Day 60

Klein, N.

Ever since the large corporations such as Nike, Shell and Monsanto began facing increased scrutiny from civil society—mostly for putting short term profits far ahead of environmental responsibility and job security—an industry has ballooned to help these companies respond. But it seems clear that many in the corporate world remain convinced that all they have is a ‘messaging problem’ that can be neatly solved by settling on the right, socially minded brand identity.

As evidence of the state of corporate confusion, I am frequently asked to give presentations to individual corporations. Fearing that my words will end up in some gooey ad campaign, I always refuse. But this advice I can offer without reservation: nothing will change until corporations realise that they don’t have a communications problem. They have a reality problem.

Guardian Weekly, June 14-20, 2001 p. 21

Day 59

Carroll, L.

When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more or less.' 'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean different things.' 'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master-that's all.'

Alice in Wonderland

Day 58

Harper, J.L.

Some seeds are born dormant, some achieve dormancy and some have dormancy thrust upon them.

‘The ecological significance of dormancy and its importance in weed control’ Proceedings of the 4th International Congress on Crop Protection, Hamburg, 1950, p. 415—420. Cited by J. W. Silvertown Introduction to Plant Ecology (Longmans, London, 1982) p. 31. Checked

Day 57

Martin, P.S.

Evidently under the destabilizing circumstances of colonization, those who discover new lands ignore accompanying extinctions. Damage control, if any, comes later. The first few hundred years of pre­historic colonization on a pristine continent or island may be not unlike the last few hundred years in America in terms of increasingly destructive economic practices, as viewed by a prudent resource manager.

From the perspective of radiocarbon dating, we glimpse 40,000 years of prehistoric global extinctions with mounting unease bordering on horror. Half of the global megafauna was lost, a rich assemblage of large and beautiful mammals, never to ‘bear the burden of our thoughts’, as Thoreau imagined. Per­haps as many as one quarter of the birds of the world vanished. Not all the wreckage necessarily reflects prehistoric human activity. But the closer we come to the present, the stronger the case for human involvement, and the future only portends vastly more of the same at rapidly accelerating rates of loss.

Given the present global condition of a seemingly insatiable appetite for goods fueled by a runaway technology and its accompanying pollution, it is hard not to imagine that the Cenozoic can overtake the late Cretaceous as a time of sudden and sever extinction, this time triggered by the ‘human bolide’ rather than one from outer space. It is by no means clear that post-Cenozoic recovery will occur as rapidly as post-Cretaceous recovery, which in some cases required millions of years. It is by no means clear whether the survivors will include our species, or even the type of global ecology we have belat­edly come to value. Like the islands of doom in the Central Pacific, once inhabited and later aban­doned after heavy extinctions of their native biota, we could become the ‘Planet of Doom.’ The bio­geographic pathologies of the last 40,000 years, a mere moment in earth history, bear hallmarks of impending mass extinction.

40,000 years of extinctions on the ‘Planet of Doom’ Palaeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology (Global and Planetary Change Section) 82 (1990) 187—201. Checked

Day 56

Darwin, C. (1809-1882)

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and depen­dent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth and Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natu­ral Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the extinction of the less-improved forms. Thus from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of con­ceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

Origin of Species (6th Edition, John Murray, London, 1906) p. 669.

Day 55

They hang the man and flog the woman
That steal the goose from off the common,
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose.

Traditional Rhyme quoted in ‘Enclosure in Britain’ The Ecologist 22 (1992) 132 edited by E. Goldsmith, N. Hildyard, P. Bunyard and P. McCully

Day 54

Hersh, R.

Spinoza took up lens-grinding. The rest of his life he maintained himself in poverty by that trade. He was offered a philosophy chair at Heidelberg, a pension from Louis XIV of France, and annuities by friends in the Netherlands. He always declined, valuing intellectual independence above physical comfort.

What is Mathematics Really? (Vintage, London, 1998) p. 120.