Robert Pogue Harrison Famous Quotes
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The destructive impulse with respect to nature all too often has psychological causes that go beyond the greed for material resource or the need to domesticate an environment. There is too often a deliberate rage and vengefulness at work in the assault on nature and its species, as if one would project onto the natural world the intolerable anxieties of finitude which hold humanity hostage to death.
And nothing . . . disquiets a rationalist more than a forest.
Decadence begins with the loss of restraint.
Walls protect, divide, distinguish; above all they abstract. The basic activities that sustain life . . . take place beyond walls.
The 'violent wrenching' of the world into constant movements has remained constant. Indeed, the only constancy of the past several decades has been change itself, that is, constant inconstancy. The paradox of this syndrome causes those who suffer from it to hope that change - or the right kind of change - will eventually put an end to the dread it induces through its endless turnover of the new. This is strange hope to hold to, yet it may be the only one available at a time when the unworlding of the world seems a fait accompli.
When I'm critical of modern approaches to ecology, I'm really trying to remind my reader of the long relationship that Western civilization has had to these forests that define the fringe of its place of habitation, and that this relationship is one that has a rich history of symbolism and imagination and myth and literature. So much of the Western imagination has projected itself into this space that when you lose a forest, you're losing more than just the natural phenomenon or biodiversity; you're also losing the great strongholds of cultural memory.
(Source: discussing "Deforestation in a Civilized World.")
Irony that does not deem itself ironic is the most dangerous irony of all.
Soul and habitat--we are finally in a position to know this--are correlates of one another.
Human beings, in other words, are always already dead. This proleptic knowledge of finitude predetermines their most creative as well as their most destructive dispositions.
