Provocative Quotes for Activists and Educators For use in high-school, college, and adult education regarding environmental health. Compiled by Maria Minno
Home Page	Amendment I of the Constitution of the United States of America Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.	The First Amendment of the United States Constitution, Adopted December 15, 1791.
Click here to find out about nutritional therapy, which is part of a complete Optimal Health Program offered by Phoenix Healing Massage.	Our food system desperately demands subversion. We face unprecedented environmental and nutritional crises.	The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved -- Sandor Ellix Katz, 2006, p.xviii.
Click here to open the Guidelines for Healthy Eating page.	Polls of urban American children (taken in 1890, 1937, and 1959) asking them to rank their preferences in games, showed that pastimes with seeds, nuts, flowers and leaves were near the top of the list in 1980 but had disappeared from the list by 1959. In the late spring when the days were long and lazy, more like summer than spring, the flowers of Calycanthus florida filled the garden air with a haunting scent. Its common names sing of the perfume of this flower: sweet shrub, strawberry shrub, and Carolina allspice.	Honeysuckle Sipping – The Plant Lore of Childhood by Jeanné R. Chesanow, 1987, pp. 10-11; 40-41.
Click here for information on nutrition basic to the practice of Nutritional Therapy.	Our children no longer learn how to read the great Book of Nature from their own direct experience or how to interact creatively with the seasonal transformations of the planet. They seldom learn where their water comes from or where it goes. We no longer coordinate our human celebration with the great liturgy of the heavens.	--Wendell Berry, quoted in Last Child in the Woods – Richard Louv, 2005, p.113.
The Gainesville Holistic Health Fair was held on Saturday, February 7, 2009 at the United Church of Gainesville. If you were there, please fill out our survey form - just 10 questions. Click here!	…in coming decades farmers in all probability will be subject to unprecedented political capriciousness, born of confusion in the face of energy and water shortages, accumulating environmental stresses, and a rising tide of national debt and trade deficits, and compounded by their own political decline. They are likely to be increasingly at the mercy of a growing urban population who have come to think of cheap and abundant food as a birthright. If advocates of sustainable agriculture are to be more than merely right, if they are also to be successful in transforming agriculture, they must acquire a large constituency that understands the connections between eating well, health, and what happens on and to farms across the country.	Ecological Literacy – David W. Orr, 1992, p.179.
Holistic Health Resource Guide from the 2007 Gainesville Holistic Health Fair	The current vogue for poisons has failed utterly to take into account these most fundamental considerations. As crude a weapon as the cave man’s club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life – a fabric on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the other miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways. These extraordinary capacities of life have been ignored by the practitioners of chemical control who have brought to their task no “high-minded orientation,” no humility before the vast forces with which they tamper.	Silent Spring – Rachel L. Carson, 1962, p.261-262.
Provocative Quotes for Advocates and Educators	Little by little their hearts turned away from the people. The more meat they brought home, the more they sold to the traders. They were becoming accustomed to the things that money could buy. The elders of the village spoke sternly to the brothers. “you must feed the people. They are hungry.” The brothers answered angrily, “If they want meat, they can pay us for it like the traders do!”	The Invisible Hunters – Harriet Rohmer, Octavio Chow, Morris Vidaure, 1987, p.20.
NatureFinder.net	Several conclusions are beyond contention. First, we are crossing critical planetary thresholds, or will soon do so. Second, we are woefully ignorant of the critical causal linkages between complex systems and the effects of human actions. Third, we do not have readily available data about the “vital signs” of the planet comparable, say, to the Dow Jones index. Fourth, most research is still directed toward manipulation of the natural world, not toward understanding the impacts of doing so, or to the development of low-impact alternatives. It is a fact of no small importance that key parts of the evidence were gathered by freelance scientists operating outside the normal channels of large, well-funded scientific organizations.	Ecological Literacy – David W. Orr, 1992, p.50.
Wild Fermentation – Sandor Ellix Katz, 2003, pp.11-12.	Biodiversity is just as important at the micro level. Call it micro-biodiversity. Your body is an ecosystem that can function most effectively when populated by diverse species of microorganisms. Sure, you can buy “probiotic” nutritional supplements containing specific selected bacteria that promote healthy digestion. But by fermenting foods and drinks with wild microorganisms present in your home environment, you become more interconnected with the life forces of the world around you. Your environment becomes you, as you invite the microbial populations you share the Earth with to enter your diet and your intestinal ecology. Wild fermentation is a way of incorporating the wild into your body, becoming one with the natural world. Wild foods, microbial cultures included, possess a great, unmediated life force, which can help us adapt to shifting conditions and lower our susceptibility to disease. These microorganisms are everywhere, and the techniques for fermenting with them are simple and flexible.
Wild Fermentation – Sandor Ellix Katz, 2003, p.xii.	The science and art of fermentation is, in fact, the basis of human culture: without culturing, there is no culture. Nations that still consume cultured foods, such as France with its wine and cheese, and Japan with its pickles and miso, are recognized as nations that have culture. Culture begins at the farm, not in the opera house, and binds a people to a land and its artisans. Many commentators have observed that America is a nation lacking culture – how can we be cultured when we eat only food that has been canned pasteurized, and embalmed? How ironic that the road to culture in our germophobic technological society requires, first and foremost, that we enter into an alchemical relationship with bacteria and fungi, and that we bring to our tables foods and beverages prepared by the magicians, not machines.
Wild Fermentation – Sandor Ellix Katz, 2003, p.9.	Our culture is terrified of germs and obsessed with hygiene. The more we glean about disease-causing viruses, bacteria, and other microorganisms, the more we fear exposure to all forms of microscopic life. Every new sensationalized killer microbe gives us more reason to defend ourselves with vigilance. … Twenty years ago, mass marketing of antibacterial soap was but a glimmer in some pharmaceutical executive’s eye. It has quickly become the standard hand-washing hygiene product. … Antibacterial soap is just another exploitative and potentially dangerous product being sold by preying on people’s fears. The antibacterial compounds in these soaps, most commonly [the endocrine-disruptor and biocide] triclosan, kill the more susceptible bacteria but not the heartier ones. … Your skin, your orifices, and the surfaces of your home are all covered with microorganisms that help protect you (and themselves) from potentially harmful organisms that you both encounter. Constantly assaulting the bacteria on, in, and around you with antibacterial compounds weakens one line of defense your body uses against disease organisms. Microorganisms not only protect us by competing with potentially dangerous organisms, they teach the immune system how to function.
The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved, by Sandor Ellix Katz, 2006, p.205.	Isn’t it curious that we use the word culture to describe both the bacteria in yogurt and sauerkraut as well as language, art, science, and the totality of human endeavor?
Dreaming the Dark – Starhawk, 1982, p.3.	Yet the power we sense in a seed, in the growth of a child, the power we feel writing, weaving, working, creating, making choices, has nothing to do with threats of annihilation. It has more to do with the root meaning of the word power, from the (late popular) Latin, podere (“to be able”). It is the power that comes from within.
IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, pages 178-179.	How do we prevent this problem of waste in the first place? Zero waste represents a global vision of sustainability. Zero waste is a way of bringing to reality people’s desire to live on the planet in the way that nature intended, in a sustainable way, to live within the limits of the biosphere, not to dominate the biosphere. We have to look at the way nature exists. She has all her species living for millions and millions of years within this delicate biosphere. How does she do it? She constantly taps into the energy from the sun, and she doesn’t make any waste.. Zero waste. Nature recycles everything. So can we. Why I Went to Jail to Protect My Daughter by Terri Swearingen,
Ecology of a Cracker Childhood – Janisse Ray, 1999, p.127.	For me, growing up among piles of scrap iron and glittering landmines of broken glass that scattered ivory scars across my body, among hordes of rubber tires that streaked my legs black, among pokeweed and locust, I attribute the opening of my heart to one clump of pitcher plants that still survives on the backside of my father’s junkyard. I know it now to be the hooded species, Sarracenia minor, that sends the red bonnets of its traps knee-high out of soggy ground. In spring it blooms loose, yellow, exotic tongues. … The pitcher plant taught me to love rain, welcoming days of drizzle and sudden thundering downpours, drops trailing down its hoods and leaves, soaking the ground. In my fascination with pitcher plant, I learned to detest artificial bouquets of plastic and silk. Its carnivory taught the sinlessness of predation and its columns of dead insects the glory of purpose no matter how small. In that plant I was looking for a manera de ser, a way of being – no, not for a way of being but of being able to be. I was looking for a patch of ground that supported the survival of rare, precious, and endangered biota within my own heart.
Globalizing Indigenous Resistance by Diana Ruiz, IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page 189.	In Peru, mining’s destructive and violent legacy dates back all the way to the 1500s, the beginning of the bloody reign of the conquistadors. Today it is facilitated by institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which pressure developing countries like Peru to rely on selling their natural resources in the world market. The Yanacocha gold mine, Newmont’s largest, has done nothing to improve the well-being of the province of Cajamarca, the second poorest province of twenty-four in Peru. Lands have been destroyed, water and soil severely contaminated, and communities disempowered. But the good news is that around the world, communities are rising up and organizing themselves locally, regionally, and globally to defend their human rights, their right to clean air, clean water, self-determination, and autonomy.
Reversing the Cancer Epidemic by Samuel Epstein, IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, pages 87-88.	What has been happening to our ability to treat and cure cancers over all this time? In the 1960’s, there was about a 49 percent five-year survival rate. Forty-nine percent of people survived five years after diagnosis in the 1960’s, when virtually no money was being spent in these areas. Now, after billions of dollars have been poured into cancer treatment, the length of survival is about six years. It has barely increased over the last forty years for the great majority of common cancers in the overall population. … How does all this square up with what we are constantly hearing about these miracle cancer drugs? The answer lies in a deceptive statistical ploy. The efficacy of cancer drugs is determined on the basis of what we call tumor response. If a patient with cancer takes a drug and at the end of six months the tumor has shrunk in size, that’s a tumor response. That’s supposedly fine. We’re doing very well indeed. Let’s go out and market this miracle drug. Let’s go out and make millions and billions out of it. However, if you follow up with these patients who have had a tumor response at six months after diagnosis and treatment, in twelve to eighteen months you generally find that the original tumor has recurred and often grown larger. Sometimes, the treated patient will die sooner than the untreated patient—and this is quite apart from the fact that the treated patient’s quality of life is often devastated by highly toxic chemotherapy and radiation. [And by the costs of treatment].
Webs of Power – Notes from the Global Uprising by Starhawk, 2002, p.161-162.	The humans-as-blight vision also is self-defeating in organizing around environmental issues. It’s hard to get people enthused about a movement that – even if only unconsciously – envisions its extinction as a good. And people don’t act effectively out of feeling bad, guilty, wrong, and inauthentic. As long as we see humans as separate from nature, whether we place ourselves above or below, we will inevitably set up human / nature oppositions in which everyone loses.
Overcoming Environmental Racism, by Henry Clark, IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page 195.	I was part of a delegation that went to Nigeria last year to explore how U.S.-based oil companies operate there. Chevron has operations in the Niger Delta area, as do Shell and the French company Total. The companies here in the United States pay lip service to wanting to be good neighbors and talk about environmental protection, but when you leave the United States (and it’s bad enough here), when you go to countries like Nigeria or South Africa, you see that they can recklessly destroy the environment there with impunity. They dump garbage in streams that people use for their livelihood. Oil is being taken out of their yards, but the oil companies do not invest in the community at all. They do not hire local people. They say that since they cut a deal with the Nigerian government whereby it gets about 60 percent of the take and the oil companies get 40 percent, it’s the Nigerian government that should be investing in local communities. But the government there is corrupt, and the people cannot depend on it to invest anything in their communities. When villagers complain or demonstrate, the oil companies call in the police and the military.
In Harm’s Way: Toxic Threats to Child Development, a report by Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility, 2000, page 9.	Unlike an adult, the developing child exposed to neurotoxic chemicals during critical development windows of vulnerability may suffer from lifelong impacts on brain function.
Travels -- William Bartram, 1791, pp. 115-116.	It was obvious that every delay would but tend to increase my dangers and difficulties, as the sun was near setting, and the alligators gathered around my harbour from all quarters. From these considerations I concluded to be expeditious in my trip to the lagoon, in order to take some fish. Not thinking it prudent to take my fusee with me, lest I might lose it overboard in case of a battle, which I had every reason to dread before my return, I therefore furnished myself with a club for my defence, went on board, and penetrating the first line of those which surrounded my harbour, they gave way; but being pursued by several very large ones, I kept strictly on the watch, and paddled with all my might towards the entrance of the lagoon, hoping to be sheltered there from the multitude of my assailants; but ere I had half-way reached the place, I was attacked on all sides, several endeavoring to overset the canoe. My situation now became precarious to the last degree: two very large ones attacked me closely, at the same instant, rushing up with their heads and part of their bodies above the water, roaring terribly and belching floods of water over me. They struck their jaws together so close to my ears, as almost to stun me, and I expected every moment to be dragged out of the boat and instantly devoured. But I applied my weapons so effectually about me, tough at random, that I was so successful as to beat them off a little; when, finding that they designed to renew the battle, I made for the shore, as the only means left for me for my preservation; for, by keeping close to it, I should have my enemies on one side of me only.
IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page 197.	The key to achieving environmental justice is that communities have to organize themselves. None of these victories would ever have occurred if our communities were not organized to hold these companies and these agencies accountable to work toward a clean, green, safe environment for all of us. --Overcoming Environmental Racism, by Henry Clark,
IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page 88.	For the majority of cancer chemotherapeutic agents, there is questionable evidence of efficacy. There are some relatively rare cancers for which there is strong evidence of efficacy; for childhood cancer, where treatment is successful, the incidence of long-term recurrences are very high. Delayed toxic complications such as neurological, behavioral, and reproductive problems are also common, and the incidence of secondary cancers caused by the treatment itself is very high. --Reversing the Cancer Epidemic by Samuel Epstein,
A Shadow and a Song – The Struggle to Save an Endangered Species – Mark Jerome Walters, 1992, p.143.	In other words, faced with limited resources and a burgeoning number of endangered animals, Fish and Wildlife would have to choose which species to try to salvage and which to allow to die. For every dollar spent on the dusky [seaside sparrow], an endangered species somewhere else would languish with a dollar less. Whatever Fish and Wildlife’s failure in the application of sound scientific principles, this was also a failure of political nerve—to publicly admit to the policy that it was actively carrying out. With colossal mistakes having been made at almost every step of the way in the aborted effort to save the dusky, the sparrow now was to be given up for lost.
Redesigning Environmental Health by Anthony Cortese IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page 27.	Virtually every woman who gets pregnant has morning sickness or nausea in the first trimester of pregnancy. A biologist named Marge Profet reasoned that something nearly everybody experiences must have a useful evolutionary purpose. She started doing research and found that the fetus is most vulnerable to toxins in the first trimester of pregnancy. After that, its vulnerability drops off by a factor of ten to twenty. So women’s bodies are telling them that eating bland foods and foods with lower risks of toxicity (lower on the food chain, free of pesticides, and so forth) seems like a really important thing to do in the first trimester. Interestingly, studies also indicate that when a doctor gives a woman anti-nausea medication, or she just doesn’t have nausea during the first trimester of pregnancy, there is actually a higher risk of birth defects and miscarriage. Again, this insight reaffirms that if we don’t understand the evolutionary basis of our bodies’ responses and their ecological context, we can’t practice medicine in the right way, and in fact, we can actually do more harm than good. And what did Hippocrates tell us? First, do no harm.
In Harm’s Way: Toxic Threats to Child Development, a report by Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility, 2000, page 10.	The impact of children’s developmental disorders on children and families is immense. Parents, teachers, school administrators, and communities spend increasing amount of time, money, and energy trying to help children acquire skills that once came more naturally. Afflicted children risk early school dropout, teen parenting, drug abuse, crime, institutionalization and suicide. A constant, consuming struggle of the verge of failure is known all too well by the children, their families, and providers.
Reversing the Cancer Epidemic by Samuel Epstein, IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page 83.	While much is known about the science of cancer, its prevention depends largely, if not exclusively, on political action. Dr. Samuel Epstein is a professor of occupational and environmental medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He began his career as a laboratory chief documenting the metabolic origins of cancer, impeccably documenting the direct effects of industrial chemicals as causes of Cancer. He wrote the original proposal for what became the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976. During the Regan era, he was on a White House hit list and efforts were made to keep him off any government committees studying cancer prevention. An actual smoking gun memo reads “Get him out. Horrible.” In 1998 he was honored with the Right Livelihood Award, known as the “alternative Nobel Prize.” He has written innumerable scientific articles and several compelling books, including “The Politics of Cancer” and “The Safe Shopper’s Bible.” He is the chairman of the Cancer Prevention Coalition, a global network of scientists, public servants, and activists.
A Shadow and a Song – The Struggle to Save an Endangered Species – Mark Jerome Walters, 1992, p.198.	On December 12, 1990, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officially declared the dusky seaside sparrow extinct, and its name was removed from the federal register list of endangered species.
Webs of Power – Notes from the Global Uprising by Starhawk, 2002, p.163.	[N]ature wants to talk to us. Far from being better off without us, nature would be incomplete without human eyes admiring her and human voices singing praise, human hands tending, pruning, and gathering, and human bellies filled with her bounty. The plants will die if they are not cared about.
Healing Wise – Susun S. Weed, 1989, p.12.	In the Wise Woman tradition, all health, all coming to wholeness, begins with a return to the void. To heal, to become whole, we turn again around the spiral of our life. We turn again around the spiral and enter the void, the great unknown, knowing only that our form is reformed, that our form is transformed, that rebirth inevitably follows death.
IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page 84.	There are two very important reasons why you should take an interest in cancer prevention and the present cancer epidemic: One in every two men and one in every three women will get cancer in your lifetime, and most of these cancers are avoidable. We are failing to avoid them because of a complex of scientific, political, financial, and public policy considerations. --Reversing the Cancer Epidemic by Samuel Epstein,
In Harm’s Way: Toxic Threats to Child Development, a report by Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility, 2000, page 10.	The number of children known to be affected by developmental disabilities is staggering and appears to be increasing.
Redesigning Environmental Health by Anthony Cortese, IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, pages 29-30.	Contemporary chronic diseases such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, asthma, and depression are all diseases whose rates can be moderated by how we design and build our communities. In fact, land-use planning and zoning have their roots in a desire to protect the public’s health. …Dr. Dick Jackson tells us that as far back as 1926, the US Supreme Court argued that public health protection was one of the most basic responsibilities of local government, thus giving local government a legal mandate to restrict or control land-use decisions in a given community. Land-use decisions directly affect health. Sprawl is a major cause of health problems. Since 1960, the amount of driving—per capita vehicle miles of travel—has increased by 250 percent. We add 90,000 new automobiles to the roads every day. We turn 364 acres of farmland or forest into developed land every hour in the United States.
Reversing the Cancer Epidemic by Samuel Epstein, IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, pages 88-89.	The cancer establishment consists of the NCI [National Cancer Institute], ACS [American Cancer Society], and a national network of comprehensive cancer centers in major universities and hospitals all over the country. Their assets and resources are overwhelming. Apart from massive financial resources, they have major influence on the media through well-financed public relations campaigns that blanket the country. The cancer establishment is fixated overwhelmingly on [the profitable aspect of cancer,] damage control: screening, diagnosis, and treatment, and also genetic research. It displays virtual indifference, if not hostility, to cancer prevention. At the National Cancer Institute, for instance, occupational cancer, the single most important avoidable cancer, which we estimate is responsible for nearly 20 percent of all cancer deaths in this country, receives about 1 percent of the budget. … The ACS has a long track record of actual hostility to cancer prevention. It fought against the Delaney Amendment, which says, “Thou shalt not add any level of carcinogens to food.” It issued joint statements of support with the Chlorine Institute saying there’s no evidence that organo-chlorine pesticides represent any hazard whatsoever. A few years ago, just before PBS was getting ready to air a program called Pesticides in Our Children’s Food, a script …was stolen from the desk of Marty Coughan, the program director, and found its way to a PR operation with close ties to the ACS. Immediately, memoranda were sent out to all regional ACS divisions calling on them to contact the media and trivialize concerns about the risks of infant and childhood foods being laced with carcinogenic pesticides. … [T]here are …deep, interlocking conflicts of interest between the cancer establishment and the cancer drug, mammography, and other industries. This is most obvious in relation to the ACS, but even a previous director of the National Cancer Institute admitted in an unusually candid moment that the NCI has become a “governmental pharmaceutical company.”
Healing Wise – Susun S. Weed, 1989, p.20.	Every problem, each pain, disability, disease, is understood, in the Wise Woman way, as a hole for the entry of wholeness, a portal for the arrival of an ally. An ally who opens doorways of transformation. An ally who can protect you. An ally who brings you gifts. An ally who returns your missing pieces. An ally who guides you toward integration, through disintegration. An ally of wholeness, who accepts all of you. An ally who reminds you of your mortality and your immortality.
IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page 30.	During the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, the city restricted driving and reduced traffic by about 22 or 23 percent. Smog was reduced by roughly 30 percent, and emergency visits to the hospital for asthma went down by 42 percent. Redesigning Environmental Health by Anthony Cortese
IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page 90.	According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, the leading national watchdog of charities, “The American Cancer Society is more interested in accumulating wealth than saving lives.” --Reversing the Cancer Epidemic by Samuel Epstein,
Silent Spring – Rachel L. Carson, 1962, p.61.	Arsenic provides a classic case of the virtually permanent poisoning of the soil. Although arsenic as a spray on growing tobacco has been largely replaced by the synthetic organic insecticides since the mid-‘40’s, the arsenic content of cigarettes made from American-grown tobacco increased more than 300 per cent between the years of 1932 and 1952. Later studies have revealed increases of as much as 600 percent. Dr. Henry S. Satterlee, an authority on arsenic toxicology, says that although organic insecticides have been largely substituted for arsenic, the tobacco plantations are now thoroughly impregnated with residues of a heavy and relatively insoluble poison, arsenate of lead. This will continue to release arsenic in soluble form. The soil of a large proportion of the land planted to tobacco has been subjected to “cumulative and well-nigh permanent poisoning,” according to Dr. Satterlee. Tobacco grown in the eastern Mediterranean countries where arsenical insecticides are not used has shown no such increase in arsenic content.
Reversing the Cancer Epidemic by Samuel Epstein, IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page 90.	In addition, both the ACS [American Cancer Society] and NCI [National Cancer Institute] have maintained a policy over the last few decades of harassing practitioners of alternative and complementary medicine on the grounds that there’s no evidence of efficacy or effectiveness. The overriding irony is that for the majority of the uses of toxic chemotherapy, there isn’t significant evidence of increased survival rates. However, different standards are used for conventional versus alternative or complementary therapies. At the same time, the cancer establishment has, until very recently, denied public funds for development of trials for alternative or complementary therapy. Running deep through all of this chicanery is a pattern of corporate and white-collar crime that is well documented. It is inextricably linked with decision making at the regulatory agency level, and it is linked with the policies and priorities of the ACS and NCI.
The Coming Age of Ecological Medicine by Kenny Ausubel, IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, pages 10-11.	Alternative medicine is arguably the single largest progressive social movement of our era. As it becomes every more mainstream, those working to advance public health are increasingly collaborating with those working to restore the earth’s ecological health. Growing public awareness of the direct links between our personal health and environmental health is arising as a potent force in global politics. As suggested by Michael Lerner, founder of Commonweal, environmental health could well emerge as the central human rights issue of our age. We all have the right to be born free—free from poisons.
In Harm’s Way: Toxic Threats to Child Development, a report by Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility, 2000, page 11.	It is no longer in keeping with the state of scientific understanding to attribute the bulk of these developmental disabilities to genetic inheritance. Rather, we now understand that the outcomes are the result of interacting factors, among which are exposures to environmental contaminants that are preventable.
IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page 91.	Today, I believe the time has come for a public health crimes tribunal, like the war crimes tribunal. Bulletproof documentation exists detailing acts of manipulation, suppression, distortion, and destruction of data by a wide range of corporations resulting in disease and death. --Reversing the Cancer Epidemic by Samuel Epstein,
Dreaming the Dark – Starhawk, 1982, p.9.	And so we live our lives feeling powerless and inauthentic – feeling that the real people are somewhere else, that the characters on the daytime soap operas or the conversations on the late-night talk shows are more real than the people and the conversations in our lives; believing that the movie stars, the celebrities, the rock stars, the People Magazine-people live out the real truth and drama of our times, while we exist as shadows, and our unique lives, our losses, our passions, which cannot be counted out or measured, which were not approved or graded, or sold to us at a discount, are not the true value of the world.
IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page 86.	Dietary fat, often named as a key factor in cancer, is not in itself necessarily a cause… It’s what’s in the fat that matters, the contamination by pesticides and industrial chemicals that concentrate in fatty tissues in animals fed in feedlots in the highly industrialized countries, and that rise up the food chain. --Reversing the Cancer Epidemic by Samuel Epstein,
IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page 35.	Advocates of chemicals and their widespread use argue that the dose makes the poison, that large amounts of anything can hurt you, and that because our exposures are very low, we don’t need to worry. But any good toxicology textbook will tell you that the timing, pattern, and duration of an exposure to a toxin can be as important as dosage. Even small exposures in a developing child that occur during certain windows of vulnerability can have an impact that may be long lasting or permanent, whereas if that same exposure had happened days, weeks, or months later, it would have had little or no impact. We have seen in animal brain studies that an exposure on a certain day during embryonic development may have one set of impacts, and that the same exposure three days later can produce a totally different set of impacts. --Generations at risk: Children’s Health and the Environment by Ted Schettler,
Reversing the Cancer Epidemic by Samuel Epstein, IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, pages 85-86.	What are the facts of the cancer epidemic? The incidence and mortality rates have escalated dramatically since the 1940s. Since 1950, there’s been about a 55 percent overall increase in all cancer rates. … For example, testicular cancer is up 100 percent; for men between 28 and 35, the incidence has gone up by 300 percent. Adult brain cancer: 80 percent. Breast cancer and male colon cancer: 60 percent. Adult brain cancer: 80 percent. Brain and nervous system cancers in children: 40 percent. … Contrary to what industry and the … [National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society] tell us, it’s not the fact that people are living longer. The incidence figures are age standardized, or adjusted to reflect the increasing longevity of the population. What we’ve seen in children is a perfect example. The very high increase in childhood cancer makes it clear we’re not dealing with problems of longevity.
One Spirit Many Peoples by Stephen Harrod Buhner, 1997, page 14.	The sacred light, which had been my companion for so many years, manifests itself in many forms, each with its own intelligence, power, and knowledge. Many places on the Earth are filled with particularly focused concentrations of this sacredness, and when human beings visit them the sacred light can come into them, fill them up, and rejuvenate them for long periods afterward. This concentration of sacredness was understood by many indigenous tribes and prompted them to set aside certain places as holy. In addition to the sacredness of place, there are kinds of life and types of intelligence (many not recognized by Western science and society) that reside in those places. These beings have their own reasons for existing, their own destinies, and their own unique relationships with humans. They are called by many names (angels and devas among others) and they were well known to the indigenous tribes of the Americas. In New Mexico they are so numerous, and the power of the land is so extreme, that a vibrant, living electricity fills the air. This vibrancy beats up on the consciousness of most Americans and some of it works its way into where the dimmed and buried self rises up and reaches out to feel its kin-self manifested so strongly in the world. For me, for many years, touching the sacred power of New Mexico's land was almost overwhelming. Like that original vision this trip pulled me into another world and there, awaiting me, were new lessons, new challenges.
In Harm’s Way: Toxic Threats to Child Development, a report by Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility, 2000, page 12.	About 80,000 chemicals are in commercial use in the United States. The great majority of these compounds have been synthesized since World War II and are, therefore, new to the human environment in the evolutionary time frame. Documented and potential exposures are substantial… From the moment of conception until reaching adulthood, children are regularly exposed to large numbers of metals, solvents, pesticides and other industrial substances, alone and in complex mixtures.
When Healing Becomes a Crime byKenny Ausubel, IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page 93.	In fact, the unspoken reason for the renaissance of alternative cancer therapies is sadly obvious: The medical establishment has largely lost its celebrated war on cancer, which is based on surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. But what has remained hidden from most people is the existence of the other cancer war: organized medicine’s zealous campaign against “unorthodox” cancer treatments and their practitioners. Over the course of the twentieth century, innovators such as Harry Hoxsey advanced more than one hundred alternative approaches, at least several of which have seemed to hold significant promise. Yet rather than being the subject of interest and investigation by mainstream medicine, their champions have been ridiculed, threatened with the loss of professional licenses, harassed, prosecuted, and driven out of the country.
IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page 34.	The first environment is the womb. … Almost anything a pregnant woman internalizes from the outside world that gets circulated in her blood can make it across the placenta. Some compounds do so much more quickly than others, but virtually everything can ultimately get across. Babies are basically exposed to what their mother is exposed to… --Generations at risk: Children’s Health and the Environment by Ted Schettler,
IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page 99.	In 1969, Dr. Hardin Jones released a shocking report on this issue at the Science Writers Convention sponsored by the ACS [American Cancer Society]. Jones, a respected professor of medical physics from the University of California at Berkeley and an expert on statistics and the effects of radiation and drugs, concluded that “the common malignancies show a remarkably similar rate of demise, whether treated or untreated.” Joining the fray, Nobel laureate James Watson charged that the American public had been sold a “nasty bill of goods, about cancer.” This eminent co-discoverer of the DNA double helix remarked bluntly that the war on cancer was “a bunch of s--t.” --Reversing the Cancer Epidemic by Samuel Epstein,
World as Lover, World as Self by Joanna Macy. 1991, page 29	Yesterday morning at this time I was standing for about an hour in the sweet, gentle, English drizzle. I was in a large meadow with about 40 men and women; three of them held toddlers. We stood in a circle and at the center of the circle were two ancient, sacred, standing stones. We had come there at the close of a five-day workshop on ecology, and our band included activists from all over the island—social workers, civil servants, artisans, teachers, homemakers—drawn together by a common concern for the fate of our planet. In the presence of those stones, thousands of years old, we seemed to find ourselves in two dimensions of time simultaneously. One was vast and immeasurable. As we tried to reach back to the ancient Earth wisdom of the culture that erected the stones, we sensed the long, long journey of the unfolding of life on this planet. At the same time, given the focus of the workshop, we were acutely aware of this particular historical moment when forces our culture has unleashed seem to be destroying our world. Among us were Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Pagans. Yet, despite the differing belief systems to which we belonged, the prayers and affirmations that spontaneously arose in that circle expressed a common faith and fueled a common hope. They bespoke a shared commitment to engage in actions and changes in lifestyle on behalf of our Earth and its beings. They expressed a bonding to this Earth, where we go beyond feeling sorry for the Earth or scared for ourselves, to experience relationship—relationship that can be spiritually as well as physically sustaining, a relationship that can empower.
IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page 34.	Proportionate to their size, children take in far more air, food, and water than adults, so their exposures to toxins are higher. … Furthermore, children spend far more time on the floor or near the floor than adults do. They crawl around on carpets and then stick their hands in their mouths. Carpets are a tremendous repository for pesticides. Carpets actually turn out to be the largest source of pesticide exposure for most children. The dust that accumulates in indoor environments is contaminated with pesticides. It’s estimated that about 70 percent of a child’s total pesticide exposure comes from indoor dust. --Generations at risk: Children’s Health and the Environment by Ted Schettler,
Adapted from Webs of Power – Notes from the Global Uprising by Starhawk, 2002, p.238.	The Global Justice Movement: What We Want « People everywhere protecting the viability of the life-sustaining systems of the planet. « Respect for the realm of the sacred, of things too precious to be commodified. « Communities in control of their own resources and destinies. « The rights and heritages of indigenous communities acknowledged and respected. « Enterprises rooted in communities and responsible to communities and to future generations. « Opportunity, open to all, for human beings to meet their needs and fulfill their dreams and aspirations. « Labor that receives just compensation, security, and dignity. « The human community with a collective responsibility to assure the basic means of life, growth, and development for all its members. « Democracy such that all people have a voice in the decisions that affect them, including economic decisions.
In Harm’s Way: Toxic Threats to Child Development, a report by Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility, 2000, page 14.	What more do we really need to know before concluding that we must take the steps necessary to avoid contaminating food with mercury if we want to protect the developing brain?
IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page 99.	These “proven” cancer treatments are themselves largely unproven. The standard of proof for therapeutic efficacy is in fact a double standard. Surgery was grandfathered in as standard practice early in the twentieth century without randomized, double-blind clinical trials, which only became widespread in the 1960s, with the advent of chemotherapy. Its dangers and limitations have since been only superficially acknowledged or studied, and little is known about its efficacy in relation to a baseline marker of no treatment. --Hoxsey: When Healing Becomes a Crime by Kenny Ausubel,
IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page 43.	For thirty years the precautionary principle has been used widely in Europe, mostly with regard to toxic chemicals. But in the United States it is best known as a provision in the preamble of the 1992 environmental treaty known as the Rio Declaration. The Rio Declaration says this: “Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.” --The Precautionary Principle: Golden Rule for the New Millennium,
One Spirit Many Peoples by Stephen Harrod Buhner, 1997, pages 61-62.	Then one day you begin to see and feel the interlocking patterns of communication of the Earth—how the plants think, the stones, the animals when. You begin to understand their language, the words they use. You begin to make deep and personal relationship with the residents of the Earth who live in your neighborhood. And you begin spending longer and longer times in that reality. You begin to amass interesting and surprisingly effective and useful information. And you feel good. Really, really good.
Webs of Power – Notes from the Global Uprising by Starhawk, 2002, p.161.	We all live in a culture that has more and more made the environment unreal, something exotic we watch on PBS, not the daily fabric of our existence. I began to feel that developing a real relationship with nature was a vital part of both our political and spiritual work. To do that, we need to be aware of the underlying attitudes that separate us from the natural world. There are, of course, the overriding philosophies that see human beings as above nature and therefore entitled to exploit the natural world for human ends. These philosophies arise both from religious sources and secular worship of profit, and the damage they cause is massive and visible. But there is another more subtly damaging view of the human relationship to nature, and the damage it causes is perhaps more insidious because this view is often held by activists and environmentalists themselves. That is the attitude that human beings are somehow worse than nature, a blight on the planet, doomed to despoil whatever we touch, and that nature would be better off without us. Now, I admit that a case can be made for this view – nevertheless I think that in its own way it is just as damaging as the world view of the active despoilers. For if we believe that we are in essence bad for nature, we are profoundly separated from the natural world. We are also subtly relieved of responsibility for developing a healthy relationship with nature, for learning to observe and interact and play an active role in nature’s healing.
In Harm’s Way: Toxic Threats to Child Development, a report by Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility, 2000, page 23.	Normal brain development requires the intricate unfolding of a cascade of processes that do not occur during any other life stage. Consequently, developing fetuses and infants are uniquely vulnerable to disruption of these processes by environmental factors, including chemical contaminants and nutritional deficiencies.
Hoxsey: When Healing Becomes a Crime by Kenny Ausubel, IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page100.	Like surgery, radiation therapy was grandfathered in without rigorous testing. Radiation is carcinogenic and mutagenic. In the few tests comparing radiation treatment against no treatment, according to Jones, “Most of the time, it makes not the slightest difference if the machine is turned on or not.” Jones went even further, saying, “My studies have proved conclusively that untreated cancer victims actually live up to four times longer.” Radiation is often combined with surgery despite the fact that tests have generally shown it made no apparent favorable difference. A recent study with patients with the most common form of lung cancer found that postoperative radiation therapy, which is routinely given, actually raises the relative risk of death by 21 percent, and is most detrimental to those in the early stages of illness. Nevertheless, radiation is used on about half of cancer patients. It was into this disappointing setting that chemotherapy entered as the next great hope of cancer treatment. Chemotherapy drugs are poisons that are indiscriminate killers of cells, both healthy and malignant. The strategy is quite literally to kill the cancer without killing the patient . By the mid-1980s, prominent members of medical orthodoxy had published unsettling assessments that could no longer be dismissed. Writing in Scientific American, Dr. John Cairns, who was then at Harvard Medical School, found that chemo therapy was able to save the lives of just 2 to 3 percent of cancer patients, usually those with the rarest kinds of the disease. By medicine’s own standards, at best, chemotherapy is unproven against 90 percent of adult solid tumors, the huge majority of common cancers resulting in death.
Silent Spring – Rachel L. Carson, 1962, p.261-262.	The “control of nature” is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. The concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from that Stone Age of science. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth.
Ecological Literacy – David W. Orr, 1992, p.136.	In contrast with most academic studies, which are abstract indoor activities, natural history is concrete and requires direct involvement in nature. It requires firsthand knowledge of trees, animals, plant life, birds, aquatic life, marine biology, and geology. It is an antidote to the excessively abstract, overly quantified, and computerized, as well as the romantic view of nature derived from armchair ecologists. Natural history forces us to deal with nature on nature’s terms. It also promotes the capacity not only to see but to observe with care, understanding, and, above all else, with pleasure.
Hoxsey: When Healing Becomes a Crime by Kenny Ausubel, IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, pages 100-101.	Moreover, true placebo controls have been almost abandoned in the testing of chemotherapy. Drug regimen is tested against drug regimen, and doctors hardly ever look at whether the drugs do better than simple good nursing care. Because chemotherapy drugs are outright poisons, many carcinogenic, the drugs themselves can cause “treatment deaths” and additional cancers. One study showed that among women surviving ovarian cancer, those who had been given chemotherapy developed leukemia at a rate one hundred times that of women who had not received chemotherapy. In some studies, when chemotherapy and radiation were combined, the incidence of secondary tumors was about twenty-five times the expected rate. Nevertheless, chemotherapy is given to 80 percent of patients.
Ecological Literacy – David W. Orr, 1992, p.51.	US agriculture, for example, uses about ten calories of fossil fuel energy to put one calorie on the plate.
IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page101.	Amazingly, 85 percent of prescribed standard medical treatments lack scientific validation. According to the New York Times, Richard Smith, editor of the British Medical Journal, suggests that “this is partly because only one percent of the articles in medical journals are scientifically sound, and partly because many treatments have never been assessed at all.” Hoxsey: When Healing Becomes a Crime by Kenny Ausubel,
Healing Wise – Susun S. Weed, 1989, p.19.	Wild plants are whole, integrated food and energy sources. Wild plants carry spiritual power, emotional power, physical power, and other, invisible, un-name-able powers as well. Eat a wild plant, and you’re eating wholeness. Wild plants are readily available resonators of health/wholeness/holiness, optimum nourishers to all parts of your being. This is one of the reasons that the Wise Woman tradition herbalist prefers to use wild plants.
Healing, Nature, and Modern Medicine by Andrew Weil, IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page110-111.	I’m a physician in Tucson, Arizona, where I practice what I call natural and preventive medicine. Really I think I just practice common-sense medicine, but it’s not what most doctors do. As a result of my botanical training, a lot of the prescribing that I do is botanical. During my freshman year at Harvard in 1960, I had no idea what I wanted to do in life (I still really don’t). Thumbing through the course catalogue, I thought I would take one of everything and I found a course called “Plants and Human Affairs.” What a wonderful name for a college course! It was about the relationships that human beings form with plants. It turned out, although I didn’t know it then, that it was the oldest course given continuously at Harvard. At the time that I took it, the senior lecturer was Paul Mangelsdorf, who had done a great deal of work on the ancestry of corn, but the main lecturer was Richard Evans Schultes, who later became head of the Harvard Botanical Museum. You had to go over to the museum to sign up for this course. It was an old, gloomy Victorian brick building, and when I went over there, in the fall of 1960, out of the entrance came a being I had never seen the likes of before. It was a proto-hippie—a long-haired man who I’m sure had been up in the Library of Economic Botany, which had the greatest collection in the country of books on psychoactive plants. I got the immediate sense that this was someplace I wanted to be. You had to climb up stair after stair, past exhibits of South American blowguns and an exhibit on ayahuasca. Every week we had a lab. There was a Deepfreeze in this course, with tropical fruits from all over the World, and we had a fruit-of-the-week to try every week. In the first lab we made a typical Mexican meal. Schultes had a Mexican graduate student then, and his wife would come in to lead this exercise. We had subsequent laboratories on making ink and soap and perfume. We made whiskey out of corn. We had a drug lab in which we tried exotic Amazonian drugs. This was 1960, remember. Later I became a laboratory instructor in the course. I think this was the only college course in which I learned practical things. It was real stuff, some of which I still use.
In Harm’s Way: Toxic Threats to Child Development, a report by Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility, 2000, page 91.	Studies in animals and human populations suggest that fluoride exposure, at levels that are experienced by significant proportion of the population whose drinking water is fluoridated, may have adverse impacts on the developing brain.
Ecological Literacy – David W. Orr, 1992, p.86.	Not only are we failing to teach the basics about the earth and how it works, but we are in fact teaching a large amount of stuff that is simply wrong. By failing to include ecological perspectives in any number of subjects, students are taught that ecology is unimportant for history, politics, economics, society, and so forth. And through television they learn that the earth is theirs for the taking. The result is a generation of ecological yahoos without a clue why the color of the water in their rivers is related to their food supply, or why storms are becoming more severe as the planet warms. The same persons as adults will create businesses, vote, have families, and above all, consume. If they come to reflect on the discrepancy between the splendor of their private lives in a hotter, more toxic and violent world, as ecological illiterates they will have roughly the same success as one trying to balance a checkbook without knowing arithmetic.
Ecological Literacy – David W. Orr, 1992, p.86.	Ecological literacy begins in childhood.
Ecological Literacy – David W. Orr, 1992, p.51.	Cornell University scientist David Pimentel reports that losses to insects have nearly doubled since 1945 while the use of insecticides increased tenfold in the same period. Insects are becoming resistant to pesticides that formerly proved fatal to ninety-nine percent of their species. World soil loss due to poor farm practices is now estimated to be twenty-four billion tons per year.
Healing, Nature, and Modern Medicine IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, pages 111-112.	Anyway, I have an undergraduate degree in botany…. I am sorry to tell you that in the years since then, I have met only two other physicians who were botany majors as undergraduates, and neither of them uses his botanical training in his medical practice. … P 112. I feel lonely in my position, and sad because it shows the degree to which science and medicine have separated themselves from nature and separated us from nature. Two hundred years ago, if you wanted to study medicine, you had to know botany because most of medicine consisted of giving people preparations of plants. Even today, many of the drugs in clinical use are of plant origin or are molecular variations of chemicals originally discovered in plants. Yet to most doctors today, the idea of giving a patient a plant seems at best hopelessly old-fashioned, and at worst outright dangerous and unscientific. … The separation between medicine and botany has enormous consequences for our society, because fundamentally, healing is a natural process. If you want to understand healing and how to make people better, you must understand the ways of nature. You should live close to nature and develop a feel for natural processes. Not only does medical training today isolate people from nature, but our medicine and our science even contribute to a fear of nature.
Healing Wise – Susun S. Weed, 1989,p.64.	According to the Scientific tradition, measurement leads to truth. By measuring (repeatedly) we can determine what is real, what is fixed, what repeats, and therefore, what is true in the Scientific tradition. The universe and the body, as machines, can be discovered and known by measurement, says the Scientific way. Since they cannot be measured in their entirety, they must be measured part by part. Although living organisms consist of interrelated and interdependent parts, the Scientific tradition measures and treats each part as independent. Each independent part is measured separately and treated separately. … Interrelationships are difficult to measure and quantify, so they are routinely ignored by the Scientific tradition. For example, experts from the Scientific tradition assure farmers and consumers alike that the safeguards for individual pesticides are unchanged when several pesticides are used concurrently on a crop, though no studies confirm this.
Noah’s Children by Sara Stein, 2001, page 9.	Land is nourished or not by humans; humans are nourished or not by land. Place and occupant only seem separable because we have created such a distance between liveliness and livelihood. In creating that distance, we have unwittingly detached the nature of childhood from the sense it ought to make. Childish curiosity is to make connections, to realize the larger picture, to become able in the physical environment our lives depend on. We’ve removed the red from the fruit, the fruit from the tree, the tree from the wood, the wood from all the things a child might make of it, and so left fragments much harder to connect than laces on a shoe.
Webs of Power – Notes from the Global Uprising by Starhawk, 2002, p.163.	All of our ancestors were indigenous to somewhere; that is, they were deeply rooted in one place, living in a culture in which sustenance, spirit, and culture arose from the plants, animals, climate, and resources of that particular land. If we are going to create a new political/ economic/ social system, one that truly cares for the environment and for human beings, we may need to become indigenous again, to find at least one spot on the earth we can know intimately.
Ecological Literacy – David W. Orr, 1992, p.47.	[S]ustainability will depend on the evolution of a system of world order that neutralizes power.
IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page 112.	The message that’s not overtly stated but is between the lines is that nature is fundamentally wild, dangerous, and unpredictable. It’s out to get you, whereas the products of pharmaceutical laboratories are safe. That message is especially annoying because it’s actually the other way around, and I say that as a doctor who often has to deal with the casualties of pharmaceutical science. I see many patients who have been seriously hurt by taking pharmaceutical drugs. In fact, the single greatest black mark against conventional medicine is the amount of toxicity that it causes as a result of its preference for chemical drugs that are very strong and very fast acting. --Healing, Nature, and Modern Medicine
Noah’s Children by Sara Stein, 2001, pages 13-14.	It is true that I would like this generation to steward the land—who would not? My reason, however, is not that I am a tree hugger or can claim to care very deeply about the desert pupfish. I’m concerned for our human habitat, which by its derangement isolates and estranges us like pacing animals caged from the heights and hollows that our nature urges us to seek. I worry about habitat as I worry about habitation and inhabitants: where we live and how we live is tied to what we are, and the more we realize how the loops entwine, the closer we can draw the strings and the more lovely the knot will be.
Ecological Literacy – David W. Orr, 1992, p.52.	Human impacts on the biosphere have increased markedly, while our land wisdom creeps forward. Knowledge of how to manipulate nature outruns our understanding of the impacts. As a result, our approach to agriculture, grazing lands, wildlife, and forests has been almost invariably manipulative, shortsighted, and destructive.
One Spirit Many Peoples by Stephen Harrod Buhner, 1997, page 63.	This concept of rocks, animals, and plants being able to talk to human beings is found in all indigenous cultures. The elders, holy people, and the medicine people of the tribes told the Europeans who questioned them that plants, for instance, told them many things. Thus among the Mitlenos in Mexico: "The herbs and flowers also talk to her and she to them, a rapport with the natural world which is not visibly part of the lifeways other Mitlenos." And the Zuni: " the Zuni live with their plants—the latter are part of themselves. The initiated didn't talk to their plants, and the plants can talk with them." And the Papago: " It was customary to 'talk to the plant or tree' when gathering a medicinal substance and also when administering it." Amused Europeans, knowing that it was impossible for a plant to talk, labeled the idea superstition.
IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page 118.	The English-speaking World is at one extreme of the spectrum: mycophobia. That may not seem apparent; we put mushrooms on pizzas and steaks. But if you compare us with a truly mycophilic culture like the Chinese, Japanese, or some Slavic populations, you see the differences. In any grocery store that you go into in Japan you will find a dozen different species of cultivated mushrooms for sale. Until very recently we have cultivated only one species, the common agaricus. --Healing, Nature, and Modern Medicine
Noah’s Children by Sara Stein, 2001, page 40.	Outside, how it has shrunk! New houses seem to have gobbled the land to fatten themselves. They have grown enormous. A house twice the size of ours where we raised four children is now considered modest. Some of the houses in the new developments here are more than three times bigger. They display themselves to one another over bare lawn. Their size and ostentation say something sad to me: indoors has grown more important than outdoors used to be.
Quoted in Webs of Power – Notes from the Global Uprising by Starhawk, 2002, p.162.	When people don’t use the plants, they get scarce. You must use them so they will come up again. All plants are like that. If they’re not gathered from, or talked to and cared about, they’ll die. -- Mabel McKay, Cache Creek Pomo elder and basketmaker.
IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, pages 111-112.	In some Slavic languages there are dozens of words for mushrooms. In English we have only “mushroom,” “toadstool,” and “fungus.” In these Slavic cultures people make centerpieces for their tables out of poisonous mushrooms that they consider beautiful. They take mushrooms to bed with them. They fondle them. They talk to them. They kiss them. You don’t find people in Australia, Great Britain, Canada and the United States acting that way. --Healing, Nature, and Modern Medicine
Silent Spring – Rachel L. Carson, 1962, p.136.	Nowhere has the effect of pesticides on the life of salt marshes, estuaries, and all quiet inlets from the sea been more graphically demonstrated than on the eastern coast of Florida, in the Indian River country. There, in the spring of 1955, some 2000 acres of salt marsh in St. Lucie County were treated with dieldrin in an attempt to eliminate the larvae of the sandfly. The concentration used was one pound of active ingredient to the acre. The effect on the life of the waters was catastrophic. Scientists from the Entomology Research Center of the State Board of Health surveyed the carnage after the spraying and reported that the fish kill was “substantially complete.” Everywhere dead fishes littered the shores. From the air sharks cold be seen moving in, attracted by the helpless and dying fishes in the water. No species was spared. Among the dead were mullets, snook, mojarras, gambusia. … The same melancholy picture was painted by the late Dr. Herbert R. Mills from his observations in Tampa Bay ion the opposite coast of Florida, where the National Audubon Society operates a sanctuary for seabirds in the area including Whiskey Stump Key. The sanctuary ironically became a poor refuge after the local health authorities undertook a campaign to wipe out the saltmarsh mosquitoes. Again fishes and crabs were the principle victims. The fiddler crab, that small and picturesque crustacean whose hordes move over mud flats or sand flats like grazing cattle, has no defense against the sprayers. After successive sprayings during the summer and fall months (some areas were sprayed as many as 16 times), the state of the fiddler crabs was summed up by Dr. Mills: “A progressive scarcity of fiddlers had by this time become apparent. Where there should have been in the neighborhood of 100,000 fiddlers under the tide and weather conditions of the day [October 12] there were not over 100 which could be seen anywhere on the beach, and these were all dead or sick, quivering, twitching, stumbling, scarcely able to crawl; although in neighboring unsprayed areas fiddlers were plentiful.”
Noah’s Children by Sara Stein, 2001, page 40.	The original farmhouse still stands on one of these developments. It is tiny! Yet farm families were large: six children, ten. How did they fit? The five children in my father’s farming family could have told you: they packed in for meals and overnight; otherwise they were outdoors. Smaller still than farmhouses and going back much farther are the oval adobe huts the Maya still inhabit, as well as felt-covered yurts, snow-block igloos, deer-hide tipis, and the steppe homes built of mammoth bones and tusks during the Ice Age. For most of human history, people have spent the majority of their time outside.
IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page 137.	Tremendous healing energy is produced in interaction with plants through smelling, tasting, and ingesting small amounts. The best healing comes through our relationship with the plants themselves. --Community Herbalism in Modern Health Care by Christopher Hobbs.
Ecological Literacy – David W. Orr, 1992, p.137.	TEST OF BIO-REGIONAL KNOWLEDGE 1. What soil series are you standing on? 2. When was the last time a fire burned in this area? 3. Name five native edible plants in this region and their seasons of availability. 4. From what direction do winter storms generally come in this region? 5. Where does your garbage go? 6. How long is the growing season in this region? 7. Name five grasses in this area. Are any of them native? 8. Name five resident and five migratory birds in your area. 9. What primary geological event or processes influenced the land here? 10. What species have become extinct in this area? 11. What are the major plant associations in this region? In democratic nations, wise public choices about environmental issues depend largely on the extent and breadth of public knowledge of ecology and concepts such as thermodynamics and energetics and their interrelationship with economic prosperity, unemployment, war and peace, and public health. If large numbers of people do not understand the environmental facts of energy, resources, land, water, and wildlife, there is little hope for building sustainability at any level.
World as Lover, World as Self, by Joanna Macy. 1991, page 141	Global economic patterns, with the centralizing effect of their markets, technologies, and capital investments, render rural populations poorer and more dependent; and large-scale assistance programs seem to increase this dependence on external factors.
IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page 139.	We are in crisis. In medicine we are in an economic crisis, but one that goes far beyond the problem of not being able to pay for medical care. We are in an environmental crisis, but it goes beyond the abuse and the neglect of our environment. Fundamentally, these are side effects of a greater crisis, and that is our failure to respect men, women, and children, a failure to honor humanity, to honor life, and a failure to ask with each thought, “Is this life-giving? Is this life sustaining? Or is this destructive?” --Relationships Are The Best Medicine, by Jeanne Achterberg.
Ecological Literacy – David W. Orr, 1992, p.49.	Humans are now the dominant force on the planet, equivalent to that of previous geologic upheavals. Agriculture, energy use, and manufacturing lie at the heart of the human global impacts. Since 1850, nine million square kilometers have been converted into permanent cropland. Energy use has risen by a factor of eighty, disrupting geochemical cycles of carbon, nitrogen, and sulphur. Industrial production is up more than ten thousand percent. Since 1700, the decline in forested area is larger than Europe. Sediment loads in major rivers has increased by three hundred percent, and in smaller rivers by as much as eight hundred percent. Increased water use in the same period is roughly equal to the volume of Lake Huron. Methane in the atmosphere has doubled. Heavy metals and toxics now exist everywhere in measurable quantities. Humans are causing a biological holocaust that is destroying life ten thousand times rapidly than the natural rate of extinction. The rate of change since 1945 is staggering and is still accelerating.
Webs of Power – Notes from the Global Uprising by Starhawk, 2002, p.162	Could it be that we are supposed to be talking to the plants and animals, interacting with them, accepting the gifts they offer, and using them in ways that further their growth? The Pomo basketmakers, by collecting sedge roots, pruned and thinned the stands of sedge and improved their habitat. The sedge, flourishing by the riversides and on the banks of creeks, helps hold the soil with its roots, preventing erosion. The First People of California pruned, coppiced, harvested, and burned the grasslands and forests in patterns that created optimal conditions for wildlife, for both open meadows and the growth of the great trees. Their interaction with the land was so elegantly attuned that European invaders missed it entirely, believing they had found a wilderness untouched by human intervention (and open for their exploitation), when what they had actually found was more in the nature of an exquisitely cared-for wild garden.
IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, pages 147-148.	Within hours of birth, a baby born in the United States is likely to receive a hepatitis B vaccine, the first genetically engineered vaccine. Hepatitis B, the disease, is mostly sexually transmitted. The theory is that somehow protection against this illness is going to last until children become teenagers or adults. The risk of hepatitis is a legitimate concern, but it is possible to test women for hepatitis B and then give the vaccination to the babies whose mothers test positive. But we don’t do that. The public health approach in the United States is “get everybody when you can,” and the “collateral damage” of a few bad reactions is considered acceptable. From the point of view of the parent of a child with a bad reaction, that’s not acceptable at all. There are five times as many reactions to the vaccine as there are cases of actual hepatitis B in the childhood population. Mothering On the Front Lines, by Peggy O’Mara (editor of Mothering Magazine)
Noah’s Children by Sara Stein, 2001, page 45.	Children milk the environment to build themselves from the outside in, filling themselves with their own sensations of the World and the sense of their actions on it. This brave taking –I would almost call it a greed for wholeness—isn’t something we can do for them. Toddlers are adamantly self-propelled; so, intrinsically at any age, is growth itself. What we can do is create an environment that is inherently functional. Outdoors, in our own yard, that means an ecosystem that is at least as useful, engaging, significant and social a place as the kitchen is indoors.
IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page 46.	The old idea of waiting until we can count the dead bodies has failed. We keep thinking we can do risk assessments on things for which we cannot even imagine worst-case scenarios. How do we do risk assessments on Yucca Mountain, which must contain radioactive waste for 10,000 years? How do we do a risk assessment on an ocean that drives our climate and is soon going to be warmer than our bathtub? How do we do a risk assessment on an entire generation of children who can only cope by being drugged with Ritalin or Prozac? --The Precautionary Principle: Golden Rule for the New Millennium,
Mothering On the Front Lines, by Peggy O’Mara (Editor of Mothering Magazine) IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, pages 148.	At two months, infants are routinely vaccinated against several diseases. They can get up to nine vaccines at a time—diptheria, pertussis, tetanus, hepatitis B, a strain of meningitis, and so on. Up until recently, all these vaccines contained a mercury preservative, thimersal, that’s been used since the 1930’s. If an infant actually got these nine vaccines at one time, which is common at the two-month doctor’s visit, the exposure to mercury could be 62.5 micrograms of ethyl mercury, 125 times the EPA guideline. And this standard was arrived at for ingested mercury such as one might eat in fish. There actually are no standards for injected mercury, so we don’t know what a safe level of that might be. There is probably no really safe level. Europe eliminated mercury from vaccines in 1998, and in 2000, the United States began to get rid of it as well. But it was a phaseout, not a ban, so some children continued to get mercury-laden vaccines long after our public health officials discovered they were dangerous. There are also other potential toxins in vaccines, including metals such as aluminum, and no one is testing how these compounds might act syngeristically.
IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page 46.	The chorus that we should hear, what we should listen to, is the voice of our children, which we should obey and heed. We can set a goal for a beautiful, livable, healthy World. But in order to meet that goal we will have to transform some of the pillars of our society: science, agriculture, medicine, and law. --The Precautionary Principle: Golden Rule for the New Millennium,
IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, pages 147-148.	The rate of autism in the United States used to be about 1 in 2,000. In the last ten years, it’s increased to 1 in 250. --Mothering On the Front Lines, by Peggy O’Mara (editor of Mothering Magazine)
Ecological Literacy – David W. Orr, 1992, p.86.	People who do not know the ground on which they stand miss one of the elements of good thinking which is the capacity to distinguish between health and disease in natural systems and their relation to health and disease in human ones
Webs of Power – Notes from the Global Uprising by Starhawk, 2002, p.162	All over this continent, native peoples used fire, prayer, tools, and ceremonies to influence their natural environment. The ecosystems we revere in forest and prairie co-evolved with human cultures. Outside of the highest mountain peaks and the glaciers, no “untouched” wilderness existed here. European preconceptions and racist dismissal of other cultures created the fantasy of the “virgin” wilderness. The very “nature” we see ourselves as blighting was formed by millennia of cohabitation.
IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, pages 151.	I am advocating that we regain respect for the inherent order of nature, our biological roots. Let’s trust normal pregnancy and birth and the wisdom of our immune system. Let’s protect the innocence of children and the common good. Let’s disarm our inner environment. Healing the environment begins with our relationship to our own natures. If we can learn to stop suppressing what is natural in us, we will learn to trust ourselves and others, particularly our children. --Mothering On the Front Lines, by Peggy O’Mara (editor of Mothering Magazine)
Ecological Literacy – David W. Orr, 1992, p.88	To see things in their wholeness is politically threatening. To understand that our manner of living, so comfortable for some, is linked to cancer rates in migrant laborers in California, the disappearance of tropical rain forests, fifty thousand toxic dumps across the USA, and the depletion of the ozone layer, is to see the need for a change in our way of life. To see things whole is to see both the wounds we have inflicted on the natural world in the name of mastery and those we have inflicted on ourselves and on our children for no good reason, whatever our stated intentions. Real ecological literacy is radicalizing in that it forces us to reckon with the roots of our ailments, not just with their symptoms. For this reason, I think it leads to a revitalization and broadening of the concept of citizenship to include membership in a planetwide community of humans and living things.
Webs of Power – Notes from the Global Uprising by Starhawk, 2002, p.163.	[W]e as human beings do have the capacity to meet both our needs and those of the nonhuman beings around us, in ways that actually increase diversity, habitat, balance, and beauty. If we fail to do so, it is because of a flaw in our attitudes, our observations, our goals, or our actions, not our inherent being.
IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page 157.	In the Mohawk language, one word for midwife is lewirokwas (yeh-wee-loh-gwas). This word means “she’s pulling the baby out of the water, out of the earth, or a dark, wet place.” It is full of ecological context. We know from our traditional teachings that the waters of the earth and the waters of our bodies are the same water. The fluid that bathes the ripening flower of the ovarian follicle—the dew of the morning grass, the waters of the streams and rivers, and the currents of the oceans—all these waters respond to the pull of our Grandmother Moon. She calls them to rise and fall in her rhythm. Mother’s milk forms from the bloodstream of the woman. The waters of our bloodstream and the waters of the earth are all the same water. --Cycles of Continuous Creation, by Katsi Cook (Wolf Clan Mohawk from Akwesasne, north of northern NY)
IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, pages 199-200.	The fact that contaminants are found in breast milk is an indication that there are toxic chemicals to be found in all our bodies. Measuring chemicals in breast milk is one way of testing for the presence of chemicals, because breast milk is produced by using stored fat in a woman’s body, fat that can store dozens of toxic chemicals. And of course all our bodies contain fat, and this fat is the perfect residence for many toxic chemicals. --The Global Politics of Precaution, by Sharyle Patton,
Ecological Literacy – David W. Orr, 1992, p.91.	[T]he way education occurs is as important as its content. Students taught environmental awareness in a setting that does not alter their relationship to basic life-support systems learn that it is sufficient to intellectualize, emote, or posture about such things without having to live differently.
Webs of Power – Notes from the Global Uprising by Starhawk, 2002, p.166-167.	Brazil’s Movimiento Sim Terre One of the best examples of a balanced human/ nature relationship comes from the Movimiento Sim Terre of Brazil. The Movimiento Sim Terre, or Landless Rural Workers’ Movement, is the largest direct action movement in the world. Since 1984, they’ve enabled hundreds of thousands of very poor people to reclaim unused land and start settlements that the government, in time, is forced to legalize. … Our Agreements with Earth and with Life « Human beings are precious because their intelligence, work, and organization can protect and preserve all forms of life. « To love and preserve the earth and all natural things. « To always improve our knowledge about nature and agriculture. « To produce food to eliminate hunger in humanity. To avoid monoculture and the use of agricultural pesticides. « To preserve the already existing forest and to reforest new areas. « To take care of the springs, rivers, wetlands, and lakes. To fight against the privatization of water. « To make the camp and community beautiful by planting flowers, medicinal herbs, and trees. « To adequately treat the trash and to fight any threats of contamination and aggression towards the environment. « To practice solidarity and to revolt against any kind of injustice, aggression, and exploitation against a person, a community, and nature. « To fight against the large estates so that everyone can have land, bread, education, and freedom. « Never sell the land. The land is the supreme gift for the future generations. Agrarian Reform – for a Brazil without large estates!
Noah’s Children by Sara Stein, 2001, page 57.	An insidious environmental notion underlies these ideals of yard and child: it is that both nature and human nature are entirely shaped by our external influence; they cannot run themselves; they must be made to grow. Yet however we lay on the fertilizer, spray the herbicide, water, and mow according to prescribed regimes, clover still comes in: it is not in the nature of grassland to be lawn. So it is not in the nature of children to sit still and be civilized.
IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page 229.	Ecopsychology is an attempt to bring ecology and psychology together again. All traditional peoples know that you cannot have a healthy mind or a healthy community without healthy land and a healthy environment. Oren Lyons, the great Iroquois leader, says, “We will continuously have human wars until we stop our war against Mother Earth.” Ecopsychology is about stopping that war on Mother Earth and restoring harmony and balance. Stopping the War on Mother Earth by Melissa Nelson,
IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page 158.	Women are the first environment. We are privileged to be the doorway to life. At the breast of women, the generations are nourished and sustained. From the bodies of women flows the relationship of those generations both to society and to the natural world. In this way is the earth our mother, the old people said. In this way, we as women are earth. --Cycles of Continuous Creation, by Katsi Cook (Wolf Clan Mohawk from Akwesasne, north of northern NY)
IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page 158.	Science tells us that our nursing infants are at the top of the food chain. Industrial chemicals like PCBs, mirex, DDT, and HCBs dumped into the waters and soil move up through the food chain through plants, fish, and wildlife and into the bodies of human beings who eat them. These contaminants resist being broken down by the body, which stores them in our fat cells. The only known way to excrete large amounts of them is through pregnancy, where they cross the placenta, and during lactation, when they are moved out of storage in our fat cells and show up on our breast milk. In this way, each succeeding generation inherits a body burden of toxic contaminants from their mothers. In this way, we women are the landfill. --Cycles of Continuous Creation, by Katsi Cook (Wolf Clan Mohawk from Akwesasne, north of northern NY)
Ecological Literacy – David W. Orr, 1992, p.91.	Real learning is participatory and experiential, not just didactic. The flow can be two ways between teachers, who best function as facilitators, and students, who are expected to be active agents in defining what is learned and how.
IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page 167.	I’m a commercial fisher from the Gulf Coast, from Seadrift, Texas. I’ve spent over forty years on the Texas Gulf Coast. I’ve fished the bays. I’ve been in the rivers, and I have watched those bays and those rivers systematically go down… I have been an activist probably for about thirteen or fourteen years and I’m amazed that most people think that there are laws that protect us effectively, and a lot of folks even think these poor industries are being hamstrung and over-regulated. But thirty years after the passage of the 1972 Clean Water Act, which promised us the country’s waters would once again be fishable and swimmable by 1982 and there would be zero emissions by 1985, a lot of our waters are as polluted as ever. According to the most recent government Toxic Release Inventory (TRI), 40 percent of our waterways are too polluted to fish or swim in, and 30 percent of our industries are in noncompliance. Those are just the ones that actually report it, so God only knows what’s really going on out there. In the last ten years, there have been 30,000 closures of bays and waterways and over 250 millions pounds a year of reported toxins going into our waterways. The Clean Water Act has failed miserably. --Just a Little Too Well Behaved, by Diane Wilson,
Webs of Power – Notes from the Global Uprising by Starhawk, 2002, p.163-164.	Learning a place takes time because what we need to observe are patterns that only become apparent through time. Not just, “What are the birds in my backyard today?” but “What birds come and go throughout the different seasons? How do their populations change? Are there more this year than last year? How do I know? Is this a one-time fluctuation or part of a larger trend?” And those questions are just the beginning. Indigenous myths and ceremonies reflect thousands of years of careful observation, codified into songs and tales and rituals that tell us what is supposed to be going on, and when.
Just a Little Too Well Behaved, by Diane Wilson, IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page 170.	I learned a very valuable lesson when I had a chance to go to Taiwan. My work had been covered by the underground Taiwanese press, and the Taiwan Environmental Union was holding demonstrations against Formosa Plastics and Chairman Wang because they had their own grievances with Formosa’s behavior in Taiwan. A legislator named Chen invited me to come to Taiwan and talk to grassroots groups, unions, and others for two weeks. I learned of people being jailed, disappearing, being tortured and killed. That trip, those people, radicalized me. I felt like we, the people of the United States, didn’t know how to make change. That lesson is best described by a quote from Henry David Thoreau. On his deathbed he is quoted as saying the only thing he regretted was that he was too well behaved.
– Jeannette Armstrong, “Keepers of the Earth” in the book edited by Theodore Roszack, Mary E. Gomes, and Allen D. Kanner, Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, 1995.	The Okanagan word for “our place on the land” and “our language” is the same. This means that the land has taught us our language. The way we survived is to speak the language that the land offered us as its teachings…We also refer to the land and our bodies with the same root syllable. This means that the flesh which is our body is pieces of the land come to us through the things which the land is … We are our land/ place. Not to know and to celebrate this is to be without language and without land. It is to be dis-placed. The Okanagan teaches that anything displaced from all that it required to survive in health will eventually perish … As Okanagans our most essential responsibility is to learn to bond our whole individual selves and our communal selves to the land. Quoted in Webs of Power – Notes from the Global Uprising by Starhawk, 2002, p.164.
Ecological Literacy – David W. Orr, 1992, p.93.	Ecological literacy, then, requires a thorough understanding of the ways in which people and whole societies have become destructive. The ecologically literate person will appreciate something of how social structures, religion, science, politics, technology, patriarchy, culture, agriculture, and human cussedness combine as causes of our predicament.
IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page 174.	I want you to believe, to know, that you can do it. Just believe in yourself and be outrageous. The author Molly Bang wrote a children’s book about my story called Nobody Particular. That’s a very appropriate title because, if there’s one thing I want to get across, it’s that if someone like me, naturally shy and with hardly any formal education, can take on some of the biggest companies in the world, anybody can do it. Somebody said, “It’s the reasonable woman that adapts herself to the world and it’s the unreasonable woman that makes the world adapt to her.” I’m telling all of you women to be unreasonable! Just a Little Too Well Behaved, by Diane Wilson,
Noah’s Children by Sara Stein, 2001, page 129.	When…dyes, preservatives, insecticides, hormones, herbicides, antibiotics—chemicals!—are put into our food by strangers whose motives we have no reason to trust, you can see how food anxiety can reach unreasonable heights. … There’s a rise in eating disorders, food phobias, children who turn vegetarian at the age of twelve. There can hardly be anything more unnerving than to distrust the food one eats.
Webs of Power – Notes from the Global Uprising by Starhawk, 2002, p.164.	Observation itself, for most of us, requires a shift in awareness. Most of us don’t actually know how to see and hear what is going on around us in the physical world. When we do go out into the forest or the mountains, nature becomes a scenic background to our own thoughts and dramas. If we grew up watching television or riding on the freeway instead of watching birds and animals and walking through the woods, our brains may literally need to be re-patterned.
Noah’s Children by Sara Stein, 2001, pages 194-195.	I have imagined what I would do if I were a science teacher. The fantasy is usually cut short, very short, by my being fired. I can’t be fired from writing as I would from teaching, though, so I can indulge here. The school year would start with a field trip, a scary one. I would take the little children out into the dark before the dawn, and we would huddle in the cold to see the separating of the sky from the land as the sun came up. Then I would start, “Once upon a time, the World was formless, and darkness lay upon the deep.” Sound familiar? More gripping than “you remember that: thirteen thousand years ago”? And believable, too, if you have waited in the dark for dawn. Science is strange tales of animalcules too small for eyes to see: a child must see them through a microscope to believe them; and see them alive, swimming in water from the pond where he, too, swims; and smell the bottom muck to know such things as stink and rot before it makes sense to teach how soil is a massive digestive system, what with all those animalcules eating the leavings of all creatures that die. Remember that, Ernest: decay. I’d scramble eggs with peas for lunch: See that little stringy thing atop the raw yolk? See the tiny stem that holds the pea to its pos? See your belly button? We’ve all been fed, chicks and peas and children, through our umbilical cord once upon a time (here the principal walks in, sees the class half-undressed, and I am fired). But wouldn’t the children be spellbound (they would love to go to school!), just as I was when listening to tales of Egypt past. I remember being incredulous as a child that there had been a World before me: My mother once a child? No airplanes in the sky! There is no difference to a child’s mind between history and natural history: To all children, creation begins anew at their own birth, awaits their discovery, unfolds to them through stories of how the present has come to be.
Ecological Literacy – David W. Orr, 1992, p.91.	[E]xperience in the natural world is both an essential part of understanding the environment, and conducive to good thinking.
Webs of Power – Notes from the Global Uprising by Starhawk, 2002, p.165-166.	The global corporate economic system has displaced millions of people. A capitalist economic system needs a workforce of mobile and expendable people, who can be brought to work when the need for production is high, laid off or transferred when its low. And indigenous peoples have an annoying habit of valuing the integrity of their land and culture over the profits that can be extracted from the resources it may command. The whole ideology of “efficiency” and “integration” is aimed at shoring up an economic system in which no region is self-sufficient, in which the resources of the entire globe are available without restraint to corporations that wish to exploit them, and in which the entire world is one huge market open to all. Corporations and enterprises are displaced as well – they are no longer tied or responsible to any local community. They are free to pick up and leave if local regulations become too onerous, or local labor too demanding.
IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page 11.	As human beings, we have a remarkable ability to reinvent our societies very rapidly. Our task now is to create an earth-honoring culture founded in the sanctity of life and the sacred human-nature relationship. Along with many others, I herald for this new century a Declaration of Interdependence flowing from the simple recognition that all life is connected. At its heart is ecological medicine, teaching us that we are the land and water and air. By restoring the earth, we restore ourselves. --The Coming Age of Ecological Medicine by Kenny Ausubel,
Redesigning Environmental Health by Anthony Cortese IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page 27.	The state of one’s environment is one of the most important determinant of health. Indeed, a healthy environment is one of the most important and fundamental factors in illness prevention and health promotion, and yet is barely recognized by medicine. Communicating the idea that ecological health equals human health is absolutely critical. And the environmental health concerns we have today are no longer related just to pollution and waste but include exposure to altered environments and novel disease agents resulting from our encroaching on and exceeding the carrying capacity of natural systems. The alteration and disruption of biogeochemical cycles in ecosystems may be the most harmful we have ever done to ourselves.
Webs of Power – Notes from the Global Uprising by Starhawk, 2002, p.166.	At the first World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001, an indigenous speaker defined what it means to be indigenous. “It’s not the color of your skin,” he said. “It’s not even about being raised in a traditional way. It’s about being a guardian of the common treasure of the land.”
Dreaming the Dark – Starhawk, 1982, pp.188-189.	A society is not a static thing, an object, a single entity. It is a system, an ever-changing network of interlocking relationships wherein the whole is more than – and sometimes qualitatively different from – the sum of its parts. The ways in which necessities and luxuries are produced, the shares of both to which different classes within society are entitled, the level of science and technology, the distribution of power, the sexual arrangements, the child-rearing practices, the individual psychology and ideologies embodied in religion, in philosophy, in education, and in institutions – all these shape each other. Interactions among them are not simple; they are nonlinear, circular loops of cause and effect that feed back on one another, acting as mutual pressures and restraints. A change in one aspect of society changes the dynamic balance among all its aspects. Other aspects then must change in an attempt to preserve a constancy in the relationship between human beings and their environment, so that this relationship will allow group survival.
IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, page 178.	Any time elected officials, regulatory agents, or industry employees are responsible for a decision that allows the poisoning of our children, we should put their pictures on a poster detailing their dirty work and distribute it everywhere so we all know who did it. We need to recapture American from the corporate interests that run our government. If we don’t demand accountability, we’re going to lose our democracy. --Why I Went to Jail to Protect My Daughter by Terri Swearingen,
Silent Spring – Rachel L. Carson, 1962, pp.89-91.	Perhaps no community has suffered more for the sake of a beetleless world than Sheldon, in eastern Illinois, and adjacent areas in Iroquois County. In 1954 the United States Department of Agriculture and the Illinois Agriculture Department began a program to eradicate the Japanese beetle along the line of its advance into Illinois, holding out the hope, and indeed the assurance, that intensive spraying would destroy the populations of the invading insect. The first “eradication” took place that year, when dieldrin was applied to 1400 acres by air. Another 2600 acres were treated similarly in 1955, and the task was presumably considered complete. But more and more chemical treatments were called for, and by the end of 1961 some 131,000 acres had been covered. Even in the first years of the program it was apparent that heavy losses were occurring among wildlife and domestic animals. The chemical treatments were continued, nevertheless, without consultation with either the Unites States Fish and Wildlife Service or the Illinois Game Management Division. (In the spring of 1960, however, officials of the federal Department of Agriculture appeared before a congressional committee in opposition to a bill that would require just such prior consultation. They declared blandly that the bill was unnecessary because co-operation and consultation were “usual.” These officials were quite unable to recall situations where cooperation had not taken place “at the Washington level.” In the same hearings they stated clearly their unwillingness to consult with state fish and game departments.) Although funds for chemical control came in never-ending streams, the biologists of the Illinois Natural History Survey who attempted to measure the damage to wildlife had to operate on a financial shoestring. A mere $1100 was available for the employment of a field assistant in 1954 and no special funds were provided in 1955. Despite these crippling difficulties, the biologists assembled facts that collectively paint a picture of almost unparallel wildlife destruction – destruction that became obvious as soon as the program got under way. Conditions were made to order for poisoning insect-eating birds, both in the poisons used and in the events set in motion by their application. In the early programs at Sheldon, dieldrin was applied at the rate of 3 pounds to the acre. To understand its effect on birds one need only remember that in laboratory experiments on quail dieldrin has proved to be about 50 times as poisonous as DDT. The poison spread over the landscape at Sheldon was therefore roughly equivalent to 150 pounds of DDT per acre! And this was a minimum, because there seems to have been some overlapping of treatments along field borders and in corners. As the chemical penetrated the soil the poisoned beetle grubs crawled out on the surface of the ground, where they remained for some time before they died, attractive to insect-eating birds. Dead and dying insects of various species were conspicuous for about two weeks after the treatment. The effect on the bird populations could easily have been foretold. Brown thrashers, starlings, meadowlarks, grackles, and pheasants were virtually wiped out. Robins were “almost annihilated,” according to the biologists’ report. Dead earthworms had been seen in numbers after a gentle rain; probably the robins had fed on the poisoned worms. For other birds, too, the once beneficial rain had been changed, through the evil power of the poison introduced into their world, into an agent of destruction. Birds seen drinking and bathing in puddles left by rain a few days after the spraying were inevitably doomed. The birds that survived may have been rendered sterile. Although a few nests were found in the treated area, a few with eggs, none contained young birds. Among the mammals ground squirrels were virtually annihilated; their bodies were found in attitudes characteristic of violent death by poisoning. Dead muskrats were found in the treated areas, dead rabbits in the fields. The fox squirrel had been a relatively common animal in the town; after the spraying it was gone. It was a rare farm in the Sheldon area that was blessed by the presence of a cat after the war on beetles was begun. Ninety per cent of all the farm cats fell victims to the dieldrin during the first season of spraying. This might have been predicted because of the black record of these poisons in other places. Cats are extremely sensitive to all insecticides and especially so, it seems, to dieldrin. In western java in the course of the anti-malarial program carried out by the World Health Organization, many cats are reported to have died. In central Java so many were killed that the price od a cat more than doubled. Similarly the World Health Organization, spraying in Venezuela, is reported to have reduced cats to the status of a rare animal. In Sheldon it was not only the wild creatures and the domestic companions that were sacrificed in the campaign against an insect. Observations on several flocks of sheep and her herd of beef cattle are indicative of the poisoning and death that threatened livestock as well.
Why I Went to Jail to Protect My Daughter by Terri Swearingen, IN: Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves, edited by Kenny Ausubel, 2004, pages 178-179.	It took a decade for us to learn that working only within the system didn’t benefit the people. We pursued legal, political, and economic strategies in our efforts to protect our children, with little effect. That’s when we engaged in a direct-action campaign, which included peaceful, nonviolent civil disobedience. We broke the law to prevent our government from breaking the law. We broke the law because we found the state of Ohio breaking its own law, which was meant to protect citizens with a 2,000-foot buffer zone around dangerous facilities. When our own government was not obeying the law, we had to break the law to draw their attention to the injustices. I’ve been arrested a dozen times, and I’ve spent many days in jail…. I was upholding a higher law, that I was working to protect our children. I was trying to uphold the law of human decency. I crossed the line because they crossed the line from a trust in people and democracy to a worship of technocracy and money. I crossed the line because they crossed the line between human values and human exploitation.
Ecology of a Cracker Childhood – Janisse Ray, 1999, p.273.	I will rise from my grave with the hunger of wildcat, wings of kestrel, and with possession of my grand-daughter’s granddaughter, to see what we have lost returned. My heart will be a cistern brimming with rainwater – drinkable rain. She will not know my name, though she bears the new forest about her, the forest so grand. She will have heard whooping cranes witnessing endless sky. While around her the forest I longed all my short life to see winks and slips and shimmers and thumps, mutes and musks and lights. She will walk through it with the azure-bodied eagerness of damselfly. My child, I will try to call to her. My child. I have risen from the old cemetery buried in the forest where your people are laid. Where once a golf course began. That was houses and fields long, long ago. She will be yet a child, and may not hear me. Perhaps I will not speak at all but follow her through a heraldry of longleaf, seeking for the course of a day the peace of pine warblers. And in the evening of that blessed day, I will lay to rest this implacable longing.
--ACRES USA, The Voice of Eco-Agriculture, Vol. 39, No.2, page 11 (Feb.2009)	White Roofs Roofs account for 25 percent of the surface of most cities, and pavement makes up another 35 percent. Physicist Hashem Akbari suggests that if the world’s 100 largest cities would install white roofs and more reflective pavement, greenhouse gases would be offset by 44 billion metric tons – more than the total emission of all earthlings each year. First, a cooler environment not only saves energy, but also improves comfort. Second, cooling a city by only a few degrees dramatically reduces smog. Third, global warming would be mitigated. Akbari’s research can be found in the journal Climatic Change.
--The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved by Sandor Ellix Katz, 2006, p.25.	Beyond serving healthy food and stimulating the food economy, school lunch programs can be valuable educational opportunities. Encouraging local food means weaving food production back into the web of community life. School gardens can be integrated into the curriculum, used to teach kids practical life skills while also allowing them to explore basic concepts of biology, nutrition, economics, design, teamwork, and problem solving and to produce some of their own food. This is experiential education, a radical break from the educational monoculture of our age in which standardized tests reign supreme.
--The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved by Sandor Ellix Katz, 2006, p.34.	Growing food, with its huge (and endless) learning curve, is a tangible step toward a healthier, more just, and more sustainable world.
--The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved by Sandor Ellix Katz, 2006, pp 48-49.	Investigative journalist Greg Palast obtained an internal State Department document from February 2003, a month before the U.S. invasion, that included seed and plant patents as part of the U.S. economic agenda in Iraq. “This is likely history’s first military assault plan appended to a program for toughening the target nation’s copyright laws,” wrote Palast.^15 The plot gets thicker. The war devastated most Iraqui agricultural research centers and seed stocks, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization 9FAO).^16 The now notorious Abu Ghraib prison, where U.S. soldiers tortured and sexually humiliated Iraqui prisoners, was previously home to Iraq’s national seed bank and research facilities.^17War-related damage and looting “has resulted in the loss of almost all generations of seeds of all crops,” reports the FAO. “Moreover, much seed expertise was lost during the conflict.” In Afghanistan, too, seed storage facilities were destroyed during the US. Invasion. It appears from these facts that an element of the U.S. military agenda is to disrupt agricultural self-sufficiency and create dependency on the high-tech global seed market, while imposing the legal framework to permanently disempower local farmers.
--The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved by Sandor Ellix Katz, 2006, pp. 90-91.	The system of uniform globalized agricultural commodities has reduced most farmers to cogs in a machine--no longer independent creative entrepreneurs or the stewards of diverse and productive farms, but rather monoculturalist debt-slaves to chemical and seed manufacturers and commodity speculators."
-- Nature Discoveries with a hand lens by Richard Headstrom, 1968, page 373.	Before long small one-celled animals with one or two whiplike processes will appear and swim about. The Flagellates, as they are called, feed on the bacteria, making such inroads on the bacterial population that they literally eat themselves out of house and home. With a decrease in bacteria, the flagellates begin to disappear, and their decline is followed by the rise of the ciliated protozoan Colpoda. Colpoda is followed by the ciliated hypotrichs, and in the course of events, the hypootrichs give way to the paramecia. Vorticellae may also appear, and sooner or later some amoebae.
Contact us	ThreeAunties.Org is home to Phoenix Healing Massage, Inc., and The Gainesville Holistic Health Fair.