David Barnhill
How should we live?
Nature writers, social leaders, and religious thinkers have given us a gift of diverse and even conflicting views about how we should live our lives. Here are a few worth keeping in mind.
Our life is frittered away by detail.... Simplicity, simplicity simplicity!
--Henry David Thoreau, chapter 2, Walden
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours....
--William Wordsworth, "The World Is Too Much With Us, Late and Soon"
[T]he practice of conservation is not merely a "personal virtue." It is the most public of virtues, an expression of our regard for our neighbors, for this marvelous planet, and for future generations.
--Scott Russell Sanders, A Conservationist Manifesto (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2009), xiii.
--Shevek from Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed
