Lyndsie Bourgon > Lyndsie's Quotes

“But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I'm saying? Does it also feel this way to you?”
― Kazuo Ishiguro

“History begins at ground level, with footsteps.”
― Michel de Certeau

“the old broad-gauged, integrative “natural history” began to fragment into specializations. History increasingly began an archival pursuit, carried on by urban scholars; there was less and less dirt on it. Recently, however, that drift toward an unnatural history has run up against a few hard facts: dwindling energy supplies, population pressures on available food, the limits and costs of technology. A growing number of scholars, consequently, have begun to talk about something called “environmental history” … the new history will re-create, though in a more sophisticated form, the old parson-naturalists synthesis. It will, that is, seek to combine once again natural science and history … into a major intellectual enterprise that will alter considerably our understanding of historical processes. What the inquiry involves … is the development of an ecological perspective on history.”
― Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination

“All those “why” questions are rooted in culture, which is to say, in ethical beliefs. I emphasize the point not to denigrate the achievements of scientists, but only to remind that natural science cannot by itself fathom the sources of the crisis it has identified, for the sources lie not in the nature that scientists study but in the human nature and, especially, in the human culture that historians and other humanists have made their study.”
― Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination