Archive (Page 4 of 7)

The Conversation #37 — David Keith

There are biol­o­gists who’ve spent their careers work­ing on some species of bee­tle in the trop­i­cal rain­for­est, and they just love the rain­for­est in their bones And they feel that when they go tes­ti­fy in Congress to some com­mit­tee, that they can’t just say, I love it in my bones and you guys will love it too, if you share it with me.” They have to say, Oh, we’ve done all this math and com­put­ed that there’s an ecosys­tem ser­vice here.” And I think that that has real­ly impov­er­ished our debate about envi­ron­men­tal issues.

The Conversation #36 — Ethan Zuckerman

We are in the midst of a shift in how we encounter infor­ma­tion. And we’re wrestling with three par­a­digms at the same time. The old­est of these par­a­digms, for for most of us, is edit­ed media. … You have a pow­er­ful gate­keep­er, the news­pa­per edi­tor, who says, Here are things you need to pay atten­tion to today. Give this a small amount of your time, and you will be rough­ly up to date with what you need to know.” 

The Conversation #35 — Chuck Collins

Much of class and iso­la­tion and pulling away is this sort of illu­sion that some­how we can be apart from the suf­fer­ing that is in our midst. And that’s a myth. The social iso­la­tion that many peo­ple in the one per­cent expe­ri­ence is a wound.

The Conversation #34 — Douglas Rushkoff

I would say a bet­ter place looks like…having din­ner with the per­son who lives next door to you. Knowing who they are. A bet­ter place is shar­ing the same snow­blow­er on your block. The bet­ter place is eas­i­est to imag­ine, and ulti­mate­ly get to, if we look at it in terms of our incre­men­tal moment-to-moment choices.

The Conversation #33 — Priscilla Grim

I was at a par­ty one time where I was talk­ing to some guy who had been pro­filed by Adbusters because he was a big cli­mate change guy. And he basi­cal­ly told me…that I need­ed to be mak­ing my own food, I need­ed to be mak­ing my own clothes. So you’re telling me that as a work­ing moth­er going to school full-time, along with those respon­si­bil­i­ties in which I am at home study­ing most the time, I should be mak­ing my daugh­ter’s clothes. I should be whip­ping up meals from scratch. Um…no.

The Conversation #32 — The Conversation and the Election

It’s like we’ve got all these proxy wars going, where peo­ple are fight­ing bit­ter­ly over these things. And if you could sort of go back to the orig­i­nal glob­al con­flict almost, of ideas, I think you’d get to some inter­est­ing ara­tional assump­tions. Some of which would be dif­fer­ent. Some of which might be very sim­i­lar. And then you’d won­der why the hell are these proxy wars going on?

The Conversation #31 — Claire Evans

I think if there are peo­ple who are able to take a step back­wards, take that prover­bial zoom out, and real­ize that every­body’s kind of doing the same thing in dif­fer­ent ways, and be able to step from one per­spec­tive to the oth­er and ask dif­fer­ent kinds of ques­tions based on where they are at any giv­en moment time, then it just becomes a game. I think it becomes joy­ful and engag­ing. I mean, I’m not inter­est­ed in find­ing the answer to any­thing. I don’t think there is the answer to anything.

The Conversation #30 — Henry Louis Taylor Jr.

We don’t have a con­cept of bal­ance. Not only do we not have a con­cept of bal­ance, but we have a very dis­tort­ed sense of social jus­tice that has been reframed to jus­ti­fy a soci­ety that is fun­da­men­tal­ly anchored around the con­cept of imbal­ance. The resources of the world clus­ter toward a hand­ful of very very pow­er­ful coun­tries, one coun­try hav­ing an even greater share. In order to jus­ti­fy this greater share, it’s made them believe that this high­er con­cen­tra­tion of pow­er is nor­mal, and that any­body in all coun­tries can have it, and that all coun­tries should aspire for it.

The Conversation #29 — Lawrence Torcello

What’s the best way to get over xeno­pho­bia? Eradicate the xeno” por­tion of it, and then the pho­bia” part will evap­o­rate. You have to learn about the oth­er. You have to make them not the oth­er any­more. It’s edu­ca­tion. We have to be exposed to each oth­er. And not so that we could all be paper copies of one anoth­er, but so that we learn to appre­ci­ate the diver­si­ty in the world. 

The Conversation #28 — Tim Cannon

We are a com­mu­nal ani­mal that’s devel­oped to believe that it’s the cen­ter of the uni­verse. And we behave as such. You know, we want to con­quer, because our brain is wired to want to eat and fuck anoth­er day, you know what I mean. That’s what we’re wired to do. That’s where our evil comes from. It’s our ani­mal roots that cause us to need things, and desire things.