“choose a direction and keep on walking”

"…you do not have to picture the destination to reach it or at least draw closer to it, you just need to choose a direction and keep on walking—though that metaphor makes it sound as though it already exists, if at a distance, rather than that the process itself creates it and covers the distance between the idea and the actuality."

— The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change by Rebecca Solnit

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Save the game

"I think the meaning of life is to keep the remarkable game of being human going forward. In the past this meant reproducing above all. But now it means, above all, preserving the board on which we play this game. And since we’re now setting that board on fire, it’s our job to put that fire out. In our time, that’s the most important task we can undertake, since all depends on it. The best thing about the human game is that it, potentially, can stretch far out into the future – but only if we act now."
Bill McKibben

"The Meaning of Life: Answers to Life's Biggest Questions from the World's Most Extraordinary People" by James Bailey: https://a.co/07B86YNb

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Hell

"John Gray is an unreconstructed pessimist, particularly on environmental issues... He thinks that we are going to hell in a handcart and there is nothing that we can do about it."

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/mark-lynas-on-the-environment/

“strange in-between creatures”

"Our inability to live entirely in the present (like most animals do), combined with our inability to see very far into the future, makes us strange in-between creatures, neither beast nor prophet. Our amazing intelligence seems to have outstripped our instinct for survival. We plunder the earth, hoping that accumulating material surplus will make up for the profound, unfathomable thing that we have lost."
— Arundhati Roy, Listening to Grasshoppers; Field Notes on Democracy, 2009

Place

"Going back to the same place as it changes through the seasons and physically linking myself to the land in some sort of way could be more rewarding and I could gain a deeper understanding of the place, and myself."
https://fivebooks.com/best-books/amy-liptrot-nature-writing/

Wild

"Healthy food. Something to be enthusiastic about. Fresh air. A sense of belonging and aliveness. Good water. Purpose. Intimacy. A vital connection to life. The kind of things I did without for too many years."
https://fivebooks.com/best-books/wilderness-mark-boyle/

Bill Gates Has a Point

On Tuesday, after picking up strength in an abnormally warm ocean, Hurricane Melissa tore through Jamaica, wreaking havoc and eventually claiming at least 50 lives across the Caribbean. Hours before Melissa, a Category 5 hurricane, made landfall, Bill Gates, the billionaire philanthropist, released an audacious memo arguing that climate change "will not lead to humanity's demise."

For almost two decades, many environmentalists have argued that the burning of fossil fuels poses an existential threat to all of human civilization. As a result, much of the conversation about global warming has become steeped in the language of extinction and planetary catastrophe.

But these dark visions ignore a simple fact: Climate change is not a giant meteor crashing into Earth. We will not all suffer equally.

Those whose lives are threatened by climate disaster are not merely the victims of bad luck. When heat waves strike, the dead are predominantly people who are unhoused, older or living alone in substandard housing. Around the world, the neighborhoods that repeatedly flood are disproportionately home to poor families who lack the means to evacuate, fortify their homes against worsening storms or permanently move out of harm's way…

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/02/opinion/bill-gates-climate-change-apocalypse.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare