The road to the future leads us smack into the wall. We simply ricochet off the alternatives that destiny offers: a demographic explosion that triggers social chaos and spreads death, nuclear delirium and the quasi-annihilation of the species ... Our survival is no more than a question of 25, 50 or perhaps 100 years.

– Jacques Cousteau

Editorial comment: Jacques, you devoted your life to trying to deflect the direction of the human species’ headlong march into oblivion. Ignorance, greed and stupidity always takes its toll, but this time is for keeps. These unfortunate human qualities are too great an adversary for you and the current small minority of dedicated activists. So much the pity that this errant species will take so much of the beauty of creation with it.


"By and large, I think that your founding fathers looked around and could not imagine the violence of the time in which we have found ourselves. So I would assume that those who framed those founding documents thought that the blessing of liberty for our posterity also meant that we probably could drink the water, that we could breathe the air, that we would have some trees ... because they could not imagine the level of destruction that could rot into centuries." -- Winona LaDuke from Peace and Freedom (Jan.-Feb. 98)

From Utne Reader Nov-Dec 98


"The idea of absolute freedom is fiction. It is based on the idea of an independent self. But in fact, there’s no such thing. There’s no self without other people. There’s no self without sunlight. There’s no self without dew. And water. And bees to pollinate the food we eat --- So the idea of behaving in a way that doesn’t acknowledge those reciprocal relationships is not really freedom, it’s indulgence."

-- Peter Coyote in New Age (July/Aug. 98)