
Economy
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CORPORATION - noun: an ingenious device for obtaining profit
without individual responsibility.
~Ambrose Pierce, 1906
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Fascism begins the moment a ruling
class... begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power
of exploitation...
~Tommy Douglas
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Fascism should more properly be called
corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
~Benito Mussolini (cited by Lewis Lapham
in Harper's, January 2002)
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The earth is not dying, it is being
killed. And those who are killing it have names and addresses!
~Utah Phillips
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Concentrate on what cannot lie. The evidence...
~Gil Grissom
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If we did a better job of managing our resources more
sustainably, conflicts over them would be reduced. Protecting the
global environment is directly related to securing peace.
~Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai, 2005
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What some people mistake for the high
cost of living is really the cost of high living.
~Doug Larson
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Our present 'leaders'- the people of
wealth and power - do not know what it means to take a place seriously:
to think it worthy, for it's own sake, of love and study and careful
work. They can not take any place seriously because they must be ready
at any moment, by the terms of wealth and power in the modern world, to
destroy any place.
~Wendell Berry, Out of Your Car, Off
of Your Horse
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"When I was a kid, we dumped our
garbage in the local creek. Everything from old cars to potato
peels. It soon became evident we needed a plan and built refuse
dumps. Now we are getting into recycling. We have to speed
up the process and stop peeing on the living room floor."
~ Anonymous
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"Everything faded into mist. The past was erased,
the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth."
~ George Orwell - 1984
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Once we cut through the numbers games
and semantics we recognize that what economists call economic growth is
really the liquidation of the natural wealth of the planet.
~ Excerpt from Post-Issue Activism,
and Essay by Patrick Reinsborough
The entire text of Patrick's essay can
be found at http://www.rachel.org/library/getfile.cfm?ID=508
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At this turning point in our
relationship with Earth, we work for an evolution: from dominance to
partnership; from fragmentation to connection; from insecurity, to
interdependence.
~ Declaration of Interdependence,
David Suzuki Foundation
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Don't wrestle with pigs: You'll get
all muddy and the pigs love it.
~ Ralph Milton
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Society feels no remorse for ensuring
the world's youth are left to clean up our mess.
~ Paul Girling, Toronto, Canada,
taken from BBC News January 27, 2005
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The 'environmental crisis' has
happened because the human household or economy is in conflict at almost
every point with the household of nature.
~ Wendell Berry
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A corporation, essentially, is a pile
of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
~
Wendell Berry, The Idea of Local Economy
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I really think food -
nurtured with stewardship, tended without exploitation, and transacted
with justice - is the only hope for our world.
~ Tony Ends, Wisconsin Farmer,
November 2004
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Democracy is the art and science of
running the circus from the monkey cage.
~Henry Louis Mencken
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Dissent is the highest form of
patriotism.
~Thomas Jefferson
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We’ve signed a stunning new trade
pact with Canada. The Canadians don’t understand what they’ve
signed. In twenty years, they will be sucked into the U.S. economy.
~Clayton Yeutter, U.S. Trade
Representative, on October 3, 1987 (the day the Canada-U.S. Free Trade
Agreement was signed).
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Industrial farming isn’t just bad
for chickens and hogs, it destroys family farms, aquifers, soils, and
pollutes the air and water....Industrial meat moguls site their stinking
farms in the poorest communities and pay slave wages to their miniscule
work force for performing one of the most dangerous and unhealthy jobs
in America.
~ Robert Kennedy, Jr.
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The generation that destroys the
environment is usually not the generation that suffers.
~ Waangari Maathai, Kenya's
"Green Militant" and winner of Nobel Peace Prize,
2004
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Many wars we witness around the world
are over natural resources. Without a properly managed environment, all
of our lives are threatened ... In sustainable development, we plant the
seeds of peace.
~ Waangari Maathai, Kanya's
"Green Militant" and winner of Nobel Peace Price, 2004
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How come, at a time when the
environmental movement is stronger and richer than ever, our most
pressing ecological problems just get worse? It's as though the planet
has hit a Humpty-Dumpty moment in which unprecedented amounts of
manpower and money are unable to put the world back together
again."
~Time Magazine Aug. 26, 2002
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We cannot solve the problems we have
created with the same thinking that created them.
~Albert Einstein
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Here's the difference between fast
food and slow food.
Here are the ingredients you need to
make a strawberry milkshake the old-fashioned, slow-food way:
milk, cream, vanilla beans, strawberries, sugar and ice.
Here are the ingredients you need to
make a fast-food strawberry milkshake: milk-fat, non-fat milk,
sugar, sweet whey, high-fructose corn syrup, guar gum, mono- and
di-glycerides, cellulose gum, sodium phosphate, carrageenan, citric
acid, sodium benzoate, red colouring #40, and artificial strawberry
flavour (amyl acetate, amyl butyrate, amyl valerate, anethol, anisyl
formate, benzyl acetate, benzyl isobutyrate, butyric acid, cinnamyl
isobutyrate, cinnamyl valerate, cognac essential oil, diacetyl,
dipropyl kentone, ethyl acetate, ethyl amylketone, ethyl butyrate,
ethyl cinnamate, ethyl heptanoate, ethyl lactate, ethyl
methylphenylglycidate, ethyl nitrate, ethyl propionate, ethyl valerate,
heliotropin, hydroxphenyl-2 butanome, x-ionone, isobutyl anthranilate,
lemon oil, maltol, 4-methylacetophenone, methyl anthranilate, methyl
benzoate, methyl cinnamate, methyl heptine carbonate, methyl naphthyl
ketone, methyl salicylate, mint oil, neroll oil, nerolin, neryl
isobutyrate, orris butter, phenethyl alcohol, rose, rum ether, y-undecalactone,
vanillin, and solvent).
Now, which one of these
strawberry milkshakes would you rather drink?
~The Ecologist
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Supporters needed: Slow food is
an idea whose time has come. But it needs plenty of practitioners
and supporters who can help turn it into an unstoppable international
movement. Already more than 100,000 people around the world have
joined in the movement to reject fast food and the unsustainable
production system that supplies it. They have turned instead to
organically grown food that is as nutritious as it is palatable - and
conducive, as well, to a more leisurely and environmentally friendly way
of life.
~Eric Schlosser, The CCPA Monitor,
September, 2004
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Start at the table: Our defence
against fast food should begin at home at our own dining table.
Let us rediscover the flavours and savours of regional foods and
cooking, and banish the degrading effects of fast food.
~Eric Schlosser, The CCPA Monitor,
September 2004
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The first step: In the name of
productivity and higher economic growth, fast food has changed our way
of life and now threatens our environment and landscapes. A
conversion to slow food is the first step toward a progressive
alternative lifestyle.
~Eric Schlosser, The CCPA Monitor,
September 2004
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Enslaved by speed: We have been
enslaved by speed. To support our fast lifestyle, we have come to
rely on fast food. The price we pay in lost health, lost leisure,
lost privacy, lost family farms, and lost family relationships is surely
far too high.
~Eric Schlosser, The CCPA
Monitor, September 2004
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"Science is not bad, but there is
bad science. Genetic engineering is bad science working with big
business for quick profits against the public good."
~Mae-Wan Ho, "Genetic
Engineering: Dream or Nightmare?" 1998
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"Foreign investment is in fact
foreign debt. Our natural resources, which should be the heritage
of all Canadians, are now owned by foreign corporations and used for
their benefit, not ours."
~Duncan Cameron, Political Scientist
and Commentator, The CCPA Monitor, September, 2004
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The relationship between a regulator
and the regulated must never become one in which the regulator loses
sight of the principle that it regulates only in the public interest -
and not in the interest of the regulated."
~Justice Horace Krever, Commission on
the Blood system in Canada, 1996
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Industries can't be regulated by government - and for
environmental and health reasons they must be - if that government is in
bed with them."
~Globe
and Mail editorial on the Westray mine disaster, Dec. 2, 1997
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Water is a funny thing. When we
have enough of it, it has almost no value whatsoever. If you have
lots of water, you don't even think about it. But, if we don't
have enough, it becomes priceless and the most valuable resource there
is.
~ Dr. John Pomeroy, B.Sc., Ph.D.,
Saskatchewan Watershed Research Facility (SWRF), U of S
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"Intensive
agricultural operations" - industrial production models typified by
hog" mega-barns" - are incompatible with the NFU's vision of a
strong and sustainable agricultural sector based on small and
medium-sized family farms and thriving rural communities. In fact,
although mega-barn proponents try to appropriate to themselves the terms
"farm", "farmer", and "normal farm
practice", their operations represent the antithesis of responsible
farming, which cares for the land, the animals, and the future of the
community.
~ The National Farmers Union of Ontario
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The problems we face won't be solved by the minds that
created them.
~ Heifer International
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Humankind is engaged in a gigantic global experiment
as a result of the inefficient and often overuse of fertilizers, the
discharge of untreated sewage and the ever-rising emissions from
vehicles and factories. Unless urgent action is taken to tackle
the sources of the problem, it is likely to escalate rapidly.
~ Dr Klaus Toepfer, UNEP
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I see in the near future a
crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the
safety of my country. . . . Corporations have been enthroned, an era of
corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the
country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the
prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands
and the Republic is destroyed.
~Abraham
Lincoln [1864]
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The most important thing to do in solving a problem is
to begin.
~Unknown
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You can either take action, or you can hang back and
hope for a miracle. Miracles are great, but they are so unpredictable.
~Peter Drucker
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Nothing in the world can take the place of
persistence. Talent will not: Nothing is more common than
unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not: the world is
full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone
are omnipotent.
~Calvin Coolidge
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If we do what we've always done, we'll get what we've
always gotten.
~P.U. Bender
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Anyone who has accustomed himself to regard the life
of any living creature as worthless is in danger of arriving also at the
idea of worthless human lives.
~Albert Schweitzer
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Shop local. Eat local. Hire local. Work local.
~David Suzuki
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The future belongs to those who
give the next generation reasons to hope.
~Pierre Teilhard
DeChardin
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Particularly at a time when there is a real crisis for farmers
worldwide, it is even more vital to take stock of the long term
consequences of industrialized farming systems and re-examine the
inherent benefits of a more traditional approach to the overall goal of
true sustainability.
~Prince Charles in Regina, Friday, April 27, 2001
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We must be the change we wish to see.
~M.K. Gandhi
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Each of the great social achievements of recent decades
has come about not because of government proclamations, but because people
organized, made demands, and made it good politics to respond. It is the
political will of the people that makes and sustains the political will of
government.
~James Grant, Former Executive
Director, UNICEF
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The idea that our health could possibly
be related to the soil is an extremely radical one. It hasn't been
discussed much in medical literature. It isn't recognized as important by
your family physician. It isn't taught in high schools or colleges. If you
would ask the Department of Agriculture--Is our health related to the
soil? It would answer--Yes--but from that point on they and I ride on
different trains. They actually believe that to obtain health from food,
you have to use chemical fertilizers to build up the soil's fertility. I
shall try to show how ridiculous that attitude is.
~J.I.
Rodale, The Organic Front (1948)
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| All things are interconnected. Everything
goes somewhere. There's no such thing as a free lunch. Nature bats last.
~The Laws of Ecology
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| How we eat determines to a considerable
extent how the world is used.
~Wendell Berry
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| When spiders unite, they can tie down a
lion.
~Ethiopian Proverb
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| "It matters not whether market
control is by the central planning of a communist government or by large
corporations, the disastrous effects on our competitive markets are the
same."
~F.A. Hayek, Nobel prize winning
economist
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| We abuse land because
we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community
to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.
~Aldo Leopold
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| As the system is currently structured, farmers are just
the hamsters in the wheel that powers an expanding agribusiness empire.
And government’s solution to the farm crisis is for the hamsters to run
faster.
~NFU report: The Farm Crisis, Bigger Farms,
and the Myths of
‘Competition’ and ‘Efficiency’
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| There is nothing in which the birds differ more from
man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it
was before.
~ Robert Lynd
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| Canada will soon be home to as many pigs as people as hog
production in industrial-scale barns grows by more than one million each
year.
~ Vancouver Sun |
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| Never in the history of mismanagement was so much owed by
so few to so many.
~ Anonymous |
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