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The Sun Interview
The Voice Of The Earth
A Conversation With Theodore Roszak
One of the paradoxes of our conception of progress is that, as time goes on, our society produces people more ecologically illiterate than people ever have been in the past. Widespread ecological illiteracy is one of the roots of our environmental crisis. Many people simply do not understand the biological foundations of their own survival.
April 1994Field Observations
An Interview With Wendell Berry
The first necessity is to teach the young. If we teach the young what we already know, we would do outlandishly better than we’re doing. Knowledge is overrated, you know. There have been cultures that did far better than we do, knowing far less than we know. We need to see that knowledge is overrated, but also that knowledge is not at all the same thing as “information.” There’s a world of difference — Wes Jackson helped me to see this — between that information to which we now presumably have access by way of computers, libraries, and the rest of it, great stockpiles of data, and the knowledge that people have in their bones by which they do good work and live good lives.
February 1994By Fire And Water
An Interview With Michael Meade
All this violence is a fire screaming for the water of human attention. I don’t think we’re going to be able to keep going unless we deal with it. To me the two big events of the last two years are the fires in L.A. and the flooding of the Mississippi River. I think they are strangely related.
January 1994Necessary Guilt
An Interview With David Reynolds
The guilt that we ordinarily carry is trivial compared to what one feels when one uses Naikan. But, again, that guilt is always balanced by the sense of having been loved and taken care of in spite of one’s own imperfections, and that’s a wonderful gift. The result is a desire to repay the world. But in fact you can’t repay the world because it keeps giving too fast.
November 1993What The Universe Remembers
An Interview With Rupert Sheldrake
My theory is concerned with self-organizing natural systems and the cause of form. The cause of all these forms, I believe, is organizing fields, form-shaping fields, which I call morphic fields, from the Greek word for form. I’m saying that the forms of societies, ideas, crystals, and molecules all depend on the way previous ones have been organized. There’s a kind of built-in memory in the morphic fields of each thing.
July 1993Words Of Honor
An Interview With Barbara Kingsolver
Some people are able to separate the personal from the political. I know some extremely conservative people who don’t dislike my company or my books. They can tolerate a different view in their lives, but without thinking about it much or respecting it. But the reverse isn’t true. I don’t know very many leftists who could, for example, marry a Republican, or easily cohabit with fascist thinking. I suppose that’s the difference between politics as a sort of hobby and politics as fighting for your life.
June 1993From Boys To Men
A Conversation With Robert Bly
I think the greatest mistake in consciousness in this century is the belief that fathers are not important. Both men and women have accepted that. The men have accepted it more grudgingly, but nevertheless they’ve accepted it, so that when a man gets divorced, he may simply say, “Well, I’ll let her raise the children.”
May 1993Odyssey Of Resistance
An Interview With Daniel Berrigan
Americans don’t generally think of the consequences of war. We have grown calloused souls, with the help of a duplicitous leadership, an inert Congress, a morally cloudy church, and the jingoistic media. Add to this our historically embedded racism and you have a poisonous brew indeed, hardening hearts against thought or concern for the slaughtered innocents of Iraq.
April 1993When A Tree Falls In The Forest
An Interview With John Seed
Let me give an example of the scale of the destruction that’s going on. We know that the amount of solar energy necessary to sustain the hydrological cycle in the Amazon jungle — the energy necessary to lift that water into the atmosphere — is equivalent to the energy put out by two thousand hydrogen bombs a day. The vegetation that grows there captures that much energy. It creates a huge heat engine that drives the winds of the world, those winds that the ancient mariners knew, and the same winds that deliver moisture regularly and predictably to North America and to Europe. Those winds don’t simply exist — they’re continuously being created and maintained by large biological systems. The Amazon is one of the vital organs of the living planet.
January 1993The Prayer Of The Body III
An Interview With Stephen R. Schwartz
This body only appears to be an enclosure. It is actually a passageway — like an entry to a cave or a cathedral. It is quite the opposite of the way we’ve been taught to perceive it.
October 1992
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