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I think one of the most romantic and loving things you can say to another person is “Look.” There is a kind of love in which two people look at each other, but I don’t think it’s as interesting as the love between two people standing side by side and looking at something else that moves them both.

Let’s think about this in terms of what we were saying about memory and identity: If we are our memories, then to the extent that two people share memories, they become one person. The whole notion of the joining of souls that’s supposed to happen in marriage may come down to those times when we say, “Look,” to our partner, so the two of us can capture a memory to hold in common.

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Kathleen Dean Moore, in an interview named “A Weakened World Cannot Forgive Us” (2001) by Derrick Jensen

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I believe that there is an essential, defining connection between identity and place.

First, it’s literally true that people are made of places. Minerals from eroding mountains strengthen your bones and mine. River water rushes through my veins [and] through yours. It’s the [sun] that transforms my fat into vitamins. We are calcified by gravity, wrinkled by wind, softened by shopping malls. Gradually, eventually, particle by particle, our bodies are constructed from places.

But there’s more to it than that. Not just our bodies, but our minds – our ideas, our emotions, our characters, our identities – are shaped, in part, by places. Alienation from the land is an alienation from the self, which causes sadness. And the opposite is true, too: there’s a goofy joy to finding ourselves in places that have meaning for us.

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Kathleen Dean Moore, in an interview named “A Weakened World Cannot Forgive Us” (2001) by Derrick Jensen

"[T]o a certain extent, it’s your memories that make us who we are. For example, I am the person who remembers seeing a flock of white pelicans over Thompson Lake and the apple tree in the backyard of my house. And every time I notice something, every time something strikes me as important enough to store away in my memory, I add another piece to who I am. These memories and sense impressions of the landscape are the very substance of my self. In this way, I am – at the core of my being – made of the earth.

Environmental destruction is a kind of self-destruction. If we go around systematically destroying the places that hold meaning for us, that hold our memories, then we become fragmented and don’t have a sense of who we are."

Kathleen Dean Moore, in an interview named “A Weakened World Cannot Forgive Us” (2001) by Derrick Jensen

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People tend to think that we have only two options: hope or despair. But neither one is acceptable. Blind hope leads to moral complacency: things will get better, so why should I put myself out? Despair leads to moral abdication: things will get worse no matter what I do, so why should I put myself out?

But between hope and despair is the broad territory of moral integrity — a match between what you believe and what you do. You act lovingly toward your children because you love them. You live simply because you believe in taking only your fair share. You do what’s right because it’s right, not because you will gain from it.

There is freedom in that. There is joy in that. And, ultimately, there is social change in that.

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Kathleen Dean Moore, in an interview named “If Your House is On Fire” (2012) by Mary DeMocker

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Many of us were alive when people said, “Hell no,” to an unjust war in Vietnam. The question today is: Can we say, “Hell no,” to an unjust economic system? Can we reclaim our humanity from forces that would prefer us to be mindless consumers?

Every decision that we make — about where we find information, where we get food, what we wear, how we make our living, how we invest our time and our wealth, how we travel or keep ourselves warm and sheltered — is an opportunity for us to express our values both by saying yes to what we believe in and by saying no to what we don’t believe in.

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Kathleen Dean Moore, in an interview named “If Your House is On Fire” (2012) by Mary DeMocker

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The Cenozoic, the era we are leaving behind, was when the earth was at its ‘most lyrical,’ when songbirds, flowering plants, and the great families of mammals flourished. At this peak of beauty and richness came humankind. We’re now estimated to be responsible for the extinction of one out of every ten species that we know of and likely uncounted others that we haven’t even identified yet. And we’re about to change even the climate that sustains these lives and ours.

We are the children of the Age of Enlightenment, and we have brought the world to the brink of ruin by acting under the delusion that humans are separate from the earth, better somehow, in control of it. We believe that humans are the only creatures of spirit in a universe otherwise made up of stones and insensate matter; that the nonhuman world was created for us alone and derives all its value from its usefulness to humanity; that we are the masters of the universe. Because of our technological prowess, we see ourselves as exceptions to the rules that govern the ‘lower’ forms of life. We believe we can destroy our habitat without also destroying ourselves. How could we be so tragically wrong?

There’s a disconnect in our culture separating what people do from what they really care about. I love my children and my grandchildren more than anything else. I care about their future. I love this world with a passion. The thought that we might be losing songbirds, trading them for something I don’t care about at all, like running shoes, makes me angry… The fact is, many well-meaning people are blithely destroying the world on which their children’s lives depend… we invest in our own destruction. We damage the ecosystem simply because we no longer recognize that we live in an impoverished world. But we also do it because we ask less and less of ourselves. We don’t expect ourselves to be generous or openhearted. We think greed is ok.

[but…]

The worst offenders are happy to implicate and and entangle us in every possible way and make us blame ourselves for climate change. We have to do our best to shake loose of that entanglement and never turn our rage against ourselves or allow self-criticism to dissipate our anger toward the real culprits. Of course each of us should be using less oil. But when I hear people piously say, ‘We have met the enemy, and he is us,’ I say bullshit. I didn’t cut corners and cause an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. I didn’t do my best to undermine the Environmental Protection Agency and every other agency that might have limited franking. I’m not lobbying Congress to open oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean. I didn’t cut funding for alternative energy sources. Big Oil is pouring billions of dollars into shaping government policies and consumer preferences. And what to we say? ‘Oh, I should be a more mindful consumer.’ Of course we should, but that’s only the beginning.

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Kathleen Dean Moore, in an interview named “If Your House is On Fire” (2012) by Mary DeMocker

(via brokenshines)