A fine quote from Marcus Aurelius, gleaned from the excellent pages of today's New York Times Book Review: "A limit of time is fixed for thee, which if thou dost not use for clearing the clouds from thy mind, it will go and thou wilt go, and it will never return." It comes in a Reading to Live: a review of "The Whole Five Feet"--the length of the full shelf of the Harvard Classics, 51 volumes of indispensable reading.
Otherwise... I invite you to consider the truly frightening column by Nicholas D Kristof, It's Time to Learn From Frogs. It bodes ill for our species.
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The Harvard Classics---wonderful. The set in my bookshelf was written in 1910....before the unfolding of Karl Marx....what a world view back then....
the kristoff piece bodes ill for all species.
Biodiversity is the measure of success in our world and human activity has eroded it in the name of development and growth which we all know is unsustainable.
We MUST live differently to have a diverse biota!
Those of use who believe this have to stop spending our energy speaking only to the chorus and get to those who would maintain the status quo by providing scientific proof to them and setting an example for them in our everyday lives.
"It's Time to Learn From Frogs" is a worrying piece. Thanks for pointing us to it.
Poor old frogs seem as useful to us, as red flags, as the canary was to miners of old. There's the idea of "boiling into" something, using frog as example (from Wiki)
The boiling frog story is a widespread anecdote describing a frog slowly being boiled alive. The premise is that if a frog is placed in boiling water, it will jump out, but if it is placed in cold water that is slowly heated, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death. The story is often used as a metaphor for the inability of people to react to important changes that occur gradually
That, too, describes what humans are doing now.
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