The institutions founded 'to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war' have failed. Since the end of WW2, some thirty million people have been killed in armed conflict. Most of them were civilians.

Soil is an almost magical substance, a living system that transforms the materials it encounters.

Do we want to be remembered as the generation that saved the banks and let the biosphere collapse?

Thinking like ethical people, dressing like ethical people, decorating our homes like ethical people makes not a damn of difference unless we also behave like ethical people.

The Christians stole the winter solstice from the pagans, and capitalism stole it from the Christians.

If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire.

Governments are deemed to succeed or fail by how well they make money go round, regardless of whether it serves any useful purpose. They regard it as a sacred duty to encourage the country’s most revolting spectacle: the annual feeding frenzy in which shoppers queue all night, then stampede into the shops, elbow, trample and sometimes fight to be the first to carry off some designer junk which will go into landfill before the sales next year. The madder the orgy, the greater the triumph of economic management.