Democracy is not what we have. It is what we do.

I get goose-bumps when you talk about Diane Wilson. Who knows where she found that courage? When she was a child, she would crawl under the bed when a stranger came to the house. But in 1989, she found out that her county in south Texas was ranked worst in the country for toxic waste. She wondered if the effluent, dumped into the waters where she and her family had shrimped for generations, might be responsible for the dwindling fish populations. And she suspected that her son's autism might be related to the pollution.

I've grown certain that the root of all fear is that we've been forced to deny who we are.

The act of putting into your mouth what the earth has grown is perhaps your most direct interaction with the earth.

A life-long mission has been to counter the notion that political engagement is the spinach we must eat in order to have the dessert of freedom.

The problem is that our whole tribe - if you will, the larger community of humanity itself - is on a death march ecologically and in terms of the intensification of violence and conflict.

We got hooked on grain-fed meat just as we got hooked on gas guzzling automobiles. Big cars made sense only when oil was cheap; grain-fed meat makes sense only because the true costs of producing it are not counted.