What is it that delivers the air that we can breathe? Guess what? It's all the green things on the planet. Surely that should-- does that have a value in our economic system? Guess what? Economists call that an externality. And what I found out is, they don't care about that. It's considered so vast it's irrelevant to our economy.

the challenge is to reduce our circle within that planet. We've got to reduce and get back down to a size that makes sense. And within that circle, which is us, is a much smaller circle, which is the economy. That should be the way that we look at it. The biosphere, our species, and the economy,

if you're going to talk about a shift in our paradigm, it is to recognize what indigenous people have always known, that we are created out of the elements of Mother Earth. And those should be our greatest responsibility, to protect them for ourselves and the rest of life on Earth.

We are animals. And as animals, our most important need is a breath of air. Without air for more than three or four minutes, you're either brain damaged or dead. So surely to goodness, air ought to be, as a society, our highest priority. The protection of the quality of air should come before anything else. We are water. Go without water for more than a few days, you're dead. Have to drink contaminated water, you're sick. So surely, water, like air, should be one of our society's highest priorities. And we are created out of the food that we eat. So protecting the soil that gives us our food should be one of our highest priorities. And protecting the photosynthetic capacity of the planet is in our highest self-interest.

We want air to be free, and we forget what a sacred substance it is.

There's this wonderful thought exercise Harlow Shapley, an American astronomer, did many years ago. He said, what happens to one breath of air?

Think about what is the most important thing that we needed the moment every one of us left our mother's body. Well, of course, it was a breath of air. That first breath was to announce our arrival on the planet and inflate our lungs. And from that moment on to the last breath you take before you die, you need air 15 to 40 times a minute.

What Guujaaw was saying was, we Haida don't end at our skin or our fingertips. To be Haida means to be connected to the land, that the air, the water, the trees, the fish, the birds, all of that is what makes us Haida. The land embodies our history, our culture. The very reason why Haida are on this earth is told to them by their connection with the land. Destroy those elements, and you destroy what it is to be Haida.

I believe that we've framed the problem the wrong way. And for me, the big change happened in the late 1970s, when I became aware that there was a battle raging in our westernmost archipelago, what were once called the Queen Charlotte Islands, but are now called Haida Gwaii.

Geoengineering is about the human arrogance that we have screwed up the atmosphere so bad that we're now going to take over for nature, and we're going to engineer the atmosphere so that it doesn't create more catastrophic climate change

We need technology, much of it to solve the problems that we've created with technology in the first place. But since our ignorance is so vast, how could we possibly develop new technologies that wouldn't in turn create more technologies-- more difficulties that we hadn't anticipated? And you see it in spades right now.

by the time Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, we knew there were ramifications we didn't-- couldn't have anticipated, the most amazing being biomagnification. When eagles began to disappear in the United States, scientists tracked it down to the fact that DDT sprayed at low concentrations would be amplified up the food chain. So by the time you get to the fatty glands and the fat tissue and the shell glands of birds and the breasts of women, DDT was concentrated hundreds of thousands of times beyond what we had sprayed it at. By the 1960s, women's breast milk was considered too toxic to feed to babies.

Who would have imagined that high up above the Earth, CFCs would be hit by ultraviolet light, breaking off chlorine free radicals, which scavenge ozone. Nobody could have anticipated that consequence when we began to use it.

proposals to drill for oil in Hecate Strait between Haida Gwaii and the mainland

one result of the objections to Amchitka was the birth of Greenpeace in Vancouver. Greenpeace was a made in Canada organization that I'm very proud to say has exploded and become a force around the world.

she said is, yeah, you scientists are clever. You can make powerful compounds like DDT, but you don't know enough to anticipate all of the consequences. Because, first of all, the lab is not a replica of the real world. The lab is an artifact, something that has very little to do with the real world out there. In the real world, everything is connected to everything else, and we don't know enough to anticipate the effects of what we do with our powerful technologies.

I'm a banana. I'm yellow on the outside. I'm white on the inside.

my exhortation to my fellow elders is get the hell off the golf course or the couch and get on with the most important part of your lives.

Even though virtually every definition of sustainability includes the requirement that human activities should not exceed nature's carrying capacity (Brundtland et al., 1987; Fiksel, 2006), popular metrics for assessing environmental sustainability ignore the role of nature in supporting human activities and well-being (Bakshi et al., 2018).

The Climate Emergency Unit

This is the paradoxical practice of Zen. How can we take care of the ordinary things and people in our daily life with care and attentiveness and still understand and know their impermanence? In practicing these two views simultaneously, we can come to understand freedom and to completely inhabit our one precious and unique human life. They mutually support each other and yet retain their distinctive qualities. We don’t call something that is white, black and yet we understand that white and black share the same essence. This understanding defines a good Zen practice. We take care of cause and effect from the basis of operation of boundless, timeless, open awareness.

Now all I had learned on my travelsFell into a new kind of placeEven maths and hard sciencesNo longer at oddsWith Art or HumanityBut serving to showA side of the storyInsufficient to stand on its own