The most powerful way to change the world is to secretly commit little acts of compassion. You must behave as if your every act, even the smallest, impacted a thousand people for a hundred generations. Because it does.

Many people I've met believe that plants are made up of soil-that the tree outside your house, for example, is mostly made from the soil in which it grew. That's a common mistake. That tree is mostly made up of one of the gases in our air (carbon dioxide) and water (hydrogen and oxygen). Trees are solidified air and sunlight.

Because nitrous oxide [released by nitrate-fertilised soil] is 296 times stronger than CO₂ at global warming and methane [cow farts] is about 26 times as potent as CO₂, the combined greenhouse effect of our livestock worldwide is greater than the sum total of all the cars, trains, busses, trucks, ships, airplanes and jets.

The most powerful way to change the world is to secretly commit little acts of compassion. You must behave as if your every act, even the smallest, impacted a thousand people for a hundred generations. Because it does.

One of the essential differences between the liberal and conservative worldview is that the liberals believe in rationality, whereas conservative believe that human events are ordered by forces that are beyond the ability of our rational mind to understand or control.

The most important things in life are intangible.

When the Europeans first arrived in North America, the average depth of the topsoil was 53.34 cm (1¾ ft) and it was rich in the types of symbiotic organisms necessary for plant roots to absorb minerals from the soil. Today North America averages around 15.24 cm (6 in) of topsoil and most if it is exhausted of nutrients and much is devoid of life.