Small groups have always been the locus of change. What they do, in a sometimes offhand way, is constellate new cultural forms and give birth to the unexpected. Sometimes the talk is the thing, sometimes the feeling. When we risk talking about something we really care about it's infectious. Like any good infection, such talk can produce heat, a fever of intellectual excitement.

As the ongoing industrial crusade to turn all earthly life to commercial purpose relentlessly impoverishes the biosphere and human culture, our living images of graceful possibility dwindle.

Restoration ecology is experimental science, a science of love and altruism. In its attempts to reverse the processes of ecosystem degradation it runs exactly counter to the market system, to land speculation, to the whole cultural attitude of regarding the Earth as commodity rather than community. It is a soft-souled science.

There is ugliness of mass production and consumerism, the banality of advertising. Although it claims to do just the opposite, it's predicated on disempowering and effacing persons.

Millions have been taken from me. If you are not on top of it and you make a lot of money, and you trust business managers, then, yes, money will be taken from you.

Agrarian Anabaptists, Christian Scientists, and Samurai are among the rare examples of renunciation stemming from an unwillingness to sacrifice the spiritual qualities of community life. Evidently there is no separate salvation.

Individuals can refuse to use a given technology, but unless they live in total isolation will have to engage with people whose psyches have been shaped by a multitude of technologies. And there is no escaping the pervasive ecological effects.