“The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.”
― David W. Orr, Ecological Literacy: Educating Our Children for a Sustainable World
Creag Riabach, Ardmore Peninsula. Ginny Battson © 2012
I love this quote, and absolutely agree. Enjoy your weekend. x
Thank you for saying, Kim. Much appreciated. Enjoy your weekend also. 🙂
I totally agree! Thank you for sharing this. 🙂
Thank you for reading, pleasure’s mine. 🙂
It all depends on your measures of success…I have a very different value system to most of my friends. It’s endlessly amusing rejecting their version of success.
The idea of success closely related to the idea of aspiration. I agree…both can be virtuous if the consequences are compassionate and altruistic towards human and non-human life. Obviously, in this context, Orr questions the mainstream…as do you. Thank you, Spike.
For me the sentence ‘It needs people who live well in their places’ couldn’t resonate more highly. Communities, place, terroir have been usurped as we are all conned by general media paymasters. I’ve been working on art and trees and whether we can gain knowledge of the trees in our landscapes by 18th century fine art – we can – but more for me is to read text from this period which is much more advanced than anything else we see today. (Check out Gilpin’s discourse on forest scenery). Which, to cut boring blether short, allows us a mechanism to empower local communities and for those of us who traverse communtities to be the bards highlighting strategies that have worked to preserve and protect the natural features in others’ landscapes.