“Modern society [is] a civilization that [...] speaks endlessly of making people “happy”, but in fact blocks their way to the source of real joy.

This ‘modern samsara’ carefully nurtures us with a consumer machine that needs to keep us greedy.”

Sogyal Rinpoche 📚💙

Sometimes I think that the greatest achievement of modern culture is its brilliant selling of samsara and its barren distractions.

Sogyal Rinpoche, the Tibetan book of Living and Dying 📚💙

I love this perspective.

The fossil fuel industry itself is profiting off of the abundant, wild, biodiversity of earths past. It is burning the productivity of a living planet gone by, in order to kill the productivity of this one.

The Ends of the World, Peter Brannen 📚💙

"Cultural approaches to human experiences like love and death has profound effects on the social order. ‘The political institutions of any nation are always menaced and are ultimately controlled by the spiritual state of the nation.’ "

James Baldwin, through James K Row, in Radical Mindfulness 📚💙

“You still don't know how hopeless your cause itself is. You still don't know that the enemy isn't so much outside your soldiers as within them”

Krishna, the Bhagavad Gita

But could be me talking to my centrist friend who cant see that green growth overconsumption is still overconsumption

📚💙

"Changes in laws, no matter how necessary, will never be sufficient to produce a healthier society. Only addressing the deeper fears [/confusions] can accomplish that."

James Baldwin, through Eddie Glaude, through James K Rowe.

Perhaps the most important crisis book quote I have found so far 📚💙

“in the flashes of light that broke through the wooden slats as they went through sleeping towns he saw the man corpses, woman corpses, child corpses who would be thrown into the sea like rejected bananas”

100 years of Solitude 📚💙

“We have made some progress, despite our near fatal addiction to the toys granted us by our own creations”

~ Fall of Hyperion, Dan Simmons.

📚💙

A suprisingly eco hard scifi series: exploring supremacy, extractivism, and consumption of nature and human bodies.

And which i painted the first book:

“When we plot this data over time, we see that global GPI grew along with GDP until the mid-1970s, but since then has flattened out and even declined, as the social and environmental costs of growth have become significant enough to cancel out consumption-related gains.”

Less is More 💙📚

“Take the beef industry: Nearly 60% of global agricultural land is used for beef […] is the single greatest driver of deforestation. Yet […] accounts for only 2% of the calories […] could be radically scaled down without any loss to human welfare.”

📚💙 Less is More
#climate
#biodiversity
#degrowth

“after a certain point growth begins to become 'uneconomic: […] growth in high-income nations is exacerbating inequality and political instability, and contributing to problems like stress and depression from overwork and lack of sleep, and ill health”

📚💙 Less is More
#booksky #climatecrisis

“Know what is Enough”
“Know when to Stop”

“This is how to last a long time.”

📚💙 the Tao te Ching. #booksky

Is this advice for the person (sufficiency happiness) or the society (sustainability)?

“Inequality makes people feel that the material goods they have are inadequate. […] people who live in highly unequal societies are more likely to shop for luxury brands than people who live in more equal societies”

💙📚 Less is More, how degrowth will save the world

Hyperion is an intense and poetic attack of permagrowth capitalism at the cost of everything, that deserves a resurgence in these times.

It is no coincidence that, in the seven pilgrims to the Shrike’s death church outside of time, there is both a Jewish and a Palestinian man…

#booksky 📚💙
#scifi