Here On Earth Quotes

“While we sit in our air-conditioned homes and eat, drink and make merry like cattle in a feedlot without the slightest thought about the consequences of our consumption of water, food and energy, we only hasten the destruction -in the long term- of our kind.”
― Tim Flannery, Here On Earth: An Argument For Hope

“it’s not so much our technology, but what we believe, that will determine our fate.”
― Tim Flannery, Here On Earth: An Argument For Hope

“Unlike Darwin, Wallace seems to have had no fear that an understanding of evolution would corrupt public morality—indeed he saw the evolutionary process, and our understanding of it, as potentially ushering in a wonderful future. I think that’s because Wallace realised that while evolution by natural selection is a fearsome mechanism, it has nevertheless created a living, working planet, which includes us, with our love for each other, and our society.”
― Tim Flannery, Here On Earth: An Argument For Hope

“Brains are notoriously selfish organs. They give themselves priority access to everything they require—from blood-flow to warmth, nutrients and oxygen. During times of bodily stress, our brains will shut down one organ after another, even to the point of damaging them—before depriving themselves. Brains are also greedy. They make up just 2 per cent of our body weight, yet take 20 per cent of the energy we use.”
― Tim Flannery, Here On Earth: An Argument For Hope

“If you’re concerned about our future, it’s not just desirable that we eradicate poverty in the developing world, create more equal societies and never let ourselves fight another war; it’s imperative, for the discount factor tells us that failure to do so may cost us the Earth.”
― Tim Flannery, Here On Earth: An Argument For Hope

“In his translation, Yan Fu rendered the word ‘evolution’ as tian yan. Chinese characters can be read in several ways, and one way of reading these characters is as ‘heavens’ performance’—the heavens in this instance meaning all of creation.10 Yan Fu’s phrase is now obscure and defunct, but heavens’ performance strikes me as a beautiful and illuminating way of describing Darwin’s discovery, for evolution is indeed a sort of performance, one whose theme is the electrochemical process we call life and whose stage is the entire Earth. Funded by the Sun, heavens’ performance has been running for at least 3.5 billion years, and barring cosmic catastrophe will probably run for a billion more. It’s an odd sort of performance, though, for there are no seats but on the stage itself, and the audience are also the players. Darwin’s genius was to elucidate, with elegant simplicity, the rules by which the performance has unfolded.”
― Tim Flannery, Here On Earth: An Argument For Hope

“It’s often said that there are two fundamental sentiments that decide an election—hope for the future, and fear of it. If hope prevails, we’re likely to elect more generous governments and reach out to the world, but if fear prevails, we elect inward-looking, nationalistic ones.”
― Tim Flannery, Here On Earth: An Argument For Hope

“It’s often said that there are two fundamental sentiments that decide an election—hope for the future, and fear of it. If hope prevails, we’re likely to elect more generous governments and reach out to the world, but if fear prevails, we elect inward-looking, nationalistic ones. Factors determining the successful spread of mnemes are clearly extremely complex, but at the broadest level it does seem that we, collectively and as individuals, gravitate towards one of these two tendencies. If we believe that we live in a dog-eat-dog world where only the fittest survive, we’re likely to propagate very different mnemes from those that arise from an understanding of the fundamental interconnectedness of things. In large part, our future as a species will be determined by which of these mnemes prevails.”
― Tim Flannery, Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet