Here you will find a variety of quotations, out of their context as they may be, that give you a taste of the FALL QUARTER readings.

Taken for what they are, I hope these lines may prompt you to many a thought, meditation, theory, or insight; in this way, you can develop your own perspectives based on fragments of the authors' ideas.

FROM Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature

FROM Lure of the Local: A Sense of Place in a Multicentered Society

FROM Wintergreen: Rambles in a Ravaged Land

FROM The Organic Machine

FROM Topophilia

FROM The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America

"Movement toward such a symbollic landscape also may be understood as movement away from an 'artificial' world, a world identified with 'art.'" --p9

"I am thinking of the remote setting, the strong sense of place and its hold on the mind, the hero's struggle with raw nature on the one hand and the corruption within his own civilization on the other, and, finally, his impule to effect a general reconciliation between the forces of civilization and nature." --p35

"These are poetic metaphors, imaginative constructions which heighten meaning far beyond the limits of fact. And yet, like all effective metaphors, each had a basis in fact." --p43

"If America seemed to promise everything that men always had wanted, it also threatened to obliterate much of what they already had achieved. The paradox was to be a cardinal subject of our national literature, and beginning in the nineteenth century our best writers were able to develop the theme in all its complexity." --p45

"...the landscape, as an object that penetrates the mind..." --p110

"What did he think would happen when the new society approached that delicate point of equilibrium beyond which further change, which is to say, further departure from 'nature,' would be dangerous?"

--p115

"By the 'trick' of having a simple shepherd express strong feelings in a sophisticated language, the poet managed to combine the best of both worlds." --p129

"...and his superb mind maintained its poise as it moved ceaselessly between real and imagined worlds." --p144

"'Alienation is essentially experiencing the world andoneself passively, receptively, as the subject separated from the object.'" (quoting E. Fromm) --p177

FROM Technics and Civilization

"The power that was science and the power that was money were, in the final analysis, the same kind of power: the power of abstraction, measurement, quantification." --p25

"...the necessity to promote continual changes and improvements, which has been the characteristic of capitalism, introduced and element of instability into technics and kept society from assimilating its mechanical improvements and integrating them in an appropriate social pattern." --p27

"Unfortunately, the medieval habit of separating the soul of man from the life of the material world persisted, though the theology that supported it was weakened; for as soon as the procedure of exploration was definitely outlined in the philosophy and machanics of the seventeenth century man himself was excluded from the picture. Technics perhaps temporarily profited by this exclusion; but in the long run the result was to prove unfortunate. In attempting to seize power man tended to reduce himself to an abstraction, or, what comes to almost the same thing, to eliminate every part of himself except that which was bent on seizing power." --p31

"Invention took the place of image-making and ritual..." --p42

"Much could be accomplished by the new science and the new technics because much that was associated with life and work in the past--art, poetry, organic rhythm, fantasy--was deliberately eliminated. As the outer world of perception grew in importance, the inner world of feeling became more and more impotent." --p49

"The displacement of the living and organic took place rapidly with the early development of the machine. For the machine was a counterfeit of nature, nature analyzed, regulated, narrowed, controlled by the mind of men." --p52

FROM A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time

FROM Land Use, Environment, & Social Change

FROM The Blue Bear

FROM New Land Marks

FROM The Idea of Wilderness

"As understoon today, [wilderness] is a melange of competing philosophies, ranging from resource conservation to so-called deep ecology. And prospectively the idea of wilderness may be understood as lying along a continuum where it is, on one end, little more than a romantic anachronism and, on the other, a category intriniscally bound up with the emergence of an evolutionary viewpoint on cosmological processes." --p3

"From the beginning of civilization, it seems, people have understood themselves as singular, different from other things in nature and from the divine, yet interacting and orienting their lives toward both." --p41

"The discovery that humankind is an agent of geographical change came gradually. A sense of history -- that is, the passage of time where changes fundamentally alter the natural landscape -- is required before such an idea can be grasped. To the Neolithic peoples who settled in the floodplains of the Nile and the Tigris-Euphrates, humans were simply living as their ancestors had since the dawn of time. The Sumerians and Egyptians later theologically rationalized the agricultural civilizations they had built." --p41

FROM Sand County Almanac